The Apple Store is My New Starbucks

It is 7 pm and I am sitting on a black stool in the basement of the newish Apple Store on 67th and Broadway.

I am halfway through my two-hour Personal Projects session, during which I have figured out Power Point, learned how to sync my Columbia email with my Outlook, sent about 20 emails, Googled theaters in Manhattan where Life During Wartime is playing, checked out the offerings at the Fringe Festival and moved the Skype icon onto my Desktop.

Today's visit is the fifth I have made since Monday morning when I came by to retrieve my brand new MacBook Pro after it underwent a weekend-long transplant of computer files from my PC. Based on the fact that my presence here this week beats the number of times I visited a Starbucks 5:1, it is clear that I am at risk of developing an Apple Store addiction. Aside from the high school geeks and twenty-something slackers, the clientele is fun to look at, with plenty of familiarish faces (celebrities???). I am completely fascinated by this place, quite unable to tear myself away.

I can hardly believe that I am the owner of a Mac, secretly think that it lends me a hardcore varnish of cyber-coolness. Yeah...it took several years of being the only PC-user in a house dominated by a Mac Monopoly and once I got the machine, several days of dysfunctional email service and emotional sessions with Geniuses and frantic phone calls to the nice people at OnetoOne and late night trouble shooting sessions with the nice people at GoDaddy but I am finally sitting in the basement of the Apple Store, happily blogging after all, a sure sign that I have crossed over to the dark side.

In fifteen minutes, I will leave to meet HOBB for the 7:50 pm showing of Life During Wartime at the IFC. I'm almost confident that things are okay; I just have to make sure my Columbia email is actually staying on the university's server. I'm going to check my test PowerPoint presentation one more time. I'm going to check if any new messages need responding to. In a couple of minutes, I'll be ready to shut down my new Mac, leave the Apple Store and have a life.