I am exhausted, my eyes are raw, I feel "off" in some extremely uncomfortable, unpleasant way that I can't even describe and don't want to think about. I woke up at 4:00 a.m. terrified I'd never get back to sleep again, and I barely did. Why? My computer is completely fucked up. It stopped doing anything useful 2 days ago, abruptly. I couldn't blog because it wouldn't post. Or at least some of the time. It would start to, then quit. I couldn't do anything on Facebook. Blank spaces appeared everywhere, on YouTube, etc. where there was supposed to be "something". Usually instantaneously fast, it became slow, slow, slow, or just left you hanging while you watched a pointless little spinning ball in the middle of the screen.
I called my son, of course, assuming it needed some small adjustment. The thing was sort of working, after all. But he didn't come downstairs right away. Time went on, and more and more, while one of my two blondie grandgirls showed me a brand new game she had just mastered, called "cat's cradle". As delighted as I was with the resurrection of a game that goes at least as far back as my mother's generation, I was NOT delighted by what my son finally told me.
He had no idea what was wrong with it. Wait a minute. JEFF doesn't know what's wrong with it. He said "if this shit started happening to my computer my hair would stand on end". He thought it was big stuff. But he couldn't fix it. This was a first. He does computer stuff for a living and is very good at it. There is NOTHING he can't fix. He couldn't fix this because everything he tried (and he tried everything) had no effect.
I was using mainly Google Chrome, which had worked flawlessly at light speed for several years, so he uninstalled and reinstalled it several times, to no avail. Then he was running out of time, so stuck Firefox on there as an alternative, and left. But it had not been set up and looked like a big blob of burning charred meat in an empty field. I sat down and realized all my bookmarks were gone. All of them. "They've been wiped clean," my husband reassured me. "Just put them back in."
"But I can't get the addresses unless I can go on the sites, and I can't go on the sites unless I have the addresses."
"Oh yes you can."
"No you can't. Look, I have to sign in to everything and give my password, and I don't remember any of them. Then I just get a generic page, not MY page. The internet has divorced me."
It was hell, actually, and I had that horrible sinking feeling of losing everything I had worked on for years and years. I couldn't sleep, woke up anxious in the night, and have felt like utter crap for 2 days. I spent four or five hours trying to make sense of Firefox or Foxfire or whatever-it-is. Bill got me back my bookmarked things or I'd still be sitting there. I feel as if my whole system has been demolished, and I am now piecing little pieces of stone back together with mucilage.
The problems are still there, hit-or-miss, returning as soon as I think they're gone: I can't post photos on Facebook (except that sometimes I can); I can't post certain things on my blog; things are still going blank or refusing to work, as if some vital connection is greying out. The internet is fine, it isn't that. My computer is fine. I now have Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Firefox at my disposal, and all of them are fucking up in similar ways, but not the SAME ways, not at the same time, and intermittently, a unique form of torture the Nazis knew all about. It's like they're running around passing the football around so elaborately that I can't keep up.
I've deleted several paragraphs here because nobody really wants to know what goes on in my mind at these times. Hell, I don't want to know. I don't know if other people have these areas of vulnerability. Maybe they don't. They certainly don't talk about them if they do. Everyone maintains at least a veneer of mastery. I can sort of do it, sometimes. But I'll die knowing it was, after all, the very thinnest of thin ice.
