How much thought do we give to things we use every day? How much thought do we give to things we can’t really live without?

Take iPods for instance. Can anybody name another device that’s done so much with so little and not feel limited? Five buttons plus a scroll wheel and you’ve got a device that can scroll through hundreds to thousands of songs, artists, and albums, and you can play any of them in just a few clicks. You can pause your iPod while it’s in your pocket, while you’re in the car. You can take it anywhere; unlike technology of the past, ¹  you don’t need to take tapes or CDs with you; the media is the player, and it’s got a battery that lasts a long long time.

Is an iPod the perfect device? I think maybe it is. But how do we define perfect? After all, the perfect notebook for a writer is gonna be vastly different than the perfect notebook for a painter. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is perfection.

I think that perfection is a complex little combination of things. First, there’s things like the perfect bottle opener, which opens bottles really well. Great. That’s small fries, I think, and doesn’t quite count. To really have the perfect bottle opener, one needs to consider what a bottle opener needs to do; the person considering also needs to consider how that bottle opener needs to work for him, and that’s the hard part. Which would be better: a hand held opener, or the type that mounts on a wall? If the type that mounts on the wall, where the wall is in relation to the fridge with the beer is very important. Does it have a cap catcher? Is the angle you hold the beer at a good angle? When snapping the cap off, does the action feel mushy or crisp? Does it look cool? Only once you’ve considered all these things, made your purchase, and can’t think of any way to improve on it have you got the perfect bottle opener. ² 

All this means form must be considered, and so must function, and it must be a very personal choice; further, perfection is going to differ from person to person, project to project, and item by item.

The only perfect thing I’ve written about up to this point has been pencils. If you read that essay, you’ll get a certain vibe from it; you’ll find that I obviously put a lot of time and effort into finding the perfect pencil. Much consideration went into the perfect pencil’s selection. And having found it, there’s a certain amount of enthusiasm involved, too. It’s perfect; it is therefore a joy to use. Why would one not want to share that with loved ones? “I found this perfect thing. It’s wonderful. It makes my life better. Screw off! I’m not telling what it is! You’ll steal it!”

No, people want to share good things, and I am no exception. The hard part is not to evangelizing on the good things. Especially the things that are not only perfect, but also life-improving. Maybe this small series of essays on perfection can be an apology and also a way for me to put some of my evangelizing to rest: the words are there for anybody to read, and I don’t need to say them again. We’ll see.

Thanks for reading. More perfect writing will follow. In the meantime, if you’d like to post a comment telling about something perfect you’ve found, that’d be great! Just don’t post about your significant other. Unless he/she is a non-human, I don’t care about how perfect your wife is. ³

1. You know, like where with a Walkman, you had to have the Walkman, plus tapes. ↩
2. I don’t yet have the perfect bottle opener. ↩
3. Unless you post naked pictures. Then it’s ok. ↩