My mind is elsewhere these days. It’s hard to write, so I don’t. Actually, it’s hard to sit down in front of the computer. Who knows about the writing, really, because I haven’t tried in a while. I have lists though, of things I’d like to write about: the resurgence in Covid cases in Victoria and the slow escalation of tensions between Australia and China; my strange and fleeting addiction to Aldi’s special buys; winter swimming. I’d like to investigate the feelings behind my forays into job hunting (no I wouldn’t), and the dating scene. Ah, all these things I’d like to write about / don’t want to write about.
Yesterday I discovered that my external hard drive is kaput. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise given that last week, before I went to Nowra, it started beeping for the first time. In a rhythmic way initially, then in a syncopated, unpredictable way, like a heart with an irregular rhythm. But the files still mounted so I figured . . . ? doo dee doo dee doo ? . . . (want to back those files up?) . . . la la la la . . . in the vacant state of mind in which I so often find myself these days, I gently put it aside and drove to Nowra, where I spent a couple of days climbing, exploring graffitied old lighthouses, watching the birds and sleeping to sea-sounds .
When I arrived home I plugged the hard drive in again. It was time to update my LinkedIn profile, and I was looking for a suitably ‘professional’ photo. I need to make myself look more employable, you see, to apply for all the government ‘content writer’ jobs, and the pic of me in a wooly beanie wasn’t going to cut it. So I tried to mount the disk but it would not be mounted. It beeped again, increasing in pace before whirring to an abrupt stop, like a tired sigh.
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Last night I went to a friend’s house and we trained for the first time in months. She hung by her fingertips from carefully shaped slats of wood bolted to a flat backboard. I did star jumps, push-ups, pull-ups, leg things. She told me about a book she’s reading: A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway. I’ve always liked Hemingway, particularly The Old Man and the Sea. Ah, what a tale. In A Moveable Feast, she told me, Hemingway writes of his proud, poverty-stricken days in Paris, living as a young writer, almost destitute, in a dank apartment with no running water. He writes about drinking and gambling, kicking it with major literary figures and pleasantly wallowing in the life of what the French might call ‘un glandeur‘. At some point he and his wife went on a trip to Italy or Switzerland, and as a sweet surprise she packed his files into manila folders, carbon copies and all, so he could work during their vacation. They were lost on the way: all of his original works except for a couple of his least successful efforts, including a particularly lacklustre one which had recently been rejected by a major publishing house.
I’m no Hemingway, but this story made me feel a little less alone.
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We all know we should back our hard drives up. I have had ample opportunity to learn this important life lesson. When my computer crashed in 2015, years of work evaporated in an instant. That’s why, when I bought my next computer I decided to store everything on external hard drives. I purchased a delightful panoply of coloured drives, one for photos, one for films, one for documents, one for daily use. When people suggested I back things up to the cloud I thanked them politely, dismissively. I wasn’t interested: too expensive, plus I don’t like subscriptions. However, I recently decided that perhaps they aren’t so bad after all. Certainly not as bad as losing all your files. Or entertaining the idea of paying someone over a thousand dollars to try recover a few.
There are two files that keep me up at night:
The South Georgia lecture
The Falkland Islands lecture
There are other files I’ll also miss, but these ones took some doing, and I was proud of them. I can re-write them, of course. I may, one day. The voyages scheduled for this November have been postponed, so who knows when I’ll next need them.
It’s like this: the hard drive leads to lectures leads to work leads to unemployment . . . I’ll discover what else I’ve lost in the coming months, when I reach for it and it’s not there.
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My first post on this blog was entitled Day 15 . . . I wrote it on my fifteenth day of self-isolation. Lately though, I’ve found myself wondering what we’re counting. As time goes on and self-isolation merges with lockdown, coalesces with the loosening of lockdown laws, cedes to the escalations we’re seeing today, things become muddled. Where are we now? Self-isolation? Lockdown? Social distancing? Self-distancing? Social lock? Down isolation?
I am feeling disoriented. In some ways, these days, things are getting back to ‘normal’. Most people around me seem to be returning to their jobs and regular rhythms. Not me. I’m still wondering when (or whether) my old jobs will re-materialise. I pass my Sunday nights searching job sites and free online courses, looking for inspiration and ways to up-skill / re-skill.
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Today is day one hundred and twenty three, and my life feels arrhythmic. Syncopated and unpredictable. Like a beep test, and I can’t keep up. I’m trying to keep pace, but it takes energy, and it’s quite hard to sleep through the night.