printing out everything i have written since the year of our lord 2001 is starting to take its toll. my i-mac was one of the first off the line, teal and self-contained, so much so that it only has a cd-rom drive. no disk drive or exterior help of any kind. i have not hooked it up to the internet. and so my i-mac and i are adrift on this lonely raft with no provisions and i am thinking about eating it. or maybe just throwing it overboard so i don't have to watch it staring at me with that eerie teal glow anymore.

i have all these rough drafts of stories and final drafts and lists of ideas and a journal blah blah, and there is no way to transfer the information to any other os. so i am printing out a copy of everything on my hard drive, scanning it, and then filing it in a real live folder that coincides with a virtual folder in my runty teal box. when chris builds me a new computer, i will have to make a decision about whether or not i should RETYPE all of that crap into the new machine, or if i should just let most of it go and re-enter, say, only the good stuff or what.

so far, the only thing worth reading in my journal was that i referred to a friend of my ex-husband as having a "chum-bucket personality." that's it. three years of forcing myself to record the minutiae in my life and that's indeed all that it is. excrutiating minutiae. there's no way to make any of it interesting although there's maybe a brief flash of interest in that chum-bucket remark. but how can you use that more than once? you can't really.

but so anyway, i'm only into about hour three of this tedious process and i'm bored out of my mind, filing activity nonwithstanding. so i pull the plug and crawl into bed with my bill bryson book and fur pillow and almost immediately begin to drool and make asthmatic snorkling sounds as i dream of tossing the computer with all of the crap inside over the side of my raft.