I am Soooooo Together…

Okay, so in the middle of all this I’m testing out PicMonkey – an awesome photo editor – and this is my first try. Bear with me…

I spent the morning like Edvard Munch’s The Scream. I have a new computer (a blog post for another day) and I can not make anything work. First, the fonts keeps changing dizzyingly, from normal to the size of a Times Square billboard. The icons scatter and shapeshift on their own, like some naughty poltergeist is playing “Find the Monkey” on my screen.

So I go to the internet to join a community of disgruntled HP users, all demanding the answer to my question. How do I make my laptop stop pitching and rolling, before I have to pop a Dramamine? It seems some technical genius decided to set the ever popular “Pinch Zoom” as the screen default. The disable button is embedded in a labyrinth of dropdown menus and I click it with righteous self-satisfaction. I ask you, who will miss this feature? Will anyone write in, annoyed and asking how to set their screen so that it is impossible to finish a document or search Facebook or write a Tweet, because the pictures and letters are expanding and contracting like Alice after the EAT ME pills?

It isn’t finished when they transfer the data…

With a new computer, every password that was stored is vapor. In order to get onto previously pushbutton sites, I am required to excavate from my brain, strings of letters and numbers such as Marebluegrass43$$! (an unfathomable nod to a concert I went to five years ago and the price of admission), or some other time sensitive hooey I did not write down and store in a safe place.

It took two days to get into this blog’s administrator screen. The WordPress sign-in template did a “cute” little jiggle each time I entered the wrong password – impossible combinations of my children’s nicknames, the handles of dead pets, childhood street addresses and punctuation marks. Any attempt to contact “help” was met with more requirements – proof of forgotten user names, the addresses of emails most recently sent (conveniently housed on the  site I sought to access).

Photos must be remembered by the names I gave them years ago, like they’ve been thrown into a very large, expensive junk drawer. I have been mysteriously “upgraded” to Word 10. something… If I backspace, the computer hijacks the space bar and I watch in silent horror as it continues to erase all I have written.

Do you see where this is heading? I am staying at Kim’s for the weekend, and although Claudio is not here I did not want to alarm her by doing what I wanted to do – scream and scream and scream and throw my new, silver HP computer into a faux-finished wall and jump off a balcony. Instead, I did a rip-out-the-hair-with-both-hands, silent shriek, all-body-seizure pantomime, and  finished with a sad clown, dejected whimper.  And then I laughed and laughed and laughed… Think Yoko Ono at MoMA.

Ironically, just last night Kim said to me, “Mare – I think you are losing you in Waking Up the Ghost. Recently, you’ve been writing all about recovery, but not about Marilyn. I hate to say it, but you seem a little too together.”