Better. Things are somewhat better now than they were earlier. This one is 100% “a me thing”. Menopause. Emotions. Age and aging. Frustration. Just the basic slop of being human, female, over 60, and a big ol’ basket of broken shit and fragments and wreckage, emotionally speaking. Having a trauma history has got to be one of the most human of things, and it’s probably a rare individual who manages to make it past 50 without any hint of trauma. If we don’t experience legitimate damaging trauma, chances are we’d make some up. Also? I have a fucking headache. I woke up with it, hours ago… it’s with me still. Very human.
I took my headache to the store and bought goblin snacks for the upcoming holiday. Fun. Still have the headache. Drinking water. Relaxing. Doing my best. All the things.
There’s nothing much more to say about the shitty start to the day. I enjoyed a pleasant walk and then “crashed my hard drive” later – metaphorically. Wasn’t quite a tantrum. Could have been much worse. Wasn’t my best moment. Blech. Adulting is harder than it seems like it could be, sometimes.
I’m tentatively sipping this fresh (quite hot) cup of coffee and endeavoring to avoid burning my mouth, while savoring the goodness of a still-hot cup of coffee on a Saturday morning. I’m still working on (with the help of my Traveling Partner) bringing my new laptop properly to life as the machine I understand so well (and which seems to understand me).
One careless misstep resulted in having to fight off the cancer that is OneDrive (omg, spare me, ffs) – I rather stupidly let that thing begin syncing my files, unaware that it was set to do so (no doubt through some earlier carelessness or lack of understanding)… wouldn’t have been such an issue if I were not also a user of DropBox for backing up my files, and had allowed that to have sync turned on and permitted to run in the background “for convenience” (omg, no no no no!!!)… the result? A crazy loop of OneDrive and DropBox seeking to back (each other) up continuously… and we’re talking about many tens of thousands of high resolution photographs, and multitudes of gigabytes of documents preserved over many decades (that through my own insecurity about “losing my memories”, had become multiple copies of copies of copied folders – in some cases also including .zip versions of those very same nested multiplicative folders and files). It was a fucking nightmare. In point of fact, an actual literal nightmare, because I dreamt through the night last night of having lost just the one and only precious file that actually mattered, because I did not realize it was stored as a single copy on fucking OneDrive – and had deleted all that content out of frustration without checking for that file. Omg. For real though?
Fuuuuuuuuuck. Okay. So. Frustrated raised voices and a few tears later, followed by careful slow conversation on the level one would have with a fairly stupid child (thanks, though, Love, I get it now)… and I think we’ve got this shit sorted out… only…
…new laptop. There may be a hardware issue; the monitor was flickering (unacceptable). I think my Traveling Partner resolved that with skilled troubleshooting in the display settings. G’damn I appreciate the depth of his expertise on this crap – I have not kept up my technical knowledge, as so often happens with “use it or lose it” sorts of things, and I’m clearly very far behind the state-of-the-art OS-wise! I could have seriously borked my new laptop if I had proceeded to simply delete a bunch of (to me) suspicious looking OS files. LOL (“Okay, Boomer…”)
Breathe through it; it’ll be okay.
Yeah. She’s here. She “lives and breathes” – as much as she can as a machine. I know, I know; she’s not actually conscious, sentient, or a living being. I just rely on this tool to the point that “she” feels personal and real to me on a level beyond machinery… like a motorhead with a favorite car. I’m okay with that.
(Note: AI is not yet a thing, y’all, just stop. We’ve got some fancy machine learning tools, but those tools are not “AI”; they do not think and can not reason or understand the material they ingest or the content they spit out. Not yet, so just fucking stop sucking down the marketing hype.)
So… definitely needed this 2nd coffee, and I’m trying to enjoy it before it goes cold. 😀
…Because it’s already time to begin again, and I’ve got shit to do in both the real and virtual worlds. Life is short, and time passes all too quickly. 😀
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.
I’m sitting in the waiting area of a local tire place. No coffee. I mean, I could, but… it’s late in the day, and the coffee here is probably quite dreadful, so… no.
Generic tire place.
The smell is “shop” and tires. It’s a bit noisy, but the sunshine streaming through the big windows feels nice. Tomorrow I leave for my camping trip… Tonight, apparently, I need to get a tire repaired. Shit. Well, at least I already got the grocery shopping done and the car is packed. Really nothing left but the morning… grab my camera bag and go, if my Traveling Partner is sleeping when I get up. Have coffee together before I leave if he’s already up.
….Easy…
It already seems rather silly that I stressed about this tire.
I’m pretty excited about this camping trip. Enough to overlook the pain I’m in. Headache. Arthritis. Fuck pain. I’m going camping anyway. I really need a couple days alone with my thoughts, my camera, and some trails I’ve never walked. Maybe I’ll write. Maybe I won’t. I know I will listen to the wind through the trees and the squawking of the jays.
This damned tire though.
…The mechanic turns up to tell me it’s fixed. A bit of paint on the rim prevented a good seal on the tire. Easily fixed. I head home.
Sometimes I still feel like I’m fighting uphill. Arguing with shadows. Spinning my wheels. Sometimes shit just feels too hard. Even (especially?) the stuff I think “should be” easy.
Fuck I am frustrated and tired. My head hurts. I just wanted…
… doesn’t matter, it didn’t go down like that. There’ll be other times, other moments, other chances. I just wasn’t expecting things to be so damned difficult in this particular instance.
I know, I know, there are practices to practice and I can begin again. Fighting back pointless stupid tears.
… Sometimes I just miss things that were once so easy…
Evening Light 