The stages of grief (or owning a Kindle Fire when you’re not an American)
I bought a Kindle Fire a couple of weeks ago. Instead of telling you what it’s made of, how many apps it has, what it does, and then sound like an idiot spouting things I barely understand myself because I just ripped off someone else’s review, I will tell you how it made me feel.
I do get some amount of satisfaction from it, but it also makes me feel inferior, and I can’t shake this nagging thought that, through all the poking and sliding, I am wasting a glorious amount of time I could otherwise have spent on more important things. Like playing WWF on Facebook.
***
I was pretty excited when I first ran my hands through it. It had a zen feel to it – not too big, not too small, not too heavy, not too light, an operating system that was minimalist – but I soon realised I was being denied two-thirds of the wonderful stuff it has to offer just because I live in the wrong place. I do not have a US address, and for that reason Amazon has deemed it necessary to shut me completely out of its playground.
.
I had hoped that by borrowing an Amazon account from my brother, who’s in Las Vegas, I’d be able to download things from Amazon’s vast library of books, movies, TV shows, music, and potpourri of efficiently time-burning apps. I was wrong. For you to get inside Jeff Bezo’s wonderland, you actually have to have a US-issued credit card, a US address, and you have to be physically within the territorial boundaries of the US. Stray but a little, and you’re suddenly a nobody.
I did try downloading from Amazon’s store, but all I got was this message: The Amazon App store is not yet available in your region. Translated: Who the fuck do you think you are, thinking you deserve a Kindle Fire? You’re not even a human being per se. You’re not American.
That got me asking. Is it really such a bad thing to not be an American? Am I really a less important citizen of the world? After a while, disappointment gave way to denial: Who the fuck do they think they are, telling me what I can and cannot have. I paid for their piece of shit, and I sure hell intend to get my money’s worth. So, for days, I tried to figure out how I could stuff my Kindle Fire with things that Amazon didn’t want me to have, which was pretty much everything.
With a software called calibre, I was able to load my Murakamis, Franzens, Capotes, Tolkiens, Rowlings and other ripped e-books on to it, but that was about as far as I got. Each time I tried downloading an Android app from a third-party source, I’d end up in Amazon’s App store and ultimately with this message: The Amazon App store is not yet available in your region. Fucker.
***
I was naturally frustrated. I could not help but feel that I somehow might have been duped into buying an expensive paperweight or cupholder. I looked at all those thumbnails of movies and TV shows on Netflix that I can never have because I do not live in America, or conversely because I live in non-America. They sat on my Kindle, teasing me, torturing me. I could almost hear them snickering and whispering close to my ear: You pathetic non-American.
But then gradually, there was acceptance, and then release. I took a long, hard look at what I had, and I soon came to realise that, even if it’s just an e-book reader and a Web browser now, it’s still worth every cent. It’s not an iPad, but neither did I have to pay an arm and a leg for it.
More importantly, because of the exclusion, I felt released from that “having-missed-out-on-something” feeling, that itch we get when we think that maybe the world is moving on without us or we’re out of the loop and must crawl our way back in. We scratch it by compulsively and incessantly checking our Facebook and Twitter accounts, e-mails, text messages.
I sometimes eavesdrop on how people use their phones when they’re on a bus or train, and I notice that they hardly spend a few seconds on one window before they move on to another. They’re on Facebook and just five seconds later they’re checking their text messages. They start playing a song, and then even before it ends, play another one. Then, it’s on to YouTube. Ten seconds later, it’s Facebook again. All in less than a minute. (Researchers place it at 10 seconds or less per Web page.)
It seems as if we are so desperate to escape to another world and to another time because we can’t stand the here and now, the reality of what our little lives have actually become. We pine to be someone else because we can’t stand who we are, what we are.
So, we burn our lives faster than we can say, “Burn, baby, burn!”
With nothing in it but my ebooks, my Kindle Fire is quite frankly a piece of shit, but it is a piece of shit I can live with. It at least reminds me of those quiet, happy evenings when all I had for company were Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre, and I could still sleep peacefully and have more than enough time to reflect on what matters most. Like an eight-letter word with the letters z, q and v on a triple-letter, triple-word column.
Most of all, my Kindle Fire lets me know that it’s not all that bad to not be American.
Gawin mo na lang syang paper weight.