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Laptops and Metaphors
I’m blessed to have a MacBook Pro that’s been my faithful laptop for about three years now. It has a 500-gigabyte hard drive, but now is loaded up with all sorts of stuff so there’s only 77.9 gigabits of space left—and I’m concerned about that. I’ve relegated most of my musical recordings and a lot of my photographs to a couple of external hard drives, so those are tucked away and safe now.
Only problem is that when I see that I only have that much space left, sometimes I feel like there’s a Chicken Little running around inside my brain repeating the phrase, “There’s no more space! There’s no more space!” all the while realizing that I’m being quite irrational in my thinking, yet quietly feeling the internal distress and slight panic that can be a consequence of this kind of thinking.
I think there’s a metaphor in here somewhere. Maybe because I’m getting older it subconsciously becomes a statement about how many more years I have before I have to—well, go on a long, long vacation, one where I don’t take any baggage at all, not even my body.
Maybe it’s one branch of the culturally sanctioned obsession that I have with things technological, and this laptop has become the heart of the operation. After all, I’ve written books, articles, and found anything I might be interested in via the Internet. Perhaps there’s some fear that as the space on my hard drive dissipates, I’ll be left without any means of doing these things.
Then there’s the phenomenon of Facebook, which has pilfered and diluted the meaning of “friend.” FB lets me know when Eldon has brushed his teeth, provided daily updates on Judith’s pregnancy, and what Thomas had for lunch, plus many other things I wouldn’t necessarily want to know about friends that exist mainly in a virtual reality community.
My relationship with my friends cannot possibly be encapsulated in this kind of format but is best nurtured through regular contact via phone, email, or when the opportunity presents itself, face to face. Yet maybe I’m lying to myself and I’ve grown accustomed to both the mundane announcements and the occasional gems I find posted on my wall and don’t want to see that disappear. Hmm. Interesting that it’s called a wall, which can be taken a couple different ways.
Maybe it’s a metaphor for my connection to the world, with the ability to know what’s going on anywhere on the planet via the various newscasts that portray all of the scary things that are going on in the world. What if I didn’t know about all these calamities that are taking place? Would I lose touch completely and go into some forbidden zone of isolation? All because I ran out of space on my hard drive?
The external hard drives I use to store the overflow are perhaps a way of saying that it’s best to clear out my life from time to time. Store my stories in memory, but don’t let them crowd out the more current moment, where the heart of the matter is, aka my laptop.
And maybe there are no metaphors in this but just something to ponder and write a blog on. No matter, I’m going to play my guitar, have a glass of wine, and write some more.
