I stared at the computer screen and mumbled obscenities. I’d already spent the better part of a day trying to diagnose a conflict between my hard drive and my printer and frankly, Scarlet, I no longer gave a damn.
On days like these I agree with my father who, at age 80, refuses to be in the same room with a computer. “They were supposed to make our lives easier. Everybody I know with a computer has nothing but trouble. Who needs it.”
He may be right. It’s hard to love your PC when your monitor is flashing “fatal error.” Do I call the techie or the coroner? I tried Feng Shui and moved the computer to a different spot in the room for more fortunate energy and blessings. The damn thing still didn’t work so I scrawled a document in long-hand.
Interestingly, that night ABC had a whole show on technology—charting man’s genetic quest to go faster and faster. His examples were as exasperating as they were fascinating. Like who really needs the five seconds we got back changing from rotary to touch tone dialing? And are we better off with an expensive plastic spout on the orange juice container when it only took a second or two to claw open the cardboard flap?
And, fresh in my mind, is “what damn good is a pentium computer when your day’s work is trapped inside, forcing you back to a Papermate pen?”
In the end, ABC concluded that man is biologically programmed to speed up. Like we didn’t know this from watching teenagers in Isuzus peel away from a traffic light.
Heck, if man is driven to speed up, this particular woman is driven to slow down. If they stopped the world, I wouldn’t get off, but I’d like to call delay of game.
Which is why I’ve been practicing Sussification. It’s the ancient art of adapting to life in Sussex County, Delaware. The guiding principle of Sussification is to chill out in the face of deadlines, traffic and waiting for the electrician to show up. While there are many relaxation techniques and poses, my current favorite is on a barstool swilling a Cosmo. It puts me back in balance.
When we went to get our driver’s licenses recently, there were Sussification disciples everywhere. One government worker (oxymoron alert!!) thought nothing of shrieking questions to me across a crowded room. I loved it when she screamed “Weight???,” listened for my quiet response and then hollered “Couldn’t hear you!”
To my credit, when I got finished shouting that great big number back to her, I practiced my new Sussification steps and did not leap over the counter and choke her.
Yes, thanks to my new regimen I’ve put my personal quest for speed on hold and I’m trying to chill out. Here’s a thought: If Yoga is practiced at an Ashram, is a Sussification temple a single-wide?
To those of us balancing our lives locally, it may have been 100-degrees and frantic on Route One last weekend (I did love the liquor store sign reading “Drink Plenty of Fluids”) but at Poodle Beach there was a nice breeze and great company. My kind of mosh pit.
Anyway, there I was at the beach, amid a bevy of lesbians of a certain age, when the conversation turned, as it often does, to…um, I forget where this was going…oh yes, to memory. Or lack of it.
I reported USA Today’s disturbing news that stress causes your brain to shrink, resulting in memory loss. Honey I Shrunk My Brain. I’d refer you to the article, but I forget which day I read it.
“What we need are Gingko Biloba Margaritas,” suggested a tribe member. Sounds good to me. I’ve already attributed the fact that I can no longer remember all the lyrics to Hot Town Summer in the City to the stress of driving into DC one night last month. The traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue almost killed me. I could feel my brain shrinking. By comparison, a Saturday afternoon trip around here is massage therapy.
At the beach, calm and peace reign as I chant my Sussification mantra “oh well, whatever” whenever, say, my new puppy eats a sandal. Hey, who cares if the folks who promised to fix my kitchen floor skipped town. And it’s entirely possible that the plumber will get back with the estimate within the twentieth century.
This new philosophy is working so well I’m beginning to think about politics calmly. In fact, I went to a wonderful Human Rights Campaign reception recently, and got to meet one of my personal heroes, Barbara Gittings—a pioneer of our gay equality movement. She was introduced to the group as a woman who really opened the doors for us. Not skipping a beat, she looked around the room teeming with energetic, interesting women and added “And look who’s coming through those doors now!” It was a wonderful moment.
And one that surely feeds our brains instead of shrinking them.
You know, I’m becoming such a high priestess of Sussification that I’m considering buying a gazing ball for my back yard. According to a catalogue description, these decorative lawn ornaments, all the rage in the Victorian era, were used to attract fairies. From the number of gazing balls on my street alone and the demographics of the neighborhood, they seem to work.
Ah, Sussex County. One day on the sand, a friend scanned the crowd, leaned over to me and said, “If you’d told me in 1960 that I’d be sitting on a beach with thousands of other homosexuals, I would have been…well…very happy!”
Well, I am very happy. I’ve traded lots of stress away, and I’m working on the rest. Now if I could only figure out this computer nonsense. I just got an error message saying, “You’ve made changes to Normal.doc.” Well I should hope so.