I live a very nomadic lifestyle, changing addresses every four to six months, like a criminal on the run. I leave a trail of forgotten and abandoned items all over the country, a residue of my activity. Having to account for the last two years of my places of residence on my recent passport application was quite a memory exercise.* My most recent exodus, conducted in the middle of intense thesis writing, has been a particularly disorganized affaire. While chanting to myself it-does-not-have-to-be-perfect-or-particularly-good-it-just-has-to-be-done as a kind of mantra, I flew away leaving an explosion of half packed boxes for my poor boyfriend to sort through.**

There is nothing quite like getting off the plane in a new city, weighed down like a pack mule with your fancy laptop, large midi-keyboard, audio interface, USB-charging camera and eReader, and realizing that you left the laptop power adapter on the other side of the continent. Suddenly all these interconnected items completely lose their meaning and function. They turn from great instruments of power, vessels for your fountain of creativity, into heavy hulls of useless plastic and metal. It is even worse when you are in the midst of a mad dash to finish your rather belated thesis: the moment of realization is accompanied by a sinking feeling as the world collapses around you into a vacuum of despair. In that moment, you know with absolute certainty that you would give your firstborn to whatever person or supernatural power able to deliver that funny little box with two cables sticking out of either end into your trembling hands.

And now that the adapter is safely back in my loving embrace***, I can go back to my routine of procrastination through blogging. Ironically, having to work on an old, slow PC, which I stole from my sister, while waiting for the adapter to show up, forced a kind of surge in productivity. The computer was simply too slow to get too distracted. It wasn’t worth going to Facebook or checking email when not absolutely necessary. So what does that say about the power of all this technology?

I’d rather blog about it than think on that too deeply. Back to the opera!

* Does the Banff Centre count if, lacking another address, you can technically be classified as homeless while you are there?
** Please forgive me, dearest! I love you!
*** Since it was the above-mentioned boyfriend who delivered the adapter through express post, I guess he’ll be the one who’ll have to deal with any firstborns who might appear in the future. Thank you and you are welcome!