the psp issue

My daughter wants a PSP. Her cousin has one, one of her friends has one, and two of her other friends are discussing about asking their OFW fathers to buy them one. She asked whether we'd buy her one when we had some extra money.

I said no, because I think she has enough toys. We have a regular Playstation where she consistently beats her father at Street Fighter, a commercial quality videoke which actually came from those huge boxes in malls where you put five-peso coins to be able to sing really loud, a desktop PC (uh, ok, so it needs upgrading), and my laptop. She has her own cellphone with a postpaid line. Shall we count the Barbies and the current craze among her friends, the erasers shaped like food?

My daughter is not one to pester us about the things she wants. She knows we're not rich, so she's ok with one 'No.' Of course the question of getting the PSP is open for discussion, so after some consultation with the man of the house and various friends whose kids own one (I can't believe the number of two-year-olds who own PSPs!), I relented and brought up the subject again after a week, and told her she could have a PSP... if she saves up for it.

My daughter got excited. She designated a special wallet for the 'PSP money,' and negotiated for an amount that she would save every day, considering the fact that her allowance comes from me. She then proceeded to convince her father to add some more, to make the saving go faster. We're looking at getting it for Christmas, but at the rate of P20 per day, I think we're likely to buy it for Christmas 2012. Sigh.

I could easily have said, Ok, we'll buy it for Christmas. But she understands that we don't buy things just because we can afford them. She knows that a PSP will cost as much as an aircon unit for their bedroom, or equivalent to a dozen Barbie dolls, or her sister's milk for three months. (She doesn't know that it's equivalent to six pairs of her mother's pretty shoes.) Not because I'm trying to make her feel guilty about an expensive toy, but because she will put more value in the PSP if she saves up for it. Because I'd like to teach her that even a child has priorities, and the sweetest things in life are those that you work hard for. That applies to PSP, job promotions, and relationships.

I wouldn't want her to come to me after her college graduation and say, 'Mama, can you buy me a car?' But well... I can loan her the down payment. :-)

the amazon kindle!

I have lusted for this gadget for over a year. I have checked Amazon a hundred times (to see if the price will go down), read dozens of reviews, followed blogs dedicated to it, chased other bank staff who are Kindle owners and asked them questions about it, and finally, when they became available in the office library, queued myself to borrow it, loaded with e-books related to education and poverty reduction. Waiting time was usually two weeks, so as soon as I returned a Kindle to the Library, I promptly put myself in the queue again. And then the Kindle was mine again for a month.

The Kindle can store 3,500 books. Imagine that. My little house will not be able to accommodate that number of books, even if I kick out the cat, the dog, and my daughter's pet rabbit. The choices in Amazon's Kindle Store is simply overwhelming, with almost a million books. Add to that the other hundreds of e-books floating around in the internet, to download to your heart's content. It has built-in Wi-Fi too. For all other wonders this little thing holds, see the Amazon Kindle page.

I'm not a gadget lover. I have no intense desire to own an iPad or the Samsung Galaxy Tab, simply because there are just too many things to do with them. Goodness, I get a headache trying to get ahead of my 10-year-old daughter when we do Plants vs Zombies in my laptop. The laptop exists so I can (i) write stories; (ii) check my email and very occasionally update my Facebook account; and (iii) read Pdf books. My daughter, of course, uses my laptop to check YouTube, Facebook, and all the online games she could get her hands on during weekends (she never goes online unsupervised).

So why the Kindle? Because I love books, period. I have books in the living room, in the bedroom, Stephenie Meyer's The Host in the bathroom, Harry Potter 7 and Maeve Binchy's Quentins in the office for my lunch break, and a Readers Digest in my office bag for when I'm stuck in traffic. I can queue in the bank, supermarket checkout lane, or a local government office without losing my temper, if I have a book to lose myself in.

I have to wait a long time before The New York Times' bestsellers become available at bookstores. Remember Under The Dome? It also took me over a year to complete Stephen King's Dark Tower I to VII, by raiding Booksale, Powerbooks, and National Bookstore. In 4shared, all seven are available in Pdf, which took about half an hour to download. Add another 15 minutes, and your Kindle is loaded.

I also discovered that you can play MP3s in it. Although I'm one of those people who can block out conversation when I'm immersed in a book, it's a nice touch when you want to take a break; say you're in Kennon Road and you're just about to puke from reading all the way from Manila, you can play a couple of songs. Or you can click Text-to-Speech, which means your Kindle will read aloud to you. While you puke.

There isn't a lot of accessories to pretty up the Kindle. There are some very nice Kindle skins in Amazon, and of course they sell the covers too. The lighted cover costs $59.99, but you can always buy an Energizer reading light for P400 that works the same way. But if you worship your Kindle, there's a Kate Spade cover that costs almost the same as the Kindle itself -- $125. Cole Haan's Kindle cover is a bit cheaper at $119, but there's a Special Offer Kindle at $114.

Now the bookssss are just a couple of clicks away. And to quote my officemate Hasmin, it looks like an oversized calculator. You can read it while riding a jeep, and you won't get held up for that. That, fellows, is something you can't do with an iPad.

My entire library in a device that's 8.5 ounces and less than half an inch thick. I got it today. It's enough to keep me grinning for a week. :-)