Substitute Writer
(Writing • Kids)
I was going to write a clever post about cranky old men trying to figure out the subtleties of Twitter and Facebook, all tied together under the headline “An Anti-socialist’s Guide To Social Media.” But I got distracted because there is so much crap piling up on top of, underneath, inside and surrounding my desk that I can’t get the smallest task completed and so I am going to write about that instead.
It all started with a really swell new D-Link router that should’ve been a snap to set up but was not. As I fiddled with approximately 150 possible variables that could’ve been causing my problem, I became increasingly agitated and impatient, and was searching through stacks of software CDs and looking for a longer piece of cable and knocked over a drink just exactly like I warn the kids not to do, set up too near a scanner and phone and USB hub. Soda was about to pour all over everything, so I just shoved stacks of Unidentified Crap Species toward the back of the desk.
Got that all sopped up, cured the router/networking issues, went to bed.
The next morning, the impact of what I’d done hit me: There’d been a tectonic shift in my desk landscape. Yesterday I’d recognized every peak and nook of every pile. Today it was an entirely unfamiliar crap mountain range.
Lots of things are missing, but the most crucial is the tiny 2-inch-square lithium battery charger for my camera. Gone with the coke. Which makes every. Picture. Exceedingly. Precious.
Either I find that charger, or I have to go to Worst Buy, a geek store run by teenagers (with no idea what I need, but plenty of incorrect assumptions) and buy another. That would mess up a perfectly good day, if I were having one. On the other hand, the only way to avoid that retail fate is to clear out every last piece of crap from my office. That will take approximately nine days, if I devote three hours a day to the task (or 27 hours if I work straight through, but that’s not happening). And that assumes I didn’t already throw the battery charger in the wastebasket along with the soda-soaked phone book and secret password list.
My daughter spent the weekend with her grandparents so that I could swear at my desk properly. About three hours after she got back, she decided to show me the great picture she had drawn over at Nana’s house. Only after turning her world upside down, she discovered she had left it behind with her Nana. She spent the next 45 minutes stomping around and declaring “I want my drawing back,” in a very whiny voice. I tried to coax her toward Reason, but she said she could not get her head to focus on any other thing. Finally, I had to revert to something more resembling a threat.
Did she not know that when her head only thought of sad and futile things, no happiness or productivity could leak through her brain-pan? Did she not know that when her mother and I heard her declaring only sad and futile thoughts, that it made us feel sad and futile? Did she not know that she had a responsibility to the whole family to keep them on the upside of futility?
Granted she’s only 5, but could she not discern that I required extreme quietness in order to achieve the proper state of being pissed off about that AWOL lithium battery charger?
Kids.
→ B.Dunn, Oct 12, 2009, 11 02 am
