Serendipity
Googling
I must be the luckiest person in the world to have survived a major laptop disaster and come out not only with an undamaged machine but also with my sanity intact (well, sort of). You see, my precocious one year old daughter, Ripley, decided to do me a favor by "cleaning" my laptop; gleefully dousing it with half a glass of water when I wasn't looking. After my split-second shock, I was torn between whipping my daughter and weeping, but decided that the proverbial belt and tears will have to wait. So I did some emergency troubleshooting by turning the laptop off, wiping the keypad, pulling the plugs (and whatever else I can pull out like the battery, CD Rom, etc.), and flipping it upside down to drain the nasty spill.
Apparently, I must have done something right because when I had my laptop checked the next day, miracle of all miracles -- it was still working! Of course, prior to this harrowing experience, I didn't know squat about laptop or computer troubleshooting. But thanks to an extra PC in the house, I was able to do some research before I brought it to the repair shop.
Typing "laptop spill" on the google search engine, I got 892,000 pages of tips, forewarnings and personal accounts of similar disasters from laptop owners. Although my googling resulted to insomnia (who could sleep after reading these on google: "How to Clean Up Keyboard Spills -- eHow.com: If you've had a bad spill, it might be easier to buy a new one than take the time to clean one"; "Saving Your Laptop after a Spill: Yahoo! Tech -- Water, coffee, and soda are among your laptop's worst enemies"; and "How To Clean a Spill on Your Laptop -- Time is very important and you have to be prepared to work quickly to tidy up a spill to protect your laptop from further damage"?), at least I knew what to expect: 1) a new laptop; 2) a laptop that could still work but with the help of a USB keyboard; and 3) eternal damnation because -- tadaa! -- I had no back up files (and we all know what that means).
But, as luck and the hand of God would have it, my insomnia paid off. My laptop was given a clean bill of health and I'm now happily tip-tapping away on its unscathed keyboard. Well, I guess this has made me once again believe in the power of miracles, IBM and technology.
And speaking of technology, I would have to go back to the wonders of googling. The other day I had a narcissistic attack and decided to google my name (what can I say, vanity is my favorite sin). After typing different variations of my name on google, I was surprised to know that one of my Serendipity articles was being used as a topic in a discussion forum-type website against feminist inspired misandry. My reactions ran the gamut from intrigued, amused, to weirded out. I mean, who wouldn't be when complete strangers from all over the globe where discussing something that I wrote and speculating about my persona. They were discussing my marital status, the possible reasons behind why I wrote the article (it was about men by the way -- hey, the website is all about anti-misandry, after all), etc., etc. It just felt so weird reading stuff and comments about me and my work written and made by complete strangers. Did I feel offended? Maybe a wee bit; not because they wrote anything offensive because they didn't, but because I felt "exposed" somehow. The problem with being a writer is that you can never alienate or delineate yourself from your work. What you write automatically becomes what you are (yes, even if you're writing about 3-headed monsters). Oh, well, this is the price we pay for being online 24/7 and exposing ourselves to the "hunters" of the wild, worldwide web.