Technology

Despite the fact that I write a blog, I know next to nothing about computers, or more specifically, how they work. I know enough, however, to realize that when a Blue Screen of Death shows up and does not leave, this is not good. The IT guys yesterday confirmed this--I have to take my computer somewhere else to be looked at, because they don't have the tools for it. It has something to do with memory or RAM or something. I'm not really sure, because this rather unfortunate computer failure has coincided with me getting a cold, and while he was talking I was more focused on how socially unacceptable it would be to rest my head on his desk, and whether I had the guts to pull that off.

I don't really mind colds, as such. I like having an excuse to go to bed early. I like when my voice is huskier so I sound like Lena Horne when I sing Lena Horne in the shower. On the other hand, I hate sore throats with a deep-seated passion, and I also hate coughing in the library, which is what I'm reduced to at this moment, because, as aforementioned, I can't turn on my computer.

So I wasn't in the greatest frame of mind as I waited for the bus to take me back to my apartment after spending some time with IT (who were, by the way, all very nice and helpful). I was doing that horrible anti-pep talk thing in my head, such as: good job on not backing up any of your Brooklyn photos, guess you can either go home for Thanksgiving or buy a new computer, your laptop is five years old--you should have known this would happen, etc. I wanted my mom. I wanted someone to make me soup. Every time I get sick away from home, I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm not very self-sufficient, at all, especially when my throat hurts.

What aggravates me more than the (potential, likely, costly) loss of my computer, is how dependent I am on it. I don't have cable, and I don't get a newspaper until I get to campus, so such mundane questions as "Will it rain today? Were there any major assassinations overnight?" are questions that I can only answer with the aid of the internet. It's just wires and microchips (and whatever else is in there), and I need it to write papers, but it's just a thing. If my apartment caught on fire, it is not what I would mourn losing--it's not the British bulldog that my flatmates got me as a farewell present, the van Gogh Sunflowers that my cousin quilted, a shawl made by my grandmother, a little William Smith pine box. There is no sentimental value attached to my computer, or my iPod, or my radio. But it's nice to know they are there.

Anyway. As I waited for the bus and quietly unspooled, my upstairs neighbor sent me a text. "I just made pie with apples from the Farmers Market. Come up and have some pie!!" Well, if anything can solve ANYTHING, that anything is PIE. So I did just that. I went up and sat on her floor and ate pie and vented. And she ate pie and vented, and told me I could use her computer whenever I wanted. I went home, made a gin toddy, and crawled into bed. I put on the 97 hour long Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth, and settled back into a better time, a simpler time: where people wore waistcoats, where Mr Darcy dove into a pond and walked around with a wet shirt on, where girls went on trips to London for months at a time, where receiving a letter was the only way you got news, and where computers did not exist.