silva rerum

trippingly on the tongue

A few days ago, I star­ted a blog post and then my laptop froze. It’s been doing that quite a lot lately.

I’m going to throw it out into the aether here, but I’m won­der­ing if any­one can help me out with my intermittently-​freezing laptop? It’s an HP tx2524CA run­ning Windows 7 Professional 64-​bit. It doesn’t seem to have any rhyme nor reason to the freez­ing then crash­ing (often accom­pan­ied by a blue screen but not always). If there were a pat­tern, I might have figured out the dia­gnosis with some Googling but as of late, I’m utterly at an impasse. Help?

Back to my post. I was feel­ing an over­all para­lyz­ing feel­ing of dread, of inad­equacy of self-​awareness and (dare I sug­gest this?) the slight­est tinc­ture of self-​loathing. I resen­ted myself and pit­ied myself at the same time. I wanted to bemoan my sor­rows to the world, ima­gin­ing that, as the pro­verb goes, a shared sor­row would be half sor­row, a shared joy would be a double joy.

Experiencing tech­no­lo­gical fail­ure mit­ig­ated that pity party of a post. Why am I suf­fer­ing incon­sol­able mal­aise? I don’t know. It’s unlikely that I will fig­ure it out. But what’s import­ant is that I hitch myself by my boot­straps and get out of this hole.

That I’m always pressed for time isn’t some­thing new. I had chosen that path at the begin­ning of this school year. I don’t really have any­one to resent but myself. With that atti­tude in mind, I hope I can stop wail­ing over my per­ceived and sup­posed mis­for­tunes and focus upon get­ting things done.

Chin up and shoulders back! Let’s push on.

On, on, on, on, on! to the breach, to the breach!

So I have been rather neg­li­gent with this blog, I’ll admit it, mea culpa. I’ve made up sev­eral excuses to myself about this already – why blog when I use other things like Tumblr, Last​.fm, etc. ? Is there really any need?

And then I real­ise, of course there is. This is my scratch­pad. I’ll have to pre­face that meta­phor though.

I notori­ously vacil­late among pos­i­tions on things. Hesitant to think about decisions, loathe to make them. The track record is pretty clear – choos­ing to (not) go to IB, choos­ing Science over Commerce, etc. And I jus­tify them (the decisions, that is) to myself some­how, some­way later, post factum.

It all hap­pens in my head which is often a bewil­der­ing and con­fus­ing place. So I blog. It’s ridicu­lously mundane and pain­fully dull, but I’ve firmly con­vinced myself (for now) that there is a pur­pose, a tele­ology to all of this and I have to com­pel myself to begin again.

Of course, it doesn’t help that my laptop has broken down. I’ve reformat­ted a few times but the prob­lem still reoc­curs – I love my HP tx2500 but I think it’s on its dying days with some sort of hard­ware prob­lem. I’ve sus­pec­ted for a while that it could be the mother­board but my dad reas­ons that it must be the hard drive. At any rate, the RAM seems fine and it’s 2x2GB so if I can sal­vage them, I will.

It’s been odd, trans­ition­ing back to paper notes for classes. I guess I do listen a bit more, lack­ing the dis­trac­tions of the inter­net but at the same time, I fell as though I’ve been unplugged and am now lay­ing dormant. I’m not as updated with news and when I do find out, I’m cer­tainly not the first. I hardly play any games on Steam any­more, mostly because my desktop is old (but reli­able). This tech­no­logy detox may yet do some good.

Here is hop­ing that I can keep this writ­ing thing going.