It’s Monday again, and I’m using my laptop to write this post, after having used my phone all last week*.  It’s much faster and more natural for me to write on the laptop, of course, and it doesn’t tend to cause soreness in the base of my thumbs (since I hardly use them when I’m typing).  But of course, it has its disadvantages, too, the biggest being the computer’s weight.  Although it is a slender, small, 11 inch laptop, it’s still heavier than my smartphone—and I carry my smartphone with me even when I have my laptop.

Nevertheless, it’s not that heavy, and I would like to be in decent enough shape that simply carrying my laptop in my backpack along with other stuff makes no real difference.  If I ever mean to go on any long hikes, with a backpack full of clothes and supplies, I would hope the laptop would seem negligible.

Also, when I’m writing on the laptop, using Word, at least the autocorrect function of my phone doesn’t keep changing “its” to “it’s”.  I try to catch them all—like Pokémon, I guess, but much more irritating—but I’m not certain that I succeed.  It would be frustrating to find that I’d allowed a grammatical slip caused by the “smartphone” to go out when I was just using it out of laziness.  I guess it would be just deserts**, but still, I’d rather be hoist by my own petard for something I did myself, not something that was a poor consequence of an automatic, would-be spelling assistant.

Speaking of malfunctioning technology, I had a stressful morning yesterday.  I put my laundry in the washing machine, with soap and fabric softener as usual, and then…the machine didn’t turn on.  There was not so much as a flicker or blink of its lights.

I have to admit that I freaked out much more than was probably warranted, though I doubt that any outside observer would have been able to tell.  Evidently, my emotions don’t show much on my face, and apparently also not in my voice or my choice of words.  Inside my mind, I felt like I was going to rip into pieces from tension and stress.

Sunday is the only day of the week on which I do laundry, since it’s the only day of the week I’m certain to be at the house, and I’ve done it that way for years, now.  I also start my washing early, because I get up early, and the sooner I get it done, the sooner I can stop having to go out into the rest of the house where I might encounter my—perfectly pleasant—housemates and have to interact with them.

Anyway, I texted my former housemate and the owner each (knowing I would have to wait a while for their replies), while trying to brainstorm ideas for what might be the issue.  Of course, I checked (and reset) all the circuit breakers, and checked the locking mechanism on the machine, and all sorts of other obvious things.  I’m not sure any of that improved anything.  In the meantime I ordered a few new shirts and a new pair of pants and some underwear (I accidentally ordered the wrong size, though), and so on, just in case.

Meanwhile, faced with the prospect of not being able to do my laundry, I honestly wished that I would have a heart attack or a stroke or something like that, and that it would all become moot.

I didn’t, of course, have either of those things, as far as I can tell.  In the long run, between me and my former housemate and the landlord, texting back and forth in parallel conversations, I got the washer to work by stretching a very long combo of extension cords to an outside socket and doing what I think was a hard reset of the washing machine—after having left it unplugged for quite some time, starting it on rinse, then stopping, turning it up to “normal” wash while it was running.

Anyway, I got my laundry done, thank goodness.  I honestly think that, in my current state of semi-life, I would rather die than have to find a way to go and use a laundromat.  I’m not speaking hyperbolically, except perhaps in the mathematical sense in which I’m at the long tail of a hyperbolic function (such as y=1/x), asymptotically approaching zero.

Wouldn’t it be horrible to find oneself steadily and slowly getting closer and closer to zero, but at a slower and slower rate, so that actually to reach zero would literally take an infinite amount of time?  The horror of getting weaker and more depressed and more decrepit, and yet never being able to die, would be…well, quite obviously, a fate worse than death.  Of course, it’s entirely possible that such will be the fate of the universe itself on the longest of time scales, if the cosmological constant really is a constant and whatnot.  But that’s in a truly, very long time.  Hyperbole aside, I don’t imagine I’ll live long enough for that to be relevant, except as a matter of scientific curiosity.

Speaking of decrepitude, I’ve been trying to do some wider spaced pull-ups recently, rather than my usual, shoulder-width ones, because I thought it might help my back.  I think it actually may have been helping my back a bit, but unfortunately, an old injury to my left shoulder began acting up by the second iteration of those pull-ups, and has gotten worse, and that pain and soreness radiates down the whole arm in a sort of electrical feeling (not the good kind), reminiscent of “causalgia” which is a term that might not be in current use anymore.

In any case, this morning I went back to more usual width, but my shoulder is still acting up.  This isn’t too surprising; once triggered, that kind of thing can take a while to calm down.

In conclusion, my life is definitely not worth the effort.  It’s just a bad habit for me, at this point.  I don’t contribute anything of substance to anyone, probably not even to myself.  I’m stressed out to the point of near-suicidality by even minor things—like having to get up and go into the office.  But, as is often the case, bad habits are hard to break.  I mean to try, though.  I’ve been hoping for some way to wean myself off, and I still have hope for that, but I may need simply to go cold turkey***.

*Imagine what someone perhaps a century or so ago would have thought upon reading that sentence:  What?  You used your laptop to write something…a post?  And…sometimes you used a phone to write?  WHAT?

**There must be plenty of bakeries or ice cream shops or similar places that call themselves “Just Desserts”.  The sorts of people who make and sell sweets are definitely the sort to enjoy a nice pun.  I mean that as a compliment.

***Homer Simpson:  Mmmmm…turrrrkeyyy.