Randomness

I just sent off my shiny new laptop for unknown repairs because it kept restarting while I was working. It was my first Asus and it’s beautiful, but…beauty doesn’t help when it doesn’t work first.

I miss my old Sony Vaio laptops. I’ve been struggling to find a good one ever since. I’m typing this on my Lenovo Ideapad or Thinkpad, I can never remember which. It’s held up nice over the last five years or so, but when I tried to get another one it ran so hot when I first got it that I returned it immediately and bought a Dell laptop instead. Which also runs hot.

Which is why I swore I was going to go with a desktop for work this time around. And then I got suckered in by the Asus…

It cracks me up to think that I made it all the way through college and the first year at work with no computer at all and now between the cheap Macs I have for Vellum and a succession of laptops that haven’t quite died but needed replaced I have five working laptops.

Then again, a computer and internet access are pretty much my only must-haves for writing. Well, that and a good enough monitor for the non-fiction screenshots, but that pretty new laptop had that, too.

(But an annoying number pad. Sigh.)

I saw some hot take on Twitter yesterday that I’m refraining from commenting on. But seriously people, when people meet you halfway don’t keep moving the frickin’ goal post or they’ll just quit playing your game altogether.

I had an aunt like that. We did family game night for a bit and whatever the game was, she’d start playing, figure out how she could win if the rules were changed, and then preemptively change the rules so that she’d win. Trivial Pursuit suddenly became the first person who could get another pie, for example, when she was right on top of a category she was good at. Surprise, surprise, we stopped family game night pretty quickly after she started pulling that nonsense.

What else? That book that was frustrating me? Also had a Chekhov’s gun problem. The special book that her mother gave her that she dragged with her for no apparent reason, that her sister maybe noticed was missing, that she hadn’t read in ages, that was rescued from her room being demolished…in the end was never mentioned again. I was going to write a post about using something as characterization versus as a plot element, but I bailed on doing so. Sorry.

Basically if you want to show that your character is a reader, then have them constantly reading books you don’t specify. But if you call out one book in particular and give it a history and have it turn up more than once, it needs to be for a reason. IMO. YMMV. Etc. Etc.

I saw a bunch of different friends recently and I’m in this phase where I feel like a complete failure because of the path I stepped off of and where I would’ve been by now if I’d stayed on that path but at the same time I know I’m on a longer journey and exactly where I need to be to make that journey.

It’s a tricky place to be. Because there’s a part of me that wants to run back to the safety of that old path but I know I don’t want to take that path at all.

Which is part of the reason I am skipping my 15 year MBA reunion. I don’t need to be in a room with people who value and weigh others by their income, power, and influence because I have tried very hard to not put weight on any of those and being back in that environment would be destructive.

Not to mention my inability to avoid reacting to certain things these days. I’m pretty sure I have no chill left. I had to stop following that school on FB and getting their emails about their new published articles because there was a very specific slant to the articles they were publishing that were basically just opinion pieces not proven fact.

Haha. Ah well.

Hiding your opinions and controlling your emotions so no one sees them is a very upperclass thing anyway and that is absolutely not what I aspire to be these days. I need to find a way to have money so there’s no financial worries without actually being around the large majority of people with money.

Right. Yeah, that’s…easy to do.

Let me get right on that.