MindSpinner

I love sitting cross-legged on my bed, writing - not with pen and paper, but tapping away on my Powerbook G4 laptop, the petite 12″ model that ensures I have to don my glasses to see what I’m doing. But that was yesterday.

Adjustments will have to be made. Laptops must occasionally be connected to power cords, and persons other than myself have occasionally tripped over power cords - three times, to be exact - yanking my laptop to the floor. The first two times, this happened at school, when a student went the wrong way round my desk. Now my desk at school is situated such that going the wrong way round is difficult to do. Twice, the laptop kept right on working, except that I had to resort to using a mouse. It kept on working, too, when a student turned and bumped a Coke on my desk, tipping the contents of the can into my keyboard. It survived even a second, similar fluid spill a year later. But it didn’t survive last night’s encounter with the laminate floor at home, and the nearest it comes to booting is the occasional appearance of the Apple logo. Fortunately, I had backed up a few gigs of my most important files a few weeks ago. Much is lost, but I’m not going to think about that all at once. Losses are best accounted for in manageable bits. Today I’ll mourn the loss of email. Next week I’ll think about music.

So now I’m downstairs using my children’s computer, the eMac I bought them two years ago. This relegates my writing and surfing the Internet to early mornings, when teenagers are asleep. My mother has already proffered the inevitable suggestion - a $500 PC from WalMart. But we Mac-loving folk adore our elegantly designed technology and operating system. I use a PC every day of school - a fairly new one - and I can only say, with Gollum, that, comparatively speaking, “We hates it.” I’d rather just get up early in the morning and slip down here to the eMac.