Bondage

That's what it is really. If you want to get honest. It's bondage. As www.dictionary.com states: Bondage is the state of being bound by or subjected to some external power or control.. and there is no doubt I am bound by the very things I depend on.

Or... maybe it's not at bleak as all that. Maybe it's merely dependance: the state of relying on or needing someone or something for aid, support, or the like. Yes. That sounds more paltable. Dependence it is.

I am dependent. Dependent on the very things that I use to "keep" me. The things that keep me on time, on task, "in the know", connected to others, the things that keep me from getting lost, keep me from forgetting who I am and help me keep others from forgotting that too.

I surrendered my computer on Saturday night. It was a horrible feeling. I have been putting it off for a very long time and waited until nearly the last minute before the warrenty ran out to send it in for the long overdue repair to the flickering LCD screen. I thought I was prepared for this surrender... but I was wrong.

I had made sure to make all the necessary fixes on my children's computer so that it would be able to function, passably, for my uses. I had prepared my mind, or so I thought, to be without it for about two weeks. And then.... I marched right in and handed it over... and I was fine. For about 20 minutes. I was perfectly fine with it... until I remembered that I was to finish up the last few changes on my voiceover files so that my friend Tim could finish his work on my work website....by Wednesday. And then, things just went downhill from there. When I tried to access my .Mac account on my kids computer it just wouldn't work properly. So, it appeared that they only way I could really do mail for the next two weeks was on my Treo. Oh, well, I reasoned.... at least I have that. It could be worse... I could be without it. I should never have thought that.

I stopped by ATT yesterday to get them to look at my phone and it's terribly annoying habit of beeping for no particular reason... constantly. They decided to just swap out the phone for a new one.. no biggie.. really. I had backed up everything at home. Well, it WAS no biggie until I got home and realized that the computer I had backed my phone up on was gone. I was at a total loss for about 30 minutes trying to figure out how I was going to do my life without my calendar/daily schedule, my phone numbers and (most importantly) EMAIL!

I called Best Buy. At this point, it had become PAINFULLY OBVIOUSLY that I was NOT ready to be without my computer for two weeks and it just needed to come home. But my heart fell when I was told it had just been sent out. It was at this moment that I felt my accute bondage, I mean, dependence and felt something had gone terribly awry in my life.

I was able to go back to ATT, get my old phone, bring it home and sync all it's information to my kids computer and then take it back to the store and switch it back to the new phone they gave me earlier in the day and then sync it to my kids computer. So.... at least I only had to spend one day "unplugged" but it was quite enough to show me that I must do something to break free from this "dependence!"