I Hate It When You Get Something New and It Doesn't Live Up To Your Expectations

When I was younger, I took piano lessons. Ten years of piano lessons, For most of that my teacher was Mrs. Elms. And for most of that time I cried about having to practice. So mostly I wouldn't practice. And then Mrs. Elms would lose patience with my pitiful playing and turn on the dreaded metronome. TICK, TOCK, TICK, TOCK. That horrid piece of machinery would click hypnotically in perfect time, forcing me to play ever faster and slower to keep pace. Mrs. Elms also constantly corrected my hand posture. She would put objects on the backs of my hands, forcing me to make flat surfaces out of the backs of my hands to keep the objects from rolling off. That's how you hold your hands to play piano, you know. Not droopy, touching your palms to the wood in front of the keys. But in nice, high plateaus of flesh. Your fingers should flow effortlessly under them, like legs dangling from a surf board that sits flat on the water. It isn't a natural posture for a lazy young girl. And it got tiring fast.

But at age 18 I went to college, and the sweet freedom of independence meant that piano lessons were a thing of the past. (How unfortunate to realize at that point that I actually enjoyed playing piano and no one was going to foot the bill anymore.) My fingers soon reverted to the slouchy, hanging posture of my youth. Quasimodo hands.

Now to my point. For the past few months, my laptop has been ill and slowly dying. Little things here are there began to go awry. I wanted to get a new laptop, but I couldn't justify the expense when my laptop could still carry out most of its functions satisfactorily. The one that finally sealed the deal was when two vertical stripes of light down my screen started to interfere with my ability to see what was on my screen. So Big Daddy charitably ordered me a new laptop.

It came a week ago. And I have to say that I was a bit disappointed. It was loaded with so much Microsoft, Norton, and AOL crap-software that it was nearly impossible to use. Little windows and advertisements popped open every few minutes, advising me of all the wonderful things Microsoft/Norton/AOL could achieve if I would only give them my social security number, credit card number, email address, and first child. Big Daddy cleared all that crap off, bless him, and soon my computer was running fairly smoothly. I could actually open the Internet and get to a recognizable screen.

First stop, Gmail. Well, come to find out that something on my Sony Vaio computer isn't compatible with that website. Whenever I would try to type, letters and spaces would fail to appear. It was like the keyboard had hiccups. Well, I finally found a way around that issue. And now I deal with the worst one of all: The little touch pad that you run your finger over to move the cursor around on the screen is SUPER sensitive. And it is located just under the heel of my left hand. So whenever I type, if the heel of my hand even breathes near that touch pad, the cursor jumps to wherever I last clicked on the screen. So in the middle of typing a sentence, half of the letters suddenly appear in a paragraph several inches up the page. It's maddening! And it happens CONSTANTLY. I can't even tell you how many times during the course of an email or blog post I have to stop, delete 8-20 characters from somewhere else on the screen, and move the cursor back to where I was. Sometimes I can't even find the letters. They have disappeared into the cyberspace.

There is only one solution for this problem: Good hand posture. No palm-slouching. I have to keep my wrists high in the air, never letting my lazy left hand relax or let down its guard. I'm 8 years old again, in Mrs.Elms's piano room. The horrible TICK TOCK of the metronome is pounding in my head. I want to relax my hands. I want the simple luxury of letting my wrists rest against the bottom of the laptop. But it is not to be. I've traded my old laptop in for a task master. Where is my Ezmeralda now?