Ten minutes on a Windows based laptop is a form of hell. I should’ve gone to the garage to retrieve the laptop, but it is dark down there, and I am home alone, and I have been listening to a lot of Stephen King. So instead I sit in my kids’ room swirling with nostalgia and a growing sense of disappointment as I watch the words I typed moments ago slowly take shape across this tiny screen.
It turns out I’m a mac guy.
I guess it started back in college when the mac was still a rectangular box with a cathode face and a mouth you could insert mini floppy disks into. I fed the school mac disk after disk, always making sure I had a fresh disk less my files get corrupted and I lose all my writing. It only happened once, but that once was lesson enough to make sure it never happened again. Back then the English department was spread across two buildings–the oldest ones on that part of campus. Even then I knew there was a stigma about English. It was a dead-end area–something that bore no connection to the real world job market. Hell, even acting had a public face to it. We’d walk across the street and watch movies and know that the musicians and the actors all had somewhere they could dream to go and go big! We writer’s didn’t have any of that. The Lit and Comp-Rhet people had it worse. I could, at least marginally, say I could be the next Neal Stephenson. They could say they would get a job somewhere in Academia.
The knowledge that our profession was to stay behind the walls of academia bonded us all in a way. We settled into the idea of the college life and dreamt it would be like this even when we were old. The professors were in on the joke too. They sometimes threw parties or had one of us house sit, all leading to a sense of place and belonging within the collegiate system. I think that is why I ended up teaching in the end. It just felt familiar and expected.