Our Laptops, Our Selves
Two weekends ago I got really, really sick. Like, every cold and flu and similar toxic symptom I’ve ever known had fused together to create a super-illness (which will hereby be known as the Great Illness of 2009), an horrific ailment I had to endure for three days straight before I could sleep more than two hours at a time.
I laughed, I cried, but, mostly, I medicated.
Around the same time my laptop came down with a serious case of “It-crashed”. It crashed.
Anyone who knows me knows that my laptop demands a lot of attention: at 17” it requires a lot of commitment, and not just because it’s difficult to lug around. It’s a bit of an eyesore when not cleaned up; it’s scarred with scrapes and scratches; it can be ridiculously slow; its paranoid anti-virus software makes it difficult for others to interact with; and when you do something it doesn’t like, or you overwhelm it with too much, it passive agressively ignores you by confusing data you input with whatever the hell it wants. Also, with an unreliable battery, it’s a bit flaky. In other words, you have to wholeheartedly convince yourself this laptop is worth it. In this way, my laptop is me.
And, maybe because of this, I was devastated by our latest parallel. After all, if you’re gonna be bedridden, you should be able to distract yourself with StumbleUpon or Slate’s Dear Prudence column. You should not be lamenting your soulmate-laptop’s coma.
But it’s funny when you get painfully sick and you slowly begin to recover; you don’t sweat the small stuff because you’re too busy being overjoyed about the normal stuff, like breathing and being hungry. But you’re also incredibly hesitant to make any quick moves, to laugh too hard, to eat more than three bites. I was hobbling around several days after I stopped medicating, wary that anything could trigger a coughing fit or feverish chills. When my friend PVD agreed to help me fix my laptop (and did a damned fine job at it), I was ecstatic, but I also made sure to take it easy on on my laptop. I gently tapped the keys on the keyboard, I waited patiently when she took forever to load information. I even hobbled around a little extra, just for her.
She’s not the same as before, and sometimes I wish she were a Mac (gorgeous, stable, popular), but, overall, I’m definitely glad we’re both basically healthy again. After all, I can’t finish my novel without a sense of physical and emotional wellness, and I certainly can’t finish it without my main writing utensil. I hope, more than anything, that my laptop makes it to the final chapter. After everything we’ve been through, we’re in this one together.
