Free Write Friday: The Three Little Pigs

There was a time when I was a little kid that I had a terrible fear of something bad happening to my house.  A hurricane would come and blow us all away.  A flood would carry the house out to sea.  There would be an earthquake, and the house would fall into whatever dark abyss was down there in the huge crack that would appear, taking us all with it.  There would be a tremendous avalanche and the house would be gone forever (or at least until Spring) covered in tons of snow.  A fire would come and consume the house, burning us and all our stuff in a gigantic ball of flame.

This fear was right up there with my fear of the Thing that lived under my bed.  I thought I might be able to avoid the Thing by lying very quietly right in the middle of the mattress, because if I were still enough, he wouldn’t know I was there.  Besides, his arms weren’t long enough to reach me if I were dead center.  But I could think of no remedies to the house disaster I knew was coming.  The only thing I could come up with was to live in a brick house.  Of course, my opinions about architecture didn’t carry much weight with my parents, who were just fine with the wood frame house we called home.  I knew in my heart that they were being terribly short-sighted, but there was little I could do about it.  I could only hope that I would survive their naiveté until I was old enough to have my own house, which would, of course, be brick. 

This fear was worse at night, because everybody knows that bad stuff always happens when you aren’t paying attention and least expect it.  I knew we would all be sleeping soundly in our beds when disaster struck, helpless to fend it off and unable to escape before we met our doom.  Needless to say, my sleep was often fitful.  I was plagued by nightmares hot with flames, cold with snow, dark and deadly in the center of the earth. 

My parents were so concerned about the frequency with which I awoke terrified,  screaming, hot and sweaty (or cold and shivering, depending), and crying hysterically, that they took me to the doctor.  His diagnosis? Growing pains. Please. I knew better. We were going to perish in our house, soon to be destroyed in some cataclysm.  Of course I was not sleeping well.  If only someone would listen.

It was a terrible period in my childhood.  And I blame the three little pigs.

Free Write Friday: Technology

I have already confessed to being a technology junkie. Today Velvet Verbosity has prompted me to question whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. 

As I begin this exercise, I am caused to turn to technology over and over.  I do not have a timer, so I went to the calendar software on my computer and set its alarm for fifteen minutes.  I have never been a typist, so I would be in real trouble were it not for the spell check on my word processing software.  When the timer goes off, and I have used up my time allotment, I will clean this up and post it out there somewhere in cyberspace – and to think too much about that makes my brain cramp – where all of you can find it.  And then I will put a comment on VV, also out there somewhere, to give you an easy road map to the other somewhere the blog lives.  And none of this would have happened at all were it not for my ability to bumble about like a vagabond in cyberspace.  I wandered “out there” looking for people like me, people who had similar interests, and perhaps different takes on them.  And that led me to VV.

Good or bad?  Well, were it not for technology, I would have a world around me that was much smaller.  My wandering about would perhaps lead me to a reading group at the library, where some might be writers and most probably would not.  I might take a writing class at the community college, but I think finding a kindred soul there would be unlikely.  It is possible that over years, I would eventually find people like VV and all of you with whom to share this interest in putting words down on paper  (oh, wait, there’s no paper involved).  I would type this on a typewriter (oops, technology again) or put pen to paper.  There would be far fewer words laid down within the 15 minutes, and most likely they would have to be retyped or rewritten to correct the misspellings and sentence fragments and just plain tortured language.  Then I might put the finished product into an envelop and mail it to VV, but none of you would likely ever see it.

So far, for me, anyway, it’s all good to have this technology I enjoy. 

Has it somehow changed our minds?  Sure, no doubt.  But is that change bad?  Speaking for my mind only, I don’t think so.  My mind is no different (OK, yes, older and hopefully wiser) than it was in the 1970s, except that it has more daily “experiences” than were possible back then.  It “knows” more people, and has access to so many more points of view.

Am I addicted to my machines, and unable to think without them?   I don’t think so.  I still spend a good deal of quiet time just thinking.  I still read books the old fashioned way (though, that being said… as I write this, my husband is reading the morning newspaper on a Kindle).  I still enjoy actually facing human beings and having a conversation with them.  I still on occasion use a pen or pencil and paper.  I still capture the world around me in ways other than words on the computer, using my camera (oh, oh, it’s digital and the images residing on my computer rarely make it to paper.).

And, alas, my computer just told me, “times up!”  Bossy machine.

Post exercise note:  There was no way I could post this without cleaning it up first.  It was unintelligible.  I did not “edit” it, per se, but did run spell check to translate it into English.

After spell check, my cyper-person comes across here as reasonably well-groomed and  appropriately  dressed (never mind how I am really dressed; one of the other benefits of technology is the ability to write at home in my bathrobe!).  Before, it “looked” more like a disheveled and tattered ne’er-do-well from a foreign country.  Thank you, Technology, for making me presentable to go out in public.