Collecting My Thoughts

Under the subject heading of "Things That Don't Get Done While I Am Computerless," we find one item: Creative Pursuits.

Well, we knew it was going to happen sooner or later --the lack of a functioning personal computer is slowly starting to drive me bonkers. Nothing is getting done when it should. My North and South Mashup, which I have had ideas on for the past week, has gone exactly nowhere, a serious problem considering that is a homework item. My LOTR fanfic is floating out in the ether, my steampunk story is also on a oneway track to nowhere, and all this pent-up creative energy is creating a block on completing schoolwork that I can, in fact, complete on school computers. I have a poster to create, lesson plans to review, journals to write. And nothing's getting done.

Can I also state again for the record that I hate not having a comma key? I am a lover of long sentences, and while it is nice that my roomate is letting me borrow her computer when she's not using it, I ABSOLUTELY HATE that her comma key is not working as it should. I have to press down twice as hard to get a comma to register; ergo, every time there is a comma I have pause so the damn thing will register. Grrrr...

Sorry. This blogger has not been having a very good several weeks. Hopefully sometime in the next few days my mood will improve enough to write some posts on the steampunk novels I've been reading and my opening thoughts on the projected arc of the mash-up.

I have at least made one small bit of progress, however; in lieu of a witty title like Jane Slayre or Android Karenina, I've decided on something a little more subtle -- Elizabeth Gasket's North and South.

Homelessness and Space

The worst of news, readers.

Last Friday, after a visit from the angel of doom and my idiotic tendency to prop my feet up on my desk, I spilled tea on my beloved laptop and turned it into a zombie computer. After taking the battery out, drying it out for the better part of three days to the best of my ability, it will not turn on.

Thus, three years worth of pictures, music, and, worst of all, writing and homeworks, are now in electronic limbo. They might still be on my harddrive. They might not. I have no way of knowing and no way of checking, yet, but I have some of the smartest and most technologically inclined people I know working on it, so we'll see how it goes.

This episode has made me realize two things. One is how incredibly dependent I am on my computer to entertain me, keep me connected with people I don't see on a daily basis, and complete my homework. I wanted to watch a TV show yesterday (and I watch all my TV online) and felt silly going to the computer lab to turn on 'Castle.' I didn't want to check my facebook becuase really, how trival is facebook anyway? And I don't want everyone else in the computer lab to see what incredibly silly game I'm playing!

The second thing I realized is that without my laptop, I feel like a displaced person. I feel homeless without that electronic space to call my own.

I am not by any means trying to trivialize homelessness here. I come from a county with an incredibly high cost of living and an equally high homeless population. I can't say I've ever been physically homeless, but my brother and sister, who have participated multiple times in events like Sleep-Out Saturday, inform me that it's not fun.

When I speak about being homeless, what I really mean is spaceless. I don't have that personal space to store my thoughts or my productions anymore. My stuff doesn't have a home anymore. Using a school computer's not the same -- I have access to the same spaces as I did before, but in a public space. I have a hard time using a public space to do personal things, like write this blog, for instance. I didn't feel anchored enough to devote my time to thinking about blog topics -- I was too worried about when I could get another computer to work on real homework later on that evening.

Hopefully we can recover my data. Hopefully my stories won't have to be recreated from scratch and I won't have to re-acquire all my music. And hopefully I can use this feeling that I have right now, this dreadful, uncertain listlessness, to understand the small percentage of my students that statistics tell me will be homeless. I know my schoolwork's suffering because  of my lack of a computer -- how much must they be suffering when they dont' know where they're sleeping that night?