A Hindrance To Writing

The PC that I use to write this blog has suffered an incident the likes of which can contrive to render the production of posts inconvenient and difficult. It is not a serious concern and perhaps by the day after today, it will be resolved (either through drying out, or through the purchase of a keyboard to replace the unit that is suffering the distress). It is not unlikely that this situation will be resolved within a day or two, even though the effect it has currently is particularly frustrating.

To set the scene, I should first begin by talking to you of a weary Friday evening. It is Easter, Good Friday, when I pen these words and you will, no doubt, notice that that is not when it gets posted. We are displaced by date and space here, and I will beg your forgiveness for any confusion that results.

Fox had noticed that her back was giving her distress, and rather than lie on the floor and feel sorry for herself, she decided what she would rather do is lie in the bath, and enjoy the way that the heated water and relaxed position eased the pains and aches of her body. This is a type of goblin cultural enriching as I understand it, and I did what I always do in this situation. I helped where I could in getting the space set up, bringing her drink and helping to place objects in the space that were necessary to increase its coziness to the point of saturation.

Being as it was a Friday night, we have a tradition of ordering food for delivery. This period of university work, the schedule I keep is good for a large order around noon, where Fox can turn it into lunch and dinner, and then it is dinner, available when I arrive back after work. Tonight, it was pizza. Pizza is a great large food to order for this kind of situation because you can always eat a lot or a little depending on your individual… vibe. Public holiday, so I wasn’t at work, but the principle holds.

Thus, I had to keep an ear out for the front door, despite that Fox was closer to it. After all, extracting yourself out of a bath so you can collect pizza would hold up the deliveryperson in a way that looks very inconvenient. It was also thundering and raining, and we did not want this poor food service worker to endure an unpleasant experience just because our awning is not very large.

Elli does not like when it is thundering and raining. If it is raining, a walk is less likely to happen. If it is thundering, Elli feels anxious and afraid, because of what we call the sky-bark. Elli likes to find a person to be near during this experience and kind of just reduce all the space between his body and theirs to zero. A ziploc bag dog. This helps to assuage his distress, you see.

It was this desire to be adjacent to the space I was in that led to an energetic flopping down, when I had a pizza and drink in hand, onto the padded space of his cushioned chair that he uses to sleep right by the desk that I use to do a vast quantity of the work I do. In this eagerness, the dog tilted over a glass half-full of soda, and the result splashed onto desk, diary, pencil case and, just outside of the constrained perceptions I have with these glasses, onto the black keyboard keys beneath.

I did not realise for about a quarter of an hour that a part of this keyboard was now unresponsive. Who would? You do not poll everything you touch, after all. It was very reasonable that I let the liquid soak in without acting on it, because I was unaware of it entirely!

And now that keyboard rests on a table, away, unplugged, and I hope it works after I have had a night’s sleep. This, I write on the laptop I use for work, sitting on a bedspread with the dog, seeking its reassurances, pressed against a leg like it seeks to be another pair of pants.

I had no specific intention to spend this evening writing. No, tonight was going to be spent in the quiet of an alone space in order to inspect the work of students and give appropriate evaluation and feedback. That works well for evenings when there is no other person sharing the space, with no noise being played on the TV. This is a task naturally hindered by the inability of the PC to connect to an entire keyboard, even if it is just to protect a single key.

Not using a PC is a great opportunity to play a thing in the tabletop collection – prehaps a round of The Crew or Brew or Rawr & Write. But those all require another person to work, and Fox is again, in the bath, because she feels garbo-butts. It’s also a chance to work on a prototype of a design that I have created, except it is early in April (at the point of writing) and therefore, I have no design to play around with.

And so I sit, on the bed, and wonder if it would be possible to create an entire blog post about this curious little happenstance and what words I lose, what ideas I cannot readily grapple with, when I lack a single key off the keyboard I use. The Sapir-Worf hypothesis suggests that the words we can use represent and alter the ways that our brains process the knowledge we have, that therefore, shaping language can shape available ideas, and I do find that there are ideas I have to reason around in order to reconcile this particular hindrance.

And all I have lost tonight is one letter.

Even just hypothetically. I can use it, after all, it’s fine on this keyboard. Of course, the code of the page uses these letters all with abandon. How else do you think I get it to present the linkable fold of ‘more?’