I am not really that materialistic, but I did bring the most used item that I own.  This is my laptop.  It connects me with the rest of the world in terms of communication and it is a huge source of entertainment.  It gets a couple of hours of use every day.

I honestly usually don’t make efforts to connect with people outside of my own culture.  I use the internet more to get information about things going on but I don’t necessarily use the internet as a tool for interaction and dialog.  Right now I am following up on the attacks that happened in Mumbai and different things around the globe, such as the financial crisis.

I have to admit, I have been out of touch with the news and politics for the entire 8-year term of president Bush. The first time he was elected I was devastated.  I couldn’t believe this was the direction our country was going in.   Then he got elected a second time and so basically, since 2000, I was completely out of politics because I was so disgusted by the choices he makes, by some of the values that he holds dear, and by the attack on Iraq.

I feel like we took a huge step back by electing him as president and so my way of coping with it has been 8 years of denial.  I was so un-amused by anything to do with George W. Bush and his foreign policy because it was so not representative of me or what I value.

The past few months of this new election, however, I have been watching with a microscope everything that has been happening. Because of the shifts in thinking and the changes that the country wants as a collective body, it has inspired me to be more involved in reading the news.  It has pulled me out of my denial.

My laptop also allows me to shrink my environmental footprint.  I have every form of entertainment through one entity: a computer, a laptop, a stereo, a DVD player, music, a cable console…all these different things are all within this one computer.