This week was a crapshoot. Not even totally for the obvious reasons — though the terrorist attack didn’t help — but because of the cumulative effect of some things both predicable and not.
On the predictable side, a friend went into the hospital for some non-major surgery, so I was driving back and forth a bit. The thing about that is that while I have a licence, I don’t have a car, and I don’t have a car because driving makes me nerve-wrackingly anxious. I hadn’t driven in at least a year. Driving, for me, is something that requires a ton of mental preparation, and I was anticipating doing it several times.
Then there was the electoral confirmations and all its fallout, which I ought to have allocated more energy to being safe with.
Some personal health issues.
And I discovered my laptop had a swollen battery on Tuesday. Early in the week. Fortunately the easiest possible thing to fix, it was still under warranty, and it hadn’t affected anything but (minorly) the mousepad. But the shop still had to send it out, so that’s two to four weeks without it. And although I keep my most important things on the cloud, there were a few game files and digital notes I might have lost, because for some reason the repair place may still erase all my data and some mistakes were made while I was still figuring out how to handle the situation.
So, right now I’m on my old laptop.
The one whose keyboard has a numpad, compressing every other key and putting all of them in the wrong places. It sounds wrong, feels wrong.
The one whose screen is both too bright and too washed out, and I can’t quite figure out how to fix it. Not to mention being the wrong size, the wrong shape.
The one with the broken hinge and cracking chassis where my cat failed a jump.
The one whose speed is about the same as a cow lumbering in water (yes, despite multiple factory resets. There’s a reason I replaced it.)
Everything about this laptop is now Wrong to me. It’s too old a model to handle some of the games I like playing: it’s too aged to be anything but grudging about playing most of the others.
Every single time I need to replace a computer, I forget how much of my digital environment defines how I view the digital world. Nothing about my online and tehnological spaces look the same that I did: the lens through which I’m viewing them is different. None of them seem friendly anymore; only to be tolerated, grudgingly, until my other laptop returns from the store.
Coupled with events in offline life and the past three days have felt like digital space has bled into meat space: nothing is real, and I’m walking through a dazed fog.
So this week was a wash. I managed some things on Monday, thought ‘oh this is a good start to the week’ … and then Monday evening my coauthor told me to take my laptop in the next day because ‘That Is Bad’.
It’s not super good timing, given I need to now be looking for other work, already uninviting, on a machine which makes everything even less inviting than they already are. Actually, I’m not entirely sure how the timing could have been much worse.
Over time I’ll adjust a little better. Probably I’ll never not feel like I’m holding out until my ‘real’ laptop comes back: this old machine will forever feel like an interloper into my curated space. It may, at least, be able to be unplugged for long enough to continue reconstructing my former writing habits, but even then it’s going to feel different, dissatisfying (not least due to the fact that the screen is not precisely stable).
Right now, though, two weeks seems entirely too long, and even though that’s the bare minimum I can hope for, I’m already yearning for it.
Aurichalcum Publishing 