Primary Master Hard Disk Fail
Perrine's
Literature, the textbook for my recently completed Composition and Rhetoric II course, defines poetry at one point as "a kind of language that says
more and says it
more intensely than does ordinary language."
The are times when the economy and specificity of technical jargon approaches poetry; five impassive words glowing faintly in white on a black screen constitute an impressive understatement. I found myself reading them over and over three months ago, when the hard disk drive of the obsolete, patchwork amalgam of computer parts that hunches under my desk lost its will to live. There was no warning for this.
I was maddened by the thing at the time, maddened to the point of dropping all other tasks and wasting hours booting the computer in an attempt to get it to wake up. I did this despite the fact that there was no important information for school trapped on the computer, and other computers were available to me to do school work. I was angered by the sheer lightning-out-of-the-blue-sky randomness of it, angry enough that I obsessively focused on it to my detriment. Eventually I had to move on to more pressing things, but I was bitter indeed.
I kept playing with the drive over the next few weeks; with practice I managed to coax it back to life briefly, and it willed me the data in its trust, so there are no longer any hard feelings. May it rest in peace.
But I still have no computer. And the
Chattahoochee Technical College library is closed for the break between quarters. So to write these posts, I pretty much have two choices: The
Cobb County Public Library System web browsing computers, or my mother's. The public library computers disconnect you every thirty minutes, and the librarians will get angry if they notice you've been on one too long. This is just a minor annoyance, but I let it bother me more than it should. Right now I am at my mother's place,
The Accursed Schoolhouse A whole lot has been going on here lately; but I am going to have to start to tell you about it tomorrow because it is now ten thirty post meridiem and I need to go home and get into bed so I can get up tomorrow at five thirty ante meridiem and go to work.
Wake rested. I will be back tomorrow.
Commitment
Greetings, people of the internet. My name is Robin. This is my Thought Sink.
My thought sink is a blog I created in October of last year, with a specific idea for what I would put into it, a general idea of what I wanted out of it, and a vague idea of who might read it.
I am a person who wants to improve himself, his life, and his world, in that order. All of these things, as far I can see, have been in great need of improvement. So I decided to fix them, even though I did not know how to do so yet, and write down here how I did it.
I started out well, with both the writing and the improving. But before long I got tripped up. I have problems- you can read about some of them in the small archive of this blog- and they are real and serious problems and tackling them once and for always is a great task. And when I grappled with myself, I allowed my publishings to get farther and farther apart. The last post published to this blog was on April fifth, three months ago. After that I floundered.
I am not floundering anymore.
In this blog I have stated that I will keep returning to it- the blog- until it is finished or I am dead. I want to explain here how primary that is. This is a blog about how I become a better person; and gaining the ability to make a long-term commitment and fulfill it is integral to that task. If I become a better person, I will learn to do this and finish the blog. If I do not become a better person, I will die first.
I have also stated that this blog will have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
This is still the beginning. I still lack direction, I still lack relentlessness, and I still lack confidence. But I am no longer quite so lost, and I am definitely not stagnant.
I started this blog because I commited to changing myself, and that created a need for a creative exit. I am still not sure why I need that creative exit, but I named it a 'thought sink'. This blog is, first and foremost, my thought sink. I have returned to it because I need it to fulfill my commitment to myself. I have attempted to take control of my life for the first time, and as I have become more and more proficient at staying on top of the uncertainty of my life in the past weeks, I have built up a backlog of thoughts to sink. I have returned here to sink them.
I had trouble writing before; I think that will be less of a problem now. I think I know the name of my block: it is my uncertainty, the uncertainty that I am on top of right now. If I do not know what will happen tomorrow I can hardly write about it; and in my anxiety the past dissolves into nonsense. I am doing everything I can to keep my vision clear right now; I can see weeks ahead, sometimes as much as a year. This is good.
So I am again ready to try and put my life into words. Except that right now it is eleven o'clock at night, and I need to go to bed, because I have to go to work early in the morning.
Good night. I will be back tomorrow.
