My Velveteen iBook

I keep hoping that putting off posting in the blog will somehow magically extend my holiday break. Sadly, this doesn't seem to be the case as my alarm clock went off at 6:30 this morning as usual, and I'm sitting here in my cubey with a sky as dark as it can possibly be and still be daylight outside my window.

I really need to apply myself at winning the lottery.

Happy New Year, everyone! Can you believe it's 2005? Doesn't it seem like just yesterday that we were all cowering in our underground bunkers, surrounded by cases of Dasani and Ensure, trembling in fear of the apocalypse that was to be Y2K?

My new year was supposed to have started on an all-new low -- the right speaker on my iBook was acting up and the computer sometimes wouldn't wake up from sleep, so I was going to be sending it to Apple today to get fixed up before my warranty expired at the end of the month. CAN YOU IMAGINE?!?! Days, even WEEKS, without my iBook! Sure, I have an iMac at home sitting in the study, but that's just not good enough. I want to surf the internet from the COUCH.

So yeah, I was backing up my hard drive last night in preparation for the, *sob*, separation when I accidentally double-clicked a song in iTunes, and whaddya know! The speaker is back to normal. And no powering up from sleep issues recently, either. I bought Apple Care today just in case, cause you know that shit's gonna break again the day after the warranty's up. My first use of Apple Care was to order a new keyboard, cause the letters on my A and E keys have completely worn off. I may not install the new keyboard until my iBook and I part ways via eBay when I upgrade, though. In a way, I like the worn keys -- they're very Velveteen Rabbit:

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."