| Collecting Panama |
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| Written by Matt Landau | |
| Wednesday, February 06 2008 | |
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Because things were slow in the office, I sent my assistant
the other day on a kind of fanciful wild goose chase. She was to find a
specific new palm pilot which I hadn't been able to locate-in fact, one which they
said couldn't be purchased in Panama.
"Who's they" she asked just before I closed the door to my car. With no real, qualified answer, I invented a group who might've reported such a thing. "The Cell Phone Association of the Republic" were the words that seeped out of my mouth. "They're called CPAR, OK?" I'd been asking around for this gadget in Panama for about a week and eventually came to the conclusion that adding members to my search group might increase my odds. I've always been a man on a mission of sorts. Less in the sense of chasing a dream like Martin Luther King or Joan of Arc, and more in the pursuit of various inanimate objects which make me feel better about myself upon acquisition: a pair of limited edition Puma sneakers made from the tires of an old Ferrari for example. Searched for those things across nearly three months in Paris. I like to think it started as a young child when I kept the box to an old top-hat filled to the brim with frisbees. These were not just any frisbees, but rather ones I had hand-picked to include in my personal collection: a stack of around ten disks which I'd take out, inventory, and re-pack into the top-hat box every night before I went to bed. Child psychologists called it a form of ADD but my parents somehow saw some genius in it all. My days searching for things as a child involved a number of different fads such as pogs, baseball cards, comic books and, for some peculiar reason now that I look back on it, gemstones. My gemstone collection, much of which had arrived in cardboard packaging from Toys-R-Us, was a valuable asset to my net worth back in those days. It was a collection I took pride in putting together and one I humbly showed off to visitors as if DeBeers-approved rocks imported from Sierra Leone. Around friends, I'd casually refer to my gemstones by their technical names such as, "The green one" and "Oh that? That's Little Mr. Purple Face". My days of searching for things took a major turn for the better with the invention of the internet which parlayed my field trips to hobby shops and long lines in toy stores into time-consuming hours in front of my mother's late model Macintosh computer which was about the size of a small fridge. I'd sit there searching for a certain type of belt or computer game until the wee hours of the morning, thinking irrationally, that there were better bargains to be found when the rest of the world was asleep. Somehow, against the laws of maturity, my obsession with collecting things lingered into high school and beyond my college years. And while the items of worship may have changed to reflect an older taste discrimination, my enthusiasm and persistence tended to stay the same. "I'm not leaving until we find a bottle of real Absinth I told some classmates at a truck stop in Berlin. Leave without me if you want. See if I care." In Panama, because personal assistants are affordable, my hunts are taken to the next level. At home, I wasn't quite able to meet the expenses, but in Panama as a young professional, fantasies like these are realized on a regular basis. It was not two days after I enlisted the help of several people that we started to make some progress and zero in on this phone which they said couldn't be found. "I think they've got one in Obarrio" one of the girls told me. "They've got one in Obarrio! We've gotta go now!" The word on the street was that a Chinese man sold them in San Francisco but we hadn't any verification on that lead yet. I'll probably find something new to search for after the phone and at this point, I don't really care if we find it or not: in Panama, the fun's in the journey of it all. |
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| Last Updated ( Wednesday, February 06 2008 ) |
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