My Love Affair With My Laptop And Bill Gates

Well, the Bill Gates bit is pushing it, I’ll admit, no offense Bill, you just don’t look like my kind of guy.  But I love my laptop and I’ve finally given in to the seduction of Windows.  It’s just so clever.  I’ll never be able to get my head around how it works, but that’s the beauty of it all, I don’t have to, any more than I have to understand how a tiny seed turns into a huge tree, or cow eats grass which becomes more cow.

Life is full of these miracles and the wonderful thing about being human is that a) we’re always falling in love with somebody or something and b) we’re always making mistakes but it doesn’t matter because either we learn something brilliant from them or somebody has created a safety net and our mistakes don’t matter at all.

Enter Bill Gates again.  Here’s the thing about my laptop.  The transition from my old desktop with its nice big keyboard to my new toy with its miniscule and ridiculously sensitive keyboard  would have been fraught with the trauma of lost files, inadvertently transposed words and sentences, things sent to outer space to get totally lost and just general misadventure.

Such is the drawback of sensitivity.  Bad enough having it in my personality, now I have to deal with it in a laptop.  But wonder of wonders, every time I do something I shouldn’t have or didn’t  mean to, Windows happily has already saved for me before my digital faux pas – as in faux pas of the digits.  And then of course there’s that lovely “undo” capacity.  You made a mistake?  Just take it back.

Ha.  Life without consequences.  I could get addicted to it.  So this transition to something new and exciting has been – well, new and exciting.  I get the greatest kick out of working on my bed, just like in the movies, or just anywhere else I feel like.  There’s something about not being confined that utterly thrills me.  When I was a small child apparently I refused to sleep in the same place during the day.  I had a pillow and blanky and I chose my spot every time.

My mother told me about that often, but I could never remember it.  Now I can at least identify the feeling, that of a triumphant kid free to make a choice from moment to moment where I’ll sit or lie down and work.   I went to a bookstore café the other day with my laptop, just in case I wanted to write.  As it turns out I didn’t, because Vogue and Vanity Fair vied for my attention.  But I felt like a big shot just carrying my darling around.

Who says love has to hurt?  This geeky love affair is bringing me nothing but pleasure, pleasure, pleasure.