Some days I think I’ll just join the Peace Corp

Today was one of those days where I swear I’m going to join the Peace Corp. Everything has gone wrong: I started work early this morning (6:30 a.m.) because I had a lunch date with my friend, Clare, and our former client, Tonya. I was really looking forward to it and wanted to get everything done before I left.

Things were moving along nicely, and I was in the middle of a story about the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra when my keyboard locked up.

This has happened to me before: If you hold the “Shift” key down for more than 8 seconds, a box pops up that asks you something about a Filter Key: “Do you want to [ ] Cancel [ ] Continue, or [ ] Frickin’ Abort” or something, I don’t know. Anyway, I hit the wrong answer and the next thing I know the cursor won’t move and the keyboard is totally locked up; it only beeped at me when I tried.

I thought, Oh, CHRIST! MUST I deal with THIS right now?? I tried doing what I normally do: Shut everything down, turn off the computer, start it up again, and hope like hell it works.

It didn’t.

I called my husband from upstairs. “Art, can you please come down here a minute?” He tried to fix it by doing that thing where you restore everything to a certain date, but for some reason, that wouldn’t work either.

By 8:30 I was a maniac, screaming into a pillow so the neighbors wouldn’t hear me (“WHY do these things HAPPEN to me…WAAAHHHH!”) and call the police. At 9:00 Art said he’d take the computer in and have Mike, the IT guy at his office, fix it.

So we unplugged everything (another pain), and Art took the computer upstairs and put it by the back door.

In the meantime, I remembered I had a job to turn in. So while he was in the shower, I went upstairs, brought the CPU back down, replugged everything back in and sent the job off. (Another problem—since I couldn’t type, I couldn’t key in the person’s name or write a message. So had to send it to someone else in her office as a Reply to an old email, then call her and explain the whole thing!!!)

Anyway, I did that, then unplugged it all again, brought it back upstairs, then brought Art’s laptop downstairs to use for the day. I got it set up with my email system (more hassles) and did some writing with the files I had available to me.

At 11:00 Art called to say Mike had fixed my computer. But by then, I had cancelled my lunch (I was in no mood) and decided to just go pick up the rotten miserable thing and come home and work. On the way there, I turned on NPR and Diane Rehm was interviewing a woman from Holland, Michigan (!) named Deborah Rodriguez who had started a beauty school in Afghanistan and written a book about it (“Kabul Beauty School”).

It was a fantastic story, one that was perfect for me to hear at that particular moment in time because 1) it completely put my problems into proper perspective, and 2) it was a totally enjoyable show! I may have had a computer lock up on me this morning, but at least I am not a young newlywed Afghani woman who has been raped and therefore unable to prove my virginity to my husband and his family who are waiting outside the tent for the bloody rag to appear. (A real situation briefly discussed on the show.)

So hearing that show definitely started to change my frame of mind. But I was still kinda wiped out from the morning’s events. And when I got home at noon I realized I wasn’t in the mood to work, either; I needed to regroup and start the day all over again.

I called my friend Nancy, a peace activist, who met me at Honey Creek. We had lunch and a few laughs and by the time I left for home, I thought I was ok.

But I wasn’t. I got in the car and started crying. It wasn’t just the computer problems, or even the Afghanistan story; I had had some other emotional upheavals this week, too: my son didn’t come home when I thought he was going to and just last night I finished a book called “Lucky Child” by Loung Ung, about how she came to the U.S. at age 10 as a Cambodian refugee after half her family was killed by the Khmer Rouge. Incredibly awful.

So emotionally, I was a little raw; and by the time I got home, I definitely was not ready to pick up where I left off on my symphony story and pretend all was well.

And although I really felt like joining the Peace Corp at that point, I decided to drive down to Grand Haven instead.