A spell of shininess

For almost a week I have been suffering the absence of my tiny little Toshiba laptop computer, this machine which I've used and loved and carried around the world with me for four years.  It had been making an increasing amount of whirring, spinning noise while operating, i.e., while being turned on 16 of every 24 hours. And it had always run hot.  So off to the shop it went for a new hard drive. And hopefully for a few more years of life. Because even though I know it's probably beyond its useful life in computer terms, I'm attached to it.

Which is why I make a very poor buddhist. 

I am a person who becomes really attached to certain tools.  If you don't believe me, visualize me at work if I happen to misplace my mechanical pencil (um, same one I've had for years).  It isn't possible for me to just pick up any old replacement writing instrument.  I have to find MY pencil, feel it in my hand, in order to settle down and work, so I'll retrace my steps around the office until I lay hands on it, making repetitive rounds until boom, I land in the same place where the pencil is and all is right with the world.  Sure, maybe it's  OCD, but at least I know it.

It's not enough that it's a mechanical pencil, it's THE mechanical pencil.  Same deal with the laptop: not just any computer will do.  There's something particular about that configuration -- that tiny keyboard sized just right for my mitts, that little monitor with its fortune cookie message taped to the bottom, tiny photo of Jasper to the top. 

Not just any ole thing will do.  The things I love are super-special to me. 

And so it's been this week without Laptopy.  I just feel unsettled and clear about the fact that there are some areas in which I just cannot practice detachment. 

Sure I can check email and Facebook, etc., from my phone, but it's just not the same.  I can work from the super-slow ancient desktop at home, but again, nowhere close to the same.  So I'm unsettled and I feel unproductive and bereft.

So yeah, I love shopping and new stuff, but I am really pretty crazy about the stuff I have. 

Sometimes unreasonably so.

This explains the presence of an enormous, tattered, brown vintage men's shirt on the shelf in my closet -- I wore it like a uniform at the end of my pregnancy with The Kid twenty-four years ago.  It had belonged to my Uncle Ben, who died while I was pregnant and in whose house I was subsequently living.  Joe utterly hates that shirt as one of the ugliest things I own.  But unlike the bird shirt, I can't get rid of it because, well you just read that whole paragraph so I don't need to tell you.  I never wear it but I look at it every single time I go in or out of the closet, look at it and send it love with my eyes.  It's not just clothes-stuff I form these attachments to.  Before it was subsumed into Rite-Aid or CVS or whatever, I used to have the same weird love for Payless drugstore.  I was always happy walking through those doors, ever since childhood.  Some things, some places, just have a something about them that sticks them to me, to my heart, who knows why.

And I don't really care to detach from them.

The fortune taped to the bottom of Laptopy's screen serves as an apt reminder given my tendency toward one-click early-morning online shoe- or book-shopping.  I'm missing that little fortune right now, and strangely have no appetite for the shininess.  I don't feel like I really have any access to it.

Nothing feels quite right, my words just don't feel right to me at all without Laptopy. 

There just doesn't seem to be any spell at all.  I feel somehow outside the current of creative magic that I'm flowing in when I have just the right tool at my literal fingertips.

This is an interesting experience, I'm sure, but not one I'm eager to repeat.

I am hopeful that when I pick Laptopy up tomorrow, that all of the little tweaks that needed to be made will be complete, that I can get back to the business at hand -- all of the scribbling, and internet rock-hopping and connection-making that Laptopy and I have collaborated on for years.

Until then I'm making do with what I've got, missing my perfect little tool and eager to pick it up tomorrow sometime, all fixed up and ready to rock for a few more years.  By which time, maybe I'll be ready to move on, experience the spell of shininess from behind a different monitor, one that pleases just as much as Laptopy's.  And until then, a little bereft I must admit.

This is the price of attachment, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Do you have things like this in your life -- stuff you're perhaps unreasonably attached, a holey sweater you wear only around the house, a pair of jeans or a machine of some kind that you just LOVE?  Tell me about it in the comments below.  I'd love to know.

XX