vickyj asked: Do you ever give human-like qualities to inanimate objects? Tell us about some of them.
Yes, constantly. In fact, I’ve been doing this for so long, and so intentionally, that it’s hard for me to isolate specific examples.
The first that comes to mind, of course, is my car, which is currently ill with bad bearings. This is an expensive repair, and the car complains terribly about it, so I try to let it rest in the driveway as much as possible… and borrow other cars for any trip longer than a scoot around town. Cars are practically honorary people anyway. I’m not the first person to have written songs about a car, and won’t be the last.
Computers, on the other hand, don’t move around much. Not in a literal way. But they do interact with us. They can react quickly or slowly, and have certain tasks they do well and others that seem to take some time to contemplate. I often feel more comfortable confiding in my netbook than I do with the old desktop at home connected to the TV. That one’s quick, but doesn’t have too much to say - the fewer files on it, the less cultured it seems.
Tools also seem to react like people - I have a favorite hammer, and will often beg a particular small screwdriver to try harder to fit into a small space. Often, the tools I find myself working with (I almost wrote “using,” perish the thought) are desk things: the mechanical pencils that struggle on at the end of their working lives, the moody highlighters that may or may not squeak complaints rather than dispense ink when rubbed on a page, the stapler that always smugly insists it’s prepared, even when its last staple was dispensed days ago.
It’s my recognition of this kind of pattern-matching - the way our brains find character in every element of our environment - that makes me feel some understanding of things like the Waldorf gnomes and summoning elementals. I don’t care if these impressions of person-hood are all in my head; they help me get things done, for one thing, and are at least consistent and reliable in their person-hood-ness. That kind of magick seems to be much the same thing as the frustrated reporter yelling at the printer to stop spitting out blank pages. The printer hears. The printer is like that. Try treating it with a little kindness and it might work better, yeah?
