it touches me. (okay, LAME title. let's see if people get the pun. or not).

as a very technologically-disabled person, i'm limited to laptops (preferably sticking close to ms word and search engines. yahoo! and google are my friends. html? not so much), cellphones (the slimmer the better. "features? what features? i have a cameraphone?" is usually what my reaction is to my slivr. which used to be cool, maybe four years ago in real years and a thousand gajillion years in techy world. it's probably the grandfather four times removed from the iphones and blackberries of the now era.), and my ipod (which, compared to the 80GB ipods and itouches, has the equivalent of 9 songs, in the range of relativity.

but as the other half of a long distance relationship (yes. i live for masochism. yay me.), i have a healthy respect for technology and the wonders and ease it does for my kind of relationship, whether or not i understand it. sure, it's difficult and my advice, when asked if i would recommend long distance is "hell no. are you stupid?" But i also know that compared to the yesteryears when email was just a typographical error and computers had, like, ten green lines on the screen, bill gates was just a kid in grade school no one wanted to be friends with because he had some kind of crazy ideas (porn accessible to almost everyone with just one click? if david copperfield can't make that kind of magic, who sez you can?), and if you loved someone a world away, you could get maybe 2 letters a year from them... maybe 3, depending on the weather of the sea.

so i could kiss the people who invented chat online, who launched skype for free internet phone calls, for allowing people to put their diaries and journals in blogs to casually keep talking more about themselves (ahem, me.), for email, that takes less than a minute for your letter or note to be sent.

I don't get the luxury that most people have of seeing their significant others on valentines' day, or even just on any other normal day. it's difficult but it's manageable, knowing that if you tried hard enough, loved someone big enough, and connected with someone deeply enough, you can pretend that there are no screens in front of you, fake looking straight into the webcam and pretend that you're looking straight into his eyes even when you're looking through a small round hole with a fisheye image of reflecting you back. you can pretend that you're speaking in real-time and that there's no static, no lag, no tinny echo in the background. you can pretend you're in the same room, even if his room has red walls and yours has white, and you don't have a weird interior decorating emergency of a room with hybrid walls.

what i won't have is being able to celebrate valentines with my boyfriend at the same time, in the right day. one of us is going to have to celebrate a day earlier or a day late. the day might be a hallmark holiday but it does touch the romantic in us. if you can't even celebrate a made-up holiday on the day itself, what the heck are you doing a day before or a day later?

so if i had an itouch, what application would i wanna share with my boyfriend? i'd want to use the internet and hole myself up in a place with wifi, get through to the skype application and talk to him, even for just ten minutes, on the right day, regardless of if i'm in school or i'm doing errands or i'm studying away from my laptop. the iphone above? sure it would be nice to have something with crazy apps like that (i would love a paris hilton blocker. please please, mr. mac jobs). i'm ecstatic enough that the itouch has internet, though some people would find it an almost outdated feature they already have in their cellphones (may i remind you. my cell has sentiment attached to it, not internet).

i'm not like most people who lucky enough to pick the bejeweled application for two players, that they can do with their significant others. or split headphones to listen to romantic music. unlike most, the itouch could probably be the best valentines i could hope to have. it'll be my date this valentines, my connection to someone i care about half a world away. the itouch might be something fun for two to do. but for me, it would mean 

you gave me my world to see.