Completing the Circle.

When I was in college I wrote an essay called "Paper Peelings: Reflections on Writing with a Computer." It was kind of sappy, though I think most of it was good prose.   It sure put my professor in ecstacy. (He was something of a Luddite.)  In it, I compared the process of composition to allowing thoughts to trickle together into a roaring stream.  Writing on paper was to writing on a computer as walking in a woods is to sitting in a plastic storage container.  Still, when the paper says, "I have the patience of trees that only grow because the sun is above them.  I have the patience of water that travels as slowly as osmosis," that's a little corny.  Cue the violins. 

 At the time, I had problems with composing on a computer.  "I write all of my papers by hand.  I like the permanence of ink and paper, the patience of faint blue lines," I said.  And the thing is, I did. I took issue with electronic efficiency.   I hated writing on a computer.  Writing on a computer felt slapdash and tossed off.  "Sitting in front of a screen, staring at all the space that I can fill, looking at all the words that I can move, delete, copy, and paste makes my mind as blank as the screen.  There's just something about the sterile gray (gosh, that's dated) plastic square holding the blank, pasty-white (likewise dated) screen with all my thoughts that dries up the well inside me."

Then I got out of college, and I found that it was possible, even easy,  to let my thoughts go crazy while I was staring at a screen.  As my fingers got faster (after all, if you can't type, a computer doesn't do you any good), I really started to like writing on a computer.  I transferred all my stories to floppy disk (that was a mistake!) and sat happily in front of the blank screen of my husband's cast-off laptop whiling away many hours of deployments and duty nights. 

 I'm not sure what I wrote -- nothing of consequence, I'm sure -- but the fact was, the sterile computer screen was no longer my creative nemisis.   Maybe it helped that computers got smaller, that screens became blue instead of gray, and  that I got to personalize the background.  There's a world of difference between an institutionalized computer and one's own.  At least there was when I was in college.  Now we can store our own home base somewhere in the cloud and log into it from any computer.  I haven't gotten that far yet.  But I do have a blog (obviously), and I no longer dreaded the sight of a blank, glowing page. 

The thing is, since I started working online, I've felt a regression coming on.  All of these creative thoughts are building up inside of me (and my therapist assures me that that's a bad thing),  but after spending two hours a day slogging at other people's papers, correcting spelling errors, suggesting new fonts, putting in headings, and constantly rewriting absolutely abysmal sentence structures, all within prescribed time limits, I can't equate computers with creativity anymore. 

Trying to write my own thoughts on a computer after two hours of all that is like standing up to make a speech and suddenly finding myself deprived of words.  I have all these things that I want to say and none of them come out.  Instead of trickling out into their rightful pool, they build up inside my head, gradually increasing pressure, which in turn increases heat, which means that there likely is metaphysical steam blowing out my ears.  I think I can hear myself whistling. 

So I've picked up my notebooks again.  Notebooks are patient.  I can leave them lying around unplugged for days, and they'll still work when I pick them up (provided I can find a pen).  I can use them before bedtime without unduly stimulating my brain with blue light radiation.  And there's something therapeutic about the process of putting ink on paper.  I can feel the tension drain out of my shoulders and through my fingertips as the ball of the pen rolls steadily along the faint blue line provided for me, and the only reference for my thoughts is my thoughts.  For all the adaptations I've made to a computerized lifestyle, computers still don't do that for me.