The Future Has Addled My Brain

I'm no luddite with regards to writing. I love technology. I think computers are a gift from the gods and there is no part of me that can pretend we lost something important with the functional extinction of quills and little pots of ink, or lovely smooth fountain pens, or adorable pastel typewriters and their design-y tins of ribbon. And while I feel like it's really great and sweet when people want to scrawl hand-written missives to each other and walk to the post office to deliver them and what have you, I know that if I were forced to do such a thing A) basically no one would ever hear from me because I am extremely lazy, and B) no one would be able to read my letters anyway because I have the most atrocious handwriting in the history of ever. Seriously. I cannot even read it myself.

So, since I tend to do my only good thinking in the dead of night and then forget it all by morning if it is not immediately recorded, I know that the best way to prevent my thoughts from disappearing into the ether is by keeping my (old, weirdly heavy) laptop on the floor next to the bed. Then, cozy as I may be as I am drifting off to dreamland, if I'm hit with an idea, or a sentence, or a scene that must be noted, I'll force myself to switch on the lamp, reach down and lug the laptop up to my bed, pry it open, wait for it to wake up, pull up the giant email to myself called "notes," and jot the thought down as quickly as I possibly can in my sleepy state. Then I'll put it back, roll over, and try to sleep until the next thought comes. 

It's a pretty stupid system I know, and the fact that on a good night I have to do it about five separate times makes it even sillier, but I swear it works for me better than actually writing on scraps of paper (my previous system) ever did.

But I will admit this:

Last night, long after midnight, I had some apparently inspired, book-perfecting THOUGHT. So I switched on the lamp, reached down, lugged the thing up to my bed, pried it open, waited for it to wake up... and was met with the endless beach ball spiral of death. I panicked. Frantically I tried force quit things and restart things and press all the keys on the keyboard while keeping the THOUGHT in my flighty mind, but it was no use. The device was frozen.

So I gave up, closed the laptop, put it back on the floor, switched off the lamp, lost the thought forever, and not once did it occur to me to reach over to my bedside table to grab the pen and the little notebook that live there and THAT, my friends, is pretty messed up.

P.S. Awesome wallpaper image by Wall & Deco