Well, against my prior intention, I’m writing this on my laptop today—meaning the laptop computer.
God, why can’t I just accept the fact that “laptop” is obviously a word referring to the computer on which I’m writing this, not the top of my personal lap as part of my body when in a particular configuration? Surely, every person with the savvy to read this online knows what I mean when I say that I’m writing this on my laptop. At the very least, it is extremely unlikely that they don’t.
And if, by bizarre chance, people are reading this some decades or centuries after it was written, and laptop computers are no longer a common item, or no longer exist at all, there will probably be scholars who will put little annotations in to tell those future readers what we meant back in this era by “laptop” when we’re referring to writing on something. It’ll be like those side notes when one is reading Shakespeare, notes that let everyone know—who doesn’t already—that “bodkin” for instance, as used in Hamlet’s soliloquy, means dagger, and thus, someone making his quietus with a bare bodkin is killing himself with a dagger.
Somehow, though, I have a terrible time not clarifying that I mean “the computer” when I refer to my laptop. There’s an actual tension, a feeling of significant stress involved. I suppose some might call it an anxiety, but that doesn’t feel quite like the correct term. I don’t really feel worried or in any sense scared or threatened, not even at a social level or whatever it might be. I feel as though it would be wrong not to clarify when there are multiple meanings of the word “laptop”, in case someone might have the bizarre misunderstanding that I’m writing on the top of my actual lap.
It’s pretty stupid, and it really gets to me sometimes. It makes me want to peel the skin off my head by grabbing my hair and pulling my scalp apart, it’s so frustrating.
To be clear, I don’t really want to do that. I don’t know, frankly, that I would even have the strength to do it, since skin is tougher than it seems, and also the skin of the face, at least, is pinned down to the underlying tissue by an intricate and interwoven network of tough fibrous tissue*, causing it to follow the movements of the facial muscles, allowing expression (a resource often wasted on me).
Though, of course, the scalp is much more loosely held to the skull and tissue under it, so that part would be peelable if one were strong enough to make the initial split.
I’m not really that tempted to try, but when I get so tense and stressed out (I almost wrote “sense and tressed out”) I can imagine myself reaching up to grab the sides of my head by the hair and yanking steadily, and it feels as though it would be some form of release.
It’s a bit like slapping oneself in the face when one does something stupid—though in that case, I do actually slap myself in the face. The trick is to do it hard enough that you actually get a real punishment for your own stupidity and thus might actually learn something. It’s not quite as intense as banging one’s head against a wall or against one’s desk (which I also do when I’m stressed out enough), but the latter is not really so much a punishment as it is just a way of trying to overwhelm stress with pain.
Or, well, it’s something like that. Even as I wrote that, I realized it didn’t quite seem like an accurate description, or at least not the full answer. Sometimes I think it’s just a form of giving in to my desire to lash out when I’m very stressed, but to do so against the only person I have a right to harm. I’ve at times given myself actual swollen, black and blue (initially subcutaneously red with extravasated blood) marks on my forehead, but usually it’s not that bad.
I don’t want to give myself a concussion or anything, after all. My brain is dysfunctional enough, and I don’t want to lose the few good things it can do. There are other ways I can hurt myself when necessary.
Speaking of the good things, I keep trying to get myself back into writing fiction or something, maybe, just to see if it makes me feel any better, which it had a tendency to do in the past. That’s a minor part of why I decided to bring my laptop today (the other laptop is with me whenever I sit down, so it requires no effort to bring it). But I don’t know; I can’t feel any excitement or anticipation about HELIOS or Changeling in a Shadow World, or DFandD, or Outlaw’s Mind, or any other stories, and I certainly don’t think anyone else is excited about the prospect of those stories being written, either.
I don’t know what to do**.
As usual, of course, I have written much more quickly on the laptop computer than on the smartphone, which should come as no surprise. But I don’t know if it has any effect on my style, or on how good a post comes of it. I would welcome your evaluations, of course, but I know it’s hard to judge from one instance. It may be a better or worse post than usual for reasons that have nothing to do at all with my choice of tools for writing it. There are too many variables at play.
A reasonably controlled experiment could be done, with me writing a long series of posts, randomly (perhaps) alternating between smartphone and laptop and asking readers to evaluate each post for quality without knowing which kind the post was. But that would be far more trouble than it’s worth, and I don’t mind subjective and non-rigorous impressions, if anyone wants to give them in the comments below.
I don’t really have much more to say today. I just feel stressed and tense and frustrated and angry and just…squeezed by reality. I feel almost as if there’s some metaphorical, inverted mountain suspended above me that I have to hold up or it will crash down and, I don’t know, bury me, crush me, impale me on its peak…something like that. I don’t think it will harm anyone else; there’s no one else for my collapse to harm, really, certainly not in any deep way. So far, I’m just holding it up out of habit, and because people will say that “you’ve got to try to hold on” or things along those lines. But it’s tiring and it’s stressful and it’s wearing me out at the same time that it’s pissing me off.
Anyway, this is all pointless. Sorry to waste your time. I hope you haven’t been too disappointed. And I also hope you have a good day.
*The skin of the palms of the hand and the working surface of the fingers is even more tightly and intricately bound to the underlying tissue; this contributes to the way one’s fingers wrinkle up when your hands soak in water for a while. The soles of your feet and bottoms of your toes are similarly tacked down, though it serves a slightly different “purpose” there. Dissection of the palms to look at the underlying muscle and tendons and so on is a laborious process in Gross Anatomy class. Ditto with the face.
**Am I always in the dark, living in a powder keg and giving off sparks? Probably not. That was a pretty good song, though, wasn’t it?