Monday, June 26, 2006

harumph, harumph

My computer is dying. No really. It sometimes takes almost an hour to get it up and running and even then there's no guarantee.

It doesn't irritate me that it's slow to load at the start-up. It irritates me that I only have x amount of time to indulge in the luxuries of reading and answering e-mail and surfing my favorite blogs and toying with the next idea for a post, and instead of doing any of those things I'm spending the early morning hours restarting the computer over and over and resisting the urge to smack it savagely upside the monitor, like that would help.

The IT people might have suggestions, but truthfully there are no fixes. I've tried them all. It's just an aging computer and I've pounded every last microchip out of it since I lucked onto it a couple of years ago.

It does at least open up a space in which I contemplate my navel why it is I keep blogging. I need the computer for my art shop, but beyond that -- I mean sometimes I cringe when I think of what I've written; I can't stand to read the past posts. That's why I refer to them as prior offenses.

All I can see when I look back is the mistakes. It's like when I meet up with an old friend or acquaintance and they say, "I was just thinking about you the other day," or "I remember when you were still in school" and I always have to curb the itchy, self-absorbed urge to ask: What was it you were you thinking? What is it you remember? Please tell me it's a pleasant memory and not one where I was behaving ridiculously.

So I don't do too much retrospecting, if I can help it.

I guess I'm just feeling tired and philosophical right now. I'm just thinking that the computer could crash irretrievably, the mike could short out, and if that happened and I evaporated into cybermist, no harm would really come of it. Or maybe everyone who blogs feels like that now and then.

Anyway, now the computer is up, but so are the kids, so I'm just going to have my DECAF coffee and try to pretend it's still the real deal. Harumph, harumph.