For the past month or so, I have been without a laptop. Now, you would think this would be a minor inconvenience because we have four other laptops, three smartphones and a Nook in the house and a vague idea of what the phrase "share with Mom" means. However, as years of private school education apparently did not include an understanding of the word "share", one of the laptops has a screen that's half black while another has no ability to connect to intenet, the glass on my smartphone has been cracked for three months, and nobody in the house has been able to do more on the Nook than play sudoku, I was cut off from the surreal world in which (according to the kids anyway) I spend the bulk of my waking hours.
It was major Facebook withdrawal, much more lethal than trying to detox off of black tar heroin (or so I have been told).
Being a senior citizen (according to the cashier at Foodland anyway), I have spent about 80% of my life communicating in ways not involving something with a screen, keyboard and membership fee. I mean, it took being stuck in car with baby twins at the intersection of Ward and Ala Moana Blvd to finally convince Oscar the Grouch that yes, indeed, I did need a cell phone. I did not embrace the invasion of the digital universe in my life and I was one of those uninformed few who chose to remain in the dark cave of ignofance as long as possible. I didn't need to surf the net because I did not have a porn addiction to feed nor was I interested in hooking up with any long lost high school boyfriend. However, having failed at a 2nd IVF and contemplating adoption, I was lured onto the net when another patient at the office told me that a lot of the adoption agencies posted photos and bios of the kids looking for homes. So, the promise of shopping in my own home for prospective sons and daughters was the big draw. And thus, began my journey into madness.
The thing is that the majority of people of whom I regularly communicate with via text, e-mail and FB are people I see in person or are on my favorites list on my telephone. Yet, something about trying to reach out and touch them (figuratively) without using any electronic device just seemed to foreign and archaic. It was as though that part of my brain which enabled me to speak in semi-coherent sentences or to write a totally illegible letter had disappeared, it's position usurped by the need to hear the click clack of keys and a reliance on spell check. My friend's mother passed away about a month agoand the day I learned about it, I bought a sympathy card to send to the funeral. It's still sitting in front of me as I just cannot seem to get my fingers to write how I feel about her passing or cut the koden check. I don't know if the block is due to a psychological inability to accept that she is really gone or my mental inabilty to really write something. I did set a goal of sending the card before the 49th day of her passing (it's a Buddhist thing) but that date is coming up soon and I still am like a penmanship zombie.
As a reformed lawyer, you'd think that verbal communication would be my go-to talking vehicle of choice. It's like riding a bike, right? As an attorney, perpetual diarrhea of the mouth is a given, an instinctive thing. But even this came to a halt when my laptop committed harakiri. I would call people and it would take me a while to get my thoughts together, for the synapses to connect thought to action. I would hang up and realize that I forgot to tell the person what I had intended to tell the person. Again, this may have less to do with my reliance on typing and more to do with the aforementioned onslaught of senior citizen-itis.
Sadly, I had to throw Oscar under the bus and encourage him to revive his addiction to trying to fix things when he has no idea what he is doing. This addiction seems to be prevalent in most men, particularly when it comes to items that require them to stand in line at 4 am. He has been in a state of repair jonesing for the past two weeks with various semi-successful results. Rather than deal with the cost and hassles of divorce (and our total inability to find anyone to dump the kids on permanently post-split) which is an inevitable result of my penchant to just buy a new one to replace the broken item and his misplaced belief that it is fiscally sound $1000 to repair an outdated bust-upped item instead of $200 to replace it with a current version, I decided to live what I have - which is a laptop that can ONLY go on the internet after 15 minutes of warming up when I manage to click on the right sign in button which appears in the first two seconds of turning the computer on.
The end result anyway is "I'M BACK BI*CHES!!!!"
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