Blue lappy
Today’s cuts came from opening an old laptop, one that is a gorgeous royal blue, originally a Chromebook, owned by my husband. He got it to carry with him to work. It streams video, but when Windows updated to 10 and then to 11, it didn’t have enough memory to update to those new operating systems.
My daughter is having trouble getting enough sleep. She has been waking in the morning and napping in the afternoon before going to work at 4 p.m. One way to get herself to sleep, she found, is to play restful visual novels. Where instrumental music works for me, she needs visuals. We both need to avoid words, even sung words, but while I can tolerate hymns sung, she needs no audio words at all. She’s set up her phone to connect to her large laptop. She starts a visual novel on the laptop and has the phone run it remotely through Steam, the game service. However, the phone isn’t most conducive to sleep. It pinged several times during our discussion of what she’s doing. I pointed out that she needs to disengage from social media: Snapchat, Instagram, Discord. As an illustration, I held the phone directly in front of her face while she lay there. She laughed.
I mentioned the setup I use to help me sleep; I have an old laptop in my bedroom. It lives there, with no social media connected. I can’t even write on my blog from that laptop; it doesn’t know my password. In consequence it’s mainly used for streaming Youtube videos quietly while I rest. I pay to get ads removed from Youtube; I have a sponsor block add-on which cuts the blather: “thank you for watching, this video was sponsored by… , like and subscribe for more, list of my patrons”. I set the laptop to low illumination and low volume. After the music starts I swivel the chair it’s sitting on so it faces away from me. I wear a soft beanie to cover my eyes and keep my head warm. My bedroom has only lace curtains which do not block light, so covering my eyes helps me sleep.
We talked about how using a phone involves holding it up, requiring more muscles and more therbligs to start and stop the visual novel. She asked if we still had Dad’s blue laptop, not the big dinosaur he took to Iraq, but the little blue one he got later. I told her yes, we have it. It was given to friends for online classes; they kept it for a while, lost the micro-memory disk I had put in it, and more importantly, lost the charging cable. So I got it out and tried her charging cable in it. My daughter’s cable works. It started. But it has so little memory available that she can’t install anything.
Partway through the process I felt a surge of weariness, mental ache and fatigue. This time I recognized it for what it was and stopped what I was doing. Instead I started writing here. The only way I have found to get through these grief bursts is to process them a little at a time. So thank you. Writing here helps.
We’re leaving now to drop off this blue computer at the used laptop store. They will recycle it.
