So until about 10 minutes ago, I was planning on writing some sort of flippant column on the need for personal space. You know, the usual kind of half-baked observational sociology bullshit: how everyone sits with a space between them and the next person in a lecture class, how I sometimes get dirty looks when I stand too close to the person in front of me in line at the bookstore, all concluding with a poorly developed theory that we’re all searching for a little privacy in this modern collegiate world where we’re packed hundreds to a building, sometimes living in rooms no bigger than janitor’s closets (or rooms that actually used to be janitor’s closets if we’re talking about my beloved freshman year in Nic 5.5). So right, this is what I was going to write about. And then my laptop froze.
And then it wouldn’t turn on.
As you can imagine, this was a cause of concern. There’s nothing more frustrating than computer problems when you don’t have the time for them, except for maybe the fact that computer problems only happen when you don’t have the time for them. And just to compound things, my computer had to break two days before my thesis is due. The only thing that kept me from committing ritual suicide somewhere in the attic of Olin was a tiny USB drive. God bless those little things, because if I had actually plunged a kozuka into my stomach in the attic of Olin, it would probably be weeks before they found my body slumped over under the desk of my carrel. And let’s not even talk about how angst-ridden my death poetry would have been.
Anyway, with my thesis safely secure in my pocket and my computer sadly surrendered to ITS, I find myself sitting tonight in a crowded computer lab, writing these words and realizing, perhaps for the first time, just how vulnerable I am without my trusty laptop at my side. Just how naked I feel without it; just how fundamentally wrong every other computer feels to me now. These computers don’t have sticky “N” keys, scratches on the monitor, noisy fans. I might as well just admit it: I love my laptop.
It wasn’t always this way, but writing over my thesis this past year, I’ll admit that I began to develop a serious relationship with my laptop.
Because I’m normally a terribly disorganized person who tends to write important things on napkins and tiny scraps of paper that I usually forget to take out of my pockets before I do my laundry, I realized that in order to write a thesis, I’d really have to get my act together. My brilliant idea sometime last summer was to take all my notes on my laptop. Consequently, the laptop and I went everywhere together. On trains, planes, long car rides. I took it across innumerable state lines and even into a foreign country. I took it to the bathroom and the campus center; to class and family vacations. We even took an ill-advised trip to Coney Island together this one time.
Time is perhaps the most forgiving of things. It erases faults, or at the very least, makes them kind of endearing. When you’re writing a thesis, you rarely have the luxury of flesh and blood company. Sometimes you have to settle for a friendship that is not organic but industrial. And sometimes you end up talking to your computer.
I don’t want to turn this column into something it’s not. Your computer crashing isn’t that serious a matter, but I can’t help but feel a real sense of loss at something like this. This was the computer I bought with my last paycheck from my summer job right before I came to school freshman year. It actually means something to me in a sentimental way rather than a materialistic way. It has all the papers I wrote in college, all the pictures I took, the letters I wrote, and the music I downloaded. It is the atlas of the last four years of my life. Where I’ve been, where I am, and maybe even where I’m going. There’s some sort of cruel metaphor in losing it right before I graduate. By itself, it’s really nothing more than an unfortunately-timed inconvenience. But these things have a way of piling up. Meaning eventually emerges from the wreckage of our lives, patterns are created from chaos. And maybe one day in the near future, I’ll look back on today, on my computer dying, and I’ll see it as the beginning of the end of something. Or the beginning of something.
But I don’t have that hindsight yet. All I have right now is a broken computer, a thesis in my pocket, and a box of Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pies. And so, right now, before it’s a metaphor, before it’s a symbol or a sign, before it’s even something I really have to worry about, I would like to say goodbye to a friend. One who never did me wrong before tonight.
And so, to a fallen computer, I offer this eulogy. A eulogy the height of a few picas and the width of my heart.
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