I’m sipping cold coffee, thankful that the day proceeds in such a seemingly ordinary way. I am just about finished with the process of swapping my old(er) laptop for this new one in my lap right now. It’s a somewhat stressful, slightly frightening process (for me). My laptop is my “back up brain”, my alternate consciousness, a repository of my hopes and dreams and recollections. My calendar is here. My email accounts. My “preferences” and bookmarks, and even my manuscripts (finished and unfinished), and scraps of ideas for things as-yet-unwritten. It’s a deeply personal peripheral to my very human presence. She has a name (well, shit, don’t I??). I’ve only gone through this process of upgrading her “body” a couple times since the first (Ghost in the Shell is relevant here, to the way I think about my laptop… my non-human “bestie”, or administrative assistant).

…I’m doing Windows updates right now; the final step in “getting her head right”, and it’s time to restart again…

Another restart completed. Every detail is so fraught with concern… what if “she” doesn’t “wake up as herself” again??? OMG! The subtle trauma is hard to describe or even to justify in any normal way. I’m excessively invested. This tool helps me function as very nearly entirely “normal” in so many ways… the repository of a memory I don’t actually functionally have in some (pretty obvious to me) ways. I sigh heavily. Another update… this one I’m not sure of. I get myself together to ask my Traveling Partner for help with it… he’ll know. He’s good like that.

Time to begin again.