Watching horror movies, like taking shots, is something I realized in my early 20s that I hated and didn’t ever have to do again if I didn’t want to. So I’m coming up blank when trying to think of the name of a movie in which the main characters are supposed to die in a massive plane explosion, but somehow get out of it, but then death chases them around and tries to reclaim them.
Now that I think about it, this may have been the very movie that made me say, “Nope. I’m not doing these anymore. Horrifying death isn’t entertaining to me,” so that’s probably why I’ve both blocked out the details and think about it fairly frequently. I bring it up now because…sigh…a death my MacBook escaped two years ago has caught up with it. That’s right. I just Final Destinationed my computer. (OK, I Googled it.)
Like any freelancer, my MacBook isn’t just my most important office tool; it is my office. It’s death is the equivalent of someone burning down the place where I arrive each morning and sometimes don’t leave until moments before bed. With it, I am a professional writer. I am everything I dared to dream I could be. Without it, I am just a person who sometimes forgets to leave her house. So imagine my terror two years ago, when, just weeks after paying $300 to get it fixed, some drunk asshole who was somehow at our apartment dumped an entire beer on the keyboard. It wasn’t good. It was very bad.
But alas, it somehow survived. The bottom right hand corner of my screen was a little wonky, the CD drive would never again work, but it just kept on working. I was lucky. I was veeeeeery lucky. That drunk jerkface was lucky. I was the one who ran off the plane before it exploded! I shouldn’t have survived, but I did! What could possibly go wrong now?
So at least once a month since, I’ve wondered, “Is this the day? Is this when all of a sudden it will die on me?” And it’s been coming for sometime. It’s gotten painfully slow. It can’t run Safari without passing out. I have to block out the afternoon to open InDesign. And then…yesterday….
I got home from my co-working group and the screen was just cracked. A quarter of the display is gone. It wasn’t the drunk asshole’s fault. It could have happened to a brand new computer. But it happened to my old, busted, MacBook. So it is time.
I’m having a hard time feeling too sad about it though. The money, yes, I am very sad to spend. Like, let’s not talk about it amount of sad. But, I actually feel like I just got away with two free years with laptop that should have been fried on the spot. There’s no changing the fact that my MacBook’s number is up this time, so there’s no use freaking out about it. God grant me the serenity to not retrace my every bleeding step yesterday to figure out how I cracked it and beat myself up. Whateves. We had two beautiful, stolen years together, MacBook. They were good ones.
Maybe if those people in that movie just changed their perspective and enjoyed their extra time instead of flipping out over death for the rest of their lives, they might have been happier and less horrified. But then, as Wikipedia has informed me, I guess they wouldn’t have been able to make four (presumably terrible) sequels. Ugh. Horror movies. Leaving for the Apple Store now. Ugh…
Natalie Burg 