A couple of weeks ago, I slipped and fell into a bathtub full of water.Normally, this would not be a big deal to anything except my pride, and since no one but my cat was watching, I think I was safe on that one. But my abject, unrelenting gracelessness resulted in tragedy, due to the fact that I'm a little too ADD to even take a bubble bath without having something to distract my brain.
Let's step back and get a handle on the situation. I take an incredible amount of bubble baths. Enough so that I'm surprised I'm not permanently shriveled into a sad little old lady prune. No. Whatever number you're picturing, I take way more baths than that, every single week.
Some people collect rocks. Some, stamps. Some, useful, less depressing things, like maps, or types of forks, or something. Me? I collect books, and bath salts. I have a running set of bath soaps, salts, mixes, lathers and creams. My current favorite is a lilac salt mixed with a bubbling soap called "rainforest leaves," or some equally unhelpful, cryptic thing like that.
Anyway. When I take baths, I set up my little adorable Dell Netbook, Roland, on a chair beside the edge of the tub. I mix myself a drink (grapefruit juice and seltzer water - don't laugh, it's not as retarded as it sounds), turn off all the lights, start a movie and sink into this blissful, wonderful-smelling concoction of steaming water and soap.
Or, at least, I used to. A couple weeks ago, I had this arrangement all set up. "The Simpsons" was playing on my Netbook, and I was stepping into the tub.
Then I slipped, and the world ended in the resulting tidal wave.
It was like little Roland knew his time had come. Looking back, I can't remember whether the poor little guy shorted out before or after the water engulfed him. It is, in my mind, a moment frozen in time, with my mind screaming one long, uninterrupted, needlessly dramatic cry of negation as I fell. Then the wave hit, and Roland, in one bright white flash, went black. Right in the middle of this one kind of awesome commercial. (Now, whenever I hear Adrian Brody sing, a quick pain flits through my heart and, if I'm wearing a hat, I feel like taking it off in memory of the fallen.)
The next day was a Tuesday. For you, that probably is just the day that follows Monday. For Avalons, it's the day when class goes on for eight and a half never-ending, uninterrupted hours. Have you ever tried to sit through an anthropology seminar that, instead of having a point, is just three hours of a biological anthropologist and a southwestern archaeologist talking somewhat creepily about how awesome they are? Yeah. I didn't think so. You need a computer to survive crap like that, so your brain has somewhere to go hide from all the BS.
But refuge was not to be had for my mind that day. I sat through eight and a half hours of class without any distractions. No Demotivational, no Failblog, no Penny Arcade. Just my brain and the professors' voices.
I took incredible notes. Two awful, actual attention-paying days later, I bought a new laptop, and caught up on my webcomics.
But then I started thinking about how heavily I rely on technology to get through every day. I take my computer everywhere (now, a luscious, brand-new MacBook Pro named Sidney, that cost almost as much as my car), and I text literally hundreds of times every day. I'd sooner go without my pants than my phone, and I'm pretty sure I flat-lined for a few minutes every couple of hours I went without a laptop.
I wonder what we'd all do if we suddenly had to actually talk with one another again.
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I won't ever be a cornerstone.
