#my first computer

Write about your first computer.#Dailyprompt by @WordPress The early 1990s was a time of technological advancements and growth in the world of personal computers. It was during this time that I took the leap of faith and bought my first computer. And I must say, it was one of the best decisions I have ever made. My first computer was a Macintosh Performa 550, also known as ‘Hook33’,…

At some point in my life, I decided that writing every day wasn’t part of my life. At some point in my life, I decided that anything I wrote needed to be perfect before it could be released to, let’s be honest, hardly anyone. At some point in my life, I started to write sentences that start with the same phrase and a comma and I’ve lost my train of thought.

Oh yeah.

Beyond just ignoring a facet of myself that brings me pleasure, I’ve found myself on many-a-sleepless-night feeling isolated and lost within my own brain. It’s like I decided that the only reason to write was to make other people happy. I mean that from the standpoint of both producing something “funny” or “enjoyable” for others all the way to making my bosses happy by producing something useful and worthy of a paycheck. 

So, don’t get wrong, I do write a lot. I just don’t write about anything that takes the tossy-turny-sleepless-night-thoughts out of my brain in an attempt to help me process my emotions or feelings. I am also allergic to emotions and feelings. Or rather, not the emotions or feelings themselves, but I’m allergic to…like…articulating them in an attempt to…like…be a fully realized adult human and stuff.

Instead, I (happily, mind you) write content based on heaps of nerdy research about marketing best practices. Or, I write emails that help me get a point across to a colleague. I write idiotic short-form burps of thoughts that come to me on the internet that provide, by and large, no real edification. 

When I was a little girl, after I stopped wanting to be a “valerina” (see this standalone attempt at writing from a billion months ago for context), I wanted to be a children’s book author. I was the only kid in elementary school that wanted to be a children’s book author over other pursuits like “mom”, “teacher” or “dinosaur”.

So, I got to work. I wrote every day. I mainly wrote stories about people with dying moms that also wanted glasses and braces (write what cha know, amiright?). I also wrote a lot of stories about cheerleaders that would get kidnapped, get Stockholm Syndrome, kiss hot kidnappers and then the uglier cheerleader would get murdered, but the prettier one would be ok and realize that being a brainwashed kidnapping victim wasn’t OK and go back to being a cheerleader (this particular ‘children’s book’ was called SILENCE because for a little while the main girl couldn’t talk or something).

In other epic sagas, I wrote a story called RUBY, HONEY, DAWN and AUDRINA, which was a multi-part series based in whatever-time-period ‘Little Women’ was set in because my grandmother bought ‘Little Women’ for me and I thought it didn’t have enough kissing or deceit in it. Honey, by the way, was totally just Amy March but kissed more people and was even more conniving. I think she poisoned someone, but I digress. The point being, I was a stifled, poor, Southern Baptist child with a really unstable home-life and writing was the place that I felt totally safe. 

When I was in third grade, my Uncle E.W., at the time a brilliant computer programmer living in Houston, invited my dad and me over to his house. He’d built a computer and wanted to give it to me. It is only now that I realize this wasn’t some throw-away gesture. When you’re poor, people give you stuff all the time. Food, clothes, shelter in some cases. It was a pretty common part of my life. [This is the sidenote where I point out that my parents were good people. My dad was incredibly hard-working and my mother was woefully disabled and I have hella baggage, but they’re weren’t bad people. Complicated? For sure. Anyway.] I think he knew that giving me that computer would mean more to me than anyone else. 

That evening, he taught me the basics of MS-DOS prompt. He taught me how to access the one or two games that were pre-loaded. The best part, though, was that he showed me the word processor and how to get to that part. There was no internet in MY day (ok, not until two years later when my naughty friend Ana’s mom got the internet. That journey into a loss of innocence deserves it’s own real estate here somewhere.). 

I went home and immediately lost myself in typing. I taught myself how to type. I made a regimented, personal schedule of sitting alone in my room practicing. I came up with a sentence that I determined was the best sentence to learn how to type really, really fast. Here it is:

“Jamie is very good at Little Red Play School”

I have absolutely no idea what that means and, admittedly, the more you type it, it takes on a hypnotic quality that is most-likely not healthy for a small child. There is now and never was a “Little Red Play School”, but for some reason as my weird, little fingers sailed across the super-clicky keyboard of that pity, charity computer — I was content. I felt happy. I felt powerful. I felt like I could do anything if I could just get “good” at the computer. I felt really fortunate because, even though I lived in a trailer in the middle of the woods, I had a computer. I felt rich and privileged just like all of my favorite characters in the history of characters [see: Beverly Hills Teens, Ursula the sea witch as Vanessa, Veronica from ‘Archie’, etc.].

A few years later, Uncle E.W. would have a heart attack. As with most Southern tragedies (also known in this space as “my childhood”), there was a dark twist! He didn’t die. Instead, he continued to live for many years. Only, the heart attack caused him to essentially ‘die’ for a moment and the result was that this, once brilliant and open-hearted and hilarious, vibrant man, had the mental faculties of a child. This event was absolutely heart-rending and unexpected. I don’t purport to feel the depth of that loss more than his wife or his children or his best friends, but I did quietly mourn it in my room. Alone. Typing as fast as I could.