A Lackluster Apology

I wonder at my new self-sufficiency, coupled with an even greater exterior dependence. I've traded day-long and late-night email exchanges for a solid phone conversation once a day and a short note sometime in the afternoon. Somehow, I am still satisfied despite the less frequent and intense contact. Maybe the stolen weekends help more than I realized - the hourly update suddenly seeming less relevant, less vital (and yes, I exaggerate). But the flipside of this is that You suffer, You my reader for you see I have left my computer by the wayside in this technological upgrade. I'm fed up with slow page loading, finicky virus software, pained booting up and down - I have not yet plugged in my computer since the semester started. It sits nestled tightly in my computer bag with the power cord squeezed into a zippered pockets; other drives and discs and instructions crammed here and there into all sorts of compartments - zippered, mesh, velcro. The weight rests heavily against my trashcan (is there irony or symbolic truth here? or just convenience?) which, when empty, will tip over if the bag becomes unbalanced. I tell myself I like the extra desk space, the exercise of walking to the computer lab once or twice a day, freedom from the cell that my email often becomes these days, overflowing with departmental duties and plaintive students. Really, I don't want to crawl under my desk and engage in the frustrating task of passing a power cord and ethernet cable vertically through a small opening, fighting gravity, balancing them long enough to stand up and pull them up the rest of the way. No mean feat, I promise you, all for the sake of a cordless desk and the value of a surge protector. I am not sure when this sacrifice will become necessary - at some point there will be papers to write and powerpoint to manage and I will grow tired of the daily treks to keyboards that I fear will make me ill. Until then I fear this will be sporadic at best, the composition window a patient patio, waiting for a tea party in the spring.