The good news is, my main computer works now.

The bad news is, William and I have no idea why.

William replaced the power supply, which was supposed to fix the problem. Lo and behold, it does the exact same thing it was doing with the previous power supply, namely turning on for just a second then immediately shutting down.

The funny thing is that when this problem first occurred, I was getting way less than that. In fact, I was getting ZZNN (zip zero nada nothing). Hence my immediately diagnosing it with a power issue.

But when William first came over to have a look, it was doing the flash on, flash off thing. We wondered how this was possible.

I said the logical explanation is that my computer has a mutant healing factor.

I’m such a card.

Anyhow, after the power supply swap, we were getting beep on OFF. William kept attempting to turn it on, which seemed futile to me.

So of course, because computers are more capricious and unpredictable than an irritated cat, it fucking worked.

So now the thing works, as far as I can tell. Maybe the mere acting of pressing that power button many times caused some computer doohickey to click back into place. Maybe the power supply WAS the problem, and the thing would have started working eventually even if we had done nothing.

Or maybe I had offended the Great and Mighty Gods of Computing, who rule the world from their lofty abodes in the mystical land of Palo Alto, and when it started working, it was because I had appeased them by bringing in one of their priests.

That would be you, William.

Who knows. It is a strange feeling to have a problem seemingly spontaneously solve itself while offering no possible explanation as to why. You are glad the problem is solved, but without knowing how, you have no idea if it will stay solved or not.

But anyhow, the good news is that the main computer works now, for now.

The bad news is that the Internet on it does not.

See, the end of our Super Long Ethernet Cable that is in my room has a problem. The little plastic tab on the Y-jack broke off ages ago, and it turns out that thing is kind of really super important, as that is what holds the plug in place.

Historically, we have solved this problem by sticking the plug into the Ethernet port on my computer then fiddling around with it till it connects.

And by “we” I mean “not me”.

You see, dear reader, one of the little foibles that make me so endearing is that I have very, very little patience with fiddling with things.

Normally a patient person, for some reason I pop a frustration fuse really fast when it comes with tiny details you have to just fiddle around with til they click.

That is part of why I have trouble editing my own work. Beyond basic proofreading and sentence structure improvement, editing involves a lot of fiddling work, and I get frustrated easily.

I also had the same problem when I was a kid. It’s why I hated anything like arts and crafts. For whatever reason, I just did not have the patience to deal with my own spatio-motor issues in order to overcome them, and so I could never get things even remotely right and whatever I made would end up a humiliating mess.

And I didn’t exactly need any more humiliation in my life, especially not during class, where normally I shined.

And the thing is, I didn’t know why these things were so much harder for me than they were for the other kids. And I was too young to be able to articulate the problem either. All I have is a very long history of my hands not being able to do what I want them to do, and thus there is much of everyday life that I either cannot do, cannot do well, or had to invent some sort of workaround to cope with.

From my adult perspective, it seems like it might at least be possible to learn to be lass of a maladroit with sufficient training and practice. After all, a dyslexic can learn to read. It’s just harder for them.

I hope that works for us “motor dyslexics” too. It could be that if I could just overcome this low frustration point, I could practice certain things over and over until my fucked up brain/hands/eyes work the whole thing out.

Or I can just continue to live my life needing others to do certain things for me because I am just too much of a spazz to do them myself.

Wonder which one I will pick.

Other than computer related issues, not much going on today. Gonna be social with La Gang tonight. Maybe we will go out to dinner, maybe not.

Doing our weekly dinner out on Fridays works because that way, Joe does not have to go to bed early in order to be up for work the next day.

On the other hand, on Fridays, Joe has worked all day, and is therefore tired.

Doing dinner on Sunday means Joe is all rested and perky.

But it also means he has to go to bed at like, 1 am. And for us, that is early.

To me, Fridays seem mildly superior. But I’m not captain of this boat. It sometimes seems like it because I often volunteer to make decisions when it seems like one needs to be made and nobody else wants to do it, but I am just another passenger on our little social vessel.

I just have a big mouth and am kind of pushy. But not in a “my way or the highway” assholish kind of way.

More like an encouraging, caring kind of pushing.

It can really suck to be the sort of person who really cares about getting things done sometimes, ya know?

I will talk to you all again tomorrow.

At least, it does so lately. (Siblings, you might wanna skip today’s entry. I talk about Mom and other deep scary stuff. )

Had therapy today. Nothing big went down. I told my therapist that I have my father’s address now, so I could totally send him a letter. But then we got on talking about how the really hard thing to do is confront the weak partner, the passive one, the one who could have helped but did nothing.

In other words, my mother. Might be different in your family. Probably not.

My mother is the one person who could have restrained my father’s rage at the dinner table, and beyond. She was the sane adult with children who were emotionally imperiled by her unstable and dangerous spouse, and in absolute terms, she should have been fighting for us the whole time.

Instead, we all learned to instinctively protect her. She was always so sweet and so fragile. Even today, I can’t imagine ever confronting her about the sort of childhood I had and her role in the abusive dysfunction of our unhappy home. I just can’t imagine upsetting her like that. I would feel like the worst person in the world if I hurt that sweet, sensitive woman.

Plus, I gather her health is not that great, and I would never do anything that might make that worse. (Don’t leave without me, Mom. I beg you. )

So whatever I might have to say to her, odds are it will never get said except perhaps in a letter that I never send. I can’t see a solution. For me, hurting her in any way is just plain unthinkable.

Like I have said before, she says she was a victim too, and she was. My father systematically dismantled her self-esteem and made her, a very intelligent woman with a professional career and a lot of responsibility at work, utterly dependent on him. He had her convinced that only he could handle the family finances, and so she could never leave him, obviously.

It can’t be easy to be married to Larry, four kids or no. I think, like a lot of abused wives, she just buried herself in her work and in looking after the kids, and treated Larry just like we kids treated him, namely doing her best to avoid him. It’s that old trick, dealing with something by not dealing with it.

Then there is my certainty that she was suffering from depression for a lot of my childhood. Something happened somewhere along the way and I think she just kind of gave up. She just went through the motions of life.

I find it odd that my siblings didn’t notice this. I sure did. But in a sense, Mom was my only friend when I was in elementary school, so I was closer to her than the others, at least till the zombie chill of her depression finally got through to me and I started leaving her alone, too.

Which, of course, left me totally isolated. I am positive there is a link between my depression and hers that goes far beyond mere genetic risk factors. I saw what happened to her, emotionally speaking, and internalized it.

Maybe all my frozen tundra exists within her as well.

It wasn’t all bad, though. I have fond memories of summers with my Mom, where she would be off work and there to be a Mom to us. I remember her taking the time to teach me things and stir my curiosity, and of course I will always treasure her reading all of the Narnia books, plus Huckleberry Finn and both Alice books, to me when I was a wee sprog.

It must have been fun for her too. Reading to wide-eyed little me, answering my occasional question when I didn’t understand something, doing all the voices for the different characters, my little red head soaking it all up in rapt awe.

And of course, like I have said before, I remember sitting with her at the family dinner table, in the kitchen, singing along to folk songs while she strummed her guitar, the very picture of Seventies familial bliss.

No wonder I have such intense Seventies nostalgia that it feels sometimes like a fever dream. No only was that the era of my most formative years, but things were a heck of a lot better for me back then. I had friends, Pat and Janet, and I had my family around me, far more supportive and attentive and less distracted back then, and things were just plain a lot groovier back then.

Everything changed for me when I went to school. Well, actually, the year before that, when Pat and Janet went off to school and so it was just me and the babysitter. That was the year I should have been in kindergarten.

But we’ve been over that.

So in my mind, it really does seem like the Seventies were the good times, and everything went to hell once the Eighties started. Think about it, I was born in ’73, which means I was seven in 1980. That means Grade II, and yup, by then my life was a hell of boredom and terror, utterly alone in a cold, cruel world.

Maybe it seems that way to my mother as well. It feels like in the Eighties, everyone got colder, more self-absorbed, more careerist, more grey and angry.

I know you won’t agree with that, Felicity, but it’s just my own impression.

The more I think about my childhood, the stronger the feeling of terrible wrongness gets. Nobody should grow up that isolated and abandoned, and my mother played her part in THAT as well.

She ignored me just like the others. I was inconvenient. They didn’t know what to do with me. So they did nothing.

After all, I was so meek and shy, it was like I wasn’t even there.

Sometimes I still feel like I am not even here.

Maybe I should pay someone to remind me I’m around.

I will talk to you again tomorrow, dear readers.