Broken Hardware
Jan. 26th, 2011 07:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraLast night the DVD player in my computer stopped working.
I mean – it’s an old computer, a battle-ax really – it’s surprising the DVD player worked as well for as long as it did.
But the broken DVD player threw me into a massive tailspin because as pathetic as it may sound, I don’t have the $100 necessary to buy another (I can insert it myself) or even the $50 necessary to buy a portable DVD player, a far more practical plan.
Did I say pathetic? No, it’s beyond pathetic. It’s whatever the next adjective down from pathetic is.
Never mind the Phoenix Moment, I’m still waiting for the Scarlett O’Hara Moment, the one where you hold up a lump of Tara and scream, “As God is my witness I’ll never be hungry again!”
Wendy Lou is taking me up to the ski lodge to apply for a restaurant manager job on Friday. Otherwise it’s more of the same of Stupid Boring Job But At Least It’s Something and cobbling words together – which gets harder and harder to do.
I remember the first time it occurred to me that I could afford to spend $100 – and it wouldn’t matter! A hundred dollars was nothing to me, it wasn’t essential to the bottom line, I could use it to buy things or I could set fire to it and watch it burn, I could throw it away! I was in my early twenties.
How could I have retreated so far? Twenty dollars is essential to the bottom line these days.
I guess you just do what you have to and soldier on. But it is hard. Hard. Hard.
In other words, nice phone conversation with You Know Who You Are and when I met with B to parse over the weekend’s work on the Campbell novel, I found myself thinking, “Not only don’t I love this guy, he doesn’t even particularly interest me” – which made me kind of sad. Being in love infuses one’s life with meaning somehow. Without that meaning it’s just lockstep for-ward march! Love elevates, love ennobles.
I’m still filled with a kind of bitterness that after all Ben did to me, he got the soft landing, the plump little human partridge Jayne LeGro to sew on his buttons and groom his feathers while I have to soldier on in isolation with absolutely no one to help me – though I do have many people rooting for me and I’m grateful for that. I suppose this has to do with the relative dearth of men in our advanced age cohort, the relative abundance of women. She was desperate – after all, she’d been hoarding his poetry since high school! No doubt this is all her dreams come true.
And yes, it is odd that I brood more over the woman who replaced me then the man who left me.
You Know Who You Are talking about something unrelated remarked yesterday, “I’m fifty-seven years old. I just can’t start everything over again from scratch.”
But, of course, that’s exactly what I’m having to do. Is there any nobility to it at all? Or is it totally ridiculous because it's just more evidence of my supreme lack of anything even remotely resembling common sense?
I mean – it’s an old computer, a battle-ax really – it’s surprising the DVD player worked as well for as long as it did.
But the broken DVD player threw me into a massive tailspin because as pathetic as it may sound, I don’t have the $100 necessary to buy another (I can insert it myself) or even the $50 necessary to buy a portable DVD player, a far more practical plan.
Did I say pathetic? No, it’s beyond pathetic. It’s whatever the next adjective down from pathetic is.
Never mind the Phoenix Moment, I’m still waiting for the Scarlett O’Hara Moment, the one where you hold up a lump of Tara and scream, “As God is my witness I’ll never be hungry again!”
Wendy Lou is taking me up to the ski lodge to apply for a restaurant manager job on Friday. Otherwise it’s more of the same of Stupid Boring Job But At Least It’s Something and cobbling words together – which gets harder and harder to do.
I remember the first time it occurred to me that I could afford to spend $100 – and it wouldn’t matter! A hundred dollars was nothing to me, it wasn’t essential to the bottom line, I could use it to buy things or I could set fire to it and watch it burn, I could throw it away! I was in my early twenties.
How could I have retreated so far? Twenty dollars is essential to the bottom line these days.
I guess you just do what you have to and soldier on. But it is hard. Hard. Hard.
In other words, nice phone conversation with You Know Who You Are and when I met with B to parse over the weekend’s work on the Campbell novel, I found myself thinking, “Not only don’t I love this guy, he doesn’t even particularly interest me” – which made me kind of sad. Being in love infuses one’s life with meaning somehow. Without that meaning it’s just lockstep for-ward march! Love elevates, love ennobles.
I’m still filled with a kind of bitterness that after all Ben did to me, he got the soft landing, the plump little human partridge Jayne LeGro to sew on his buttons and groom his feathers while I have to soldier on in isolation with absolutely no one to help me – though I do have many people rooting for me and I’m grateful for that. I suppose this has to do with the relative dearth of men in our advanced age cohort, the relative abundance of women. She was desperate – after all, she’d been hoarding his poetry since high school! No doubt this is all her dreams come true.
And yes, it is odd that I brood more over the woman who replaced me then the man who left me.
You Know Who You Are talking about something unrelated remarked yesterday, “I’m fifty-seven years old. I just can’t start everything over again from scratch.”
But, of course, that’s exactly what I’m having to do. Is there any nobility to it at all? Or is it totally ridiculous because it's just more evidence of my supreme lack of anything even remotely resembling common sense?
