Day 552: This Event Occurs in the Past

I have made a lot of headway with technology this last couple of years. Claire and I both have...we learned how to edit video, modify photos, write some small things in html, copy and paste with our keyboard...all very exciting things.

However, my computer recently was attacked by an evil virus. A new type of virus that when my computer found it with the help of some Harvard nerdy people at the PC help center, my computer alerted me that I needed to report this to virus protection companies. It was a "red flashing" virus---very bad. very new. The nerds all clustered around my computer to oooh and aaah. I felt exotic. Angry and impotent, but exotic.

Of course, it didn't matter how exotic my virus was once they found out I was with the extension school, as they kicked me out in under a second. I lost my umbrella in the transfer, and they didn't care--the umbrella was from harvard law school, so apparently it was allowed to stay.

I then backed up all my information and returned my computer to its foetal setting. It got reinfected...so I reset it again. It's taken a week, but finally my computer is working. Unfortunately, despite all my technological training, nothing brings out the damsel in distress in me like computer problems. I appealed to every boy I knew, and made them do as much as I could possibly convince them to. Many thanks to my brother, father, and the random kid that sat next to me in the library.

I spent hte last week cursing a technological world I could not engage in. I could not check email, and while I love my blackberry, attachments don't really work all that great. I had to work off my mother's old desktop, which moves slowly to say the least. It wasn't good.But then tonight, I got a reminder of the wonder if paper and pen...I tried to do what I normally at the end of a very busy and stressful day in which I got nothing I planned to done...I wrote out to do lists on my blackberry during class that I could then cross off retroactively. According to Claire, self-help guru, this is a very smart psychological technique. So though I spent my entire day completing two deadlines and driving to NH and back to move some wonderful new donated shoes out of the impending rain and then return in time for five hours of class, I decided to expand the to do list to include things like "wrote five emails" "babysat for ten minutes" etc.

However, when I tried to do so, my blackberry put up a warning "this event occured in the past" which entirely undermined my efforts to feel victorious

Stupid technology.

PS--did you know that if you pile weights evenly on an egg, it can hold up over 300 pounds of weight? Thank you physics class!