Abigail M. Schilling

Last week, I experienced a great tragedy. It was so great that I've struggled finding the words to express it. But, unlike so many of my other life experiences, I can actually talk about this tragedy on my blog.

Last week, my laptop died.

It was a long time coming and I've been backing up like crazy for the last year in preparation for the final day. It had already lost so much of what made it who it was: before death it was lacking an operable CD drive, had a malfunctioning ethernet drive, had no battery so it always needed to be plugged in, and ran so slowly and with such passion that when I tried to watch TV shows online (or YouTube or use iTunes) the fan would be so loud that it would eclipse the sound of the show. So, I mean, it was time. In fact, just last weekend the ABC player stopped working on my computer. Chief Weber couldn't even save it.

The hard drive is fine, I didn't lose any data, and for several days I was able to do a key-command-dance-off to get it to start up. Seriously, you try pressing Apple key, alt, P, R, and On at the same time. It took both my hands and all the mind power.

I'm fairly confident that it probably has one more forced start up left in it so on Thursday morning I decided I would save that for a special occasion. I have not touched the computer since then so I suppose you could say that it is on life support. I'll let you know when I'm cutting the cord.

Obviously, I had a bunch of Television Without Pity to catch up on because the internet? It doesn't stop when I stop. After three days without dedicated internet time, I felt as though I would never catch up. I started doing crazy things like reading books and going to bed early. I found myself getting out of bed in the morning because my email was a whole commute away. It was good for me on some levels.

But I can't keep a blog and have friends on the internet without a computer. And since buying another one isn't a viable option right now (maybe in a year) I knew what I had to do. I always knew deep down that it would come to this, otherwise I wouldn't have carried a DESKTOP COMPUTER around with me from home to home in move after move for over two years.

So, yes, now I am using a computer purchased in 2002. It was top of line at the time with XP and a CD burner and DVD drive and surround sound speakers and a flat screen (not flat panel) monitor. There are some exciting things about making this switch. First of all, I can not only watch all the shows online again, but I can also watch DVDs! on! my! computer! Also, since it's a PC, I was able to get the cheap version of Quicken and I've set it up to pay my bills for me. Awesome? I think so.

Clearly, my way of coping with the death of one of my most-prized positions is denial, and, you know, tricking myself that an old computer is new. I'll take it.