Yup, it’s going to be another one of those days.

After the fun of yesterday afternoon I’ve been procrastinating from life to the point where I’ve made steady progress on my short story. I came home from Jon’s last night and carried on with my scribblings, and woke up at half 8 this morning so I could submit it to the group in time to go to Jim’s later on to help him decorate his Christmas tree and watch fuzzy-framed 1950s Christmas feelgood movies. It must be a Canadian thing.

Evidently however, my CrapBook (previously known as MacBook) had other plans. Not content with having shut down whenever it felt like it over the past few months until Apple FINALLY admitted something was wrong and released a firmware patch that compensates for the luxury of only shutting down when you tell it to by eating up your battery life, it’s now decided to crash on whim, for me to find anything left open corrupted after I restart. Yup. Short story, completely gone. Totally corrupted. I’ve now lost forever the really decent stuff I got out this morning, purely through closing down my conscious brain and letting my imagination stream out. Sure, I could do it again - I have a draft from yesterday afternoon and I still have my mind, but I’m evidently becoming too human as I was rather sentimentally attached to that spontaneous composition I came out with earlier.

Not only that, but I’ve had to rebuild my iTunes library (AGAIN. You would have thought they’d make this pissywanky application a little more robust than blasting its airbag in its face at the slightest whiff of a crash), and reset all my passwords and (perhaps most irritatingly of all) window sizes in my browsers. I wouldn’t really mind but I’ve only just got Airport to stop asking me the sodding password to our Wireless connection and connect automatically. Does anyone remember when Apple used to be a good, reliable, decent company? Right now I see little difference between them and Microshaft, other than the prettiness of the machines. Maybe that’s all that matters now.

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, I then, right on cue, receive a phone call from my mother. Not content with making me feel worse whenever I have this foolish urge to call home to make me feel better, she’s now developed the apparent ability to pickup my frustration telepathically. Twenty minutes of listening how incompetent the builder is (during which I left the phone in my room and made a cup of coffee. No. Really. She was still talking when I came back), how lazy my sister is (the recurrent sequel to how helpful my sister is) and infuriatingly well-meaning advice on how to resurrect the quite sodomised aforementioned short story. This she then ended with a customary reprimand on never calling and a near-trademark guilt trip for not demonstrating much interest in hearing the same story I hear every week about how incompetent the builder is.

But do you know what I did? After walking repeatedly around my very small room in an angry little circle - half wondering how I could repair a corrupted RTF and half just saying “fuck” over and over, I came upon another brilliant idea. I thumped my MacBook. I gave it a damn good twatting. And then I giggled, I giggled my mo-fo arse off. Probably not very good for the machine but made me feel a whole load better.

Haven’t smoked in over 24 hours because of yesterday. Feeling much better already. Think I might go for a walk in Highgate Woods in a bit. It’s been raining and I love the scent of wet earth and mulchy leaves. I could definitely do with getting far away from technology - from my laptop and mobile phone - for even just a short while.