by Linda Rodriguez
When I was miserably sick just
recently, I started re-reading Virginia Woolf's letters for comfort
and delight. (No, I'm not afraid of Virginia Woolf, nor should you
be. The title of that play by Albee was a terrible canard. She's one
of the most readable writers ever and a fabulous role model for women
writers, but that's another blog post.) Virginia (we've long since
become BFFs, even though she died before I was born) is a gossipy,
humorous correspondent and makes great fun of herself (along with
others, usually famous), so there's a lot in her letters about her
sloppy writing and the blotches caused by the nib of whatever dip or
fountain pen she was using that day or about how lazy and awful she
was for typing a personal letter. She also gets a lot of laughs out
of describing her mishaps while printing (in the day when each letter
had to be set individually by hand and a sudden bump could knock the
whole tray of type to the floor entailing picking up and sorting all
those tiny t's and i's). I've been having so much fun with her
letters that I've continued dipping into them just before bed after
long, long work days. (I completely read and ranked over 40 poetry
book manuscripts in five days to finish up several postal bins I've
been working on for a contest and meet a deadline.)
As luck would have it, my laptop
started showing some possibly ominous symptoms of decline. Now,
long-time readers of this blog will remember the hell I went through
some years ago when my dog broke my laptop's hard drive, and I
discovered my husband had “borrowed” my jump drive and lost it,
as well as the external hard drive we'd used to back up the computer.
(To be fair, he did eventually find the big external hard drive
months after the emergency was over.) Then the brand-new laptop
bought to replace it crapped out on me within two months, so I had to
wait for the company to try repairs and then give up and send me a
new laptop. Consequently, I was not inclined to wait around until my
laptop gave up the ghost (even though I had everything backed up
twice to external drives and to the cybernetic cloud, as well), and
since a good laptop deal had just shown up in my inbox from the
company that made my other laptops—reader, I bought it.
What this has meant, however, is that
I've had to set up a new computer and transfer everything I want from
the old one, all while feverishly working to meet multiple deadlines
(the poetry contest was only one). Almost always, one of my two sons
has done this for me in the past. The oldest has his own very
successful computer consulting business with major university clients
around the country. (Why didn't I go into engineering and computers
when I was young? Oh, yeah, the first PCs didn't show up until that
oldest son was already in school.) The youngest one is an academic,
but a tech-meister, even if his Ph.D. is in medieval English lit. The
oldest was out of town, working at Stanford, and the youngest has
just been made dean at his university and is embroiled in the budget
for the humanities division and can't really spare the time since
he's facing a tight deadline, as well.
So here I am, trying to uninstall all
the memory-hog programs I don't want that came with Windows 10 (I am
emphatically not a game person so why won't you let me take
Xbox off my laptop?), so I can install the things that I want, like
Scrivener, Evernote, Dropbox, my daily planner. Here I am trying to
find and download the right driver for my laser printer, which is a few years old
but reliable. (What do you mean, you don't make that model's driver
available any longer?) Here I am, trying to create the recovery media
you told me to make, Microsoft—without telling me I would need a
16G flash drive that was empty and couldn't be used for anything
else, even if it had extra capacity, until I got into the middle of
the process that I had to go to a website to find. (I mean, honestly,
the geeks who designed all this might have tons of empty 16G flash
drives lying around, but I've only got two little 2G ones for taking
files to be printed at Kinko's or something, one empty 8G and one
almost-full 8G that I use for quick back-ups of things I'm working
on, one 64G flash drive that's my permanent back-up flash, and one
half-full 90G external hard drive for ultimate back-up, and I suspect
the average non-paranoid-of-hard-drive-failure person doesn't have
nearly that many!)
And I still haven't really begun
transferring files, of which I have many, many, many. I'm a writer,
remember? That's what I do—write.
I've suddenly become nostalgic for the
splotchy dip pen and crotchety hand-set type of Virginia's day. I
mean, Shakespeare never had a computer—or flash drive or printer
driver or software package—and no one's really outdone him yet,
have they? I think the secret must be the scroll and quill pen.
That's what I want!
(And no, I wouldn't really give up my
new little, featherweight, PURPLE laptop with the 10-hour battery for
anything. I even wrote and posted this blog on it.)
