The Star

I bought a cool cool laptop recently, and I've enjoyed forcing it to evolve to my tastes. Recently, I have discovered that it has the capability of causing intense joy by dangling mere possibility in front of my eyes. The thing is this: If you press F12 (finally those function keys have a function!), a bunch of sweet gadgets fly into the screen. They call 'em widgets, but whatever. The point is that there is one dealy-doo that checks my email for me and then tells me if any new messages are waiting to be read. It can't say who they are from or what they say—it just throws this amazingly red, beautifully five-pointed star up on the screen with the number of possibly sweet sweet emails from A or P or J or M or someone else cool enough to get an initial in my b-log.

Who cares that they usually end up being tactful reminders about my CD club membership, offers from my bank to refinance my house, or out-of-date internship opportunity notices from a school I no longer attend? It's the possibilty, the potential, the sheer temptation represented by that star, as real and as red as a pair of digital lips hanging in the air, swirling my mind with the idea of romance, forever suspended before me, urging me on into the unknown. Wouldn't you like to be a part of that? Wouldn't you like to titillate my imagination and promote the premature wearing out of my F12 key?

Wells Fargo of the Intermountain West would. Tessa Hauglid of the BYU English Department would.