Homebody Feels Insecure

There are days like today which come as a big, giant, red light at the cross road of your life and make you stop in your tracks and reassess exactly where your life is going. In my case, I found it was going down. Deep deep down.

I woke up, stretched and immediately pulled a muscle in my back. I coughed and spluttered and spewed and muttered and limped to the bathroom with a hand on my back, willing it to straighten so I could resume the day a respectable, posture appropriate to my home-sapien-ness. I tripped on the bathroom mat (again) and took a short, hot shower which helped soothe the pain. As I brushed my teeth, I remembered that I had dreamt about people laughing at me and my biology teacher telling me my feet were too dirty and offering to clean them for me.

I then remembered dreaming about falling down a hole. Of course, any eager-beaver who’s read a psychology book will tell you that this is a symptom of insecurity. It’s happened many a times that I have reported a dream to have someone tell me: “Oh, that just shows you lack confidence” and smile at me sweetly as I sink deeper into my seat, becoming just a tad bit more unsure of myself because I’ve unwittingly let them inside my head.

But this dream was different. I was blonde and wearing a blue frock and falling in with my little finger daintily curled against the dark walls, which, as one looked carefully, were spewing digits. I was inside a computer. 

Oh well. Weird, weird. Let’s not over analyze anything.

And then it happened. I was rummaging through my teaching materials and I dropped my ‘passport’ or external hard drive on the floor. I didn’t think much of it until ten minutes later when it refused to load any information on to my laptop. I was frantic. I rushed to school and asked the computer technician what had happened. 

He said it was damaged and needed to be fixed.

Yes, yes, but what about ALL my information?

Oh. It was gone.

WHAT THE FREAKING HELL WAS HE TALKING ABOUT?

Madam, please. We are a civilized educational establishment.

Madam starts hyperventilating, twitching and pulsating like Manimal before he turns into a jaguar.

"Madam, Take it to your computer-wala. I’m sure the problem lies with the motor. Your data must be safe."

Madam has turned as red as the jaguar in the eye of the night. Or whatever. She has lost all coherence and is ready to kill someone.

Small little computer technician cowers in his chair and is about to ring for security.

To cut long story short – I didn’t kill him but berated myself for my stupidity for not creating a back up of the information on some laptop.

And then I remembered my dream. I was falling and failing in a digital universe. Two years of work, writing, presentations, lesson plans, reports and papers were all locked in on that little black box of doom. And it was letting me down. I was no longer homebody. I was digi-body. My entire LIFE was on one chip that refused to cooperate. No WONDER I was anxious and fearful all the time. I was unknowingly hanging by a thread which had just snapped.

I am digi-body whose life is centered on the laptop. The problem is, my laptop, like my sister’s pet dog, succumbs to a virus once a year. I back up with USB. USB falls ill every two years. I back up with external hard-drive, which dies if you drop it. Now I’m being told to email stuff to myself. And then gmail asks me, one day, what I will do if my gmail account is corrupted? Now we have a new solution. Drop-box. DROP box. I’m falling into the cyber-universe and the only option I have left is to fall further and further down.

No wonder I dream of falling down a deep dark rabbit hole and getting stuck in a perplexing world. The universe, on days like today, seems as bloodthirsty as the queen of hearts. The only thing to do, really, is to go to bed and have a good cry. And hope to God my data comes back, by some miracle or the other.