In Memoriam

Today, I mourn the loss of a friend. Not a human friend, because I doubt I'd be able to blog about such a loss on the evening it occurred.

No, I mourn the loss of a near and dear piece of technology: my printer.

In a last brave attempt to provide me with the reading for tomorrow (yes, I procrastinated my homework for my tomorrow afternoon class, but hello! Thanksgiving break!), my dear HP Deskjet 920c choked on one last piece of paper. It sputtered a final farewell. And then, it worked no more.

I'll miss it.

You may think me strange, but this printer has followed me since the summer of 2002. The summer I headed straight down to BYU for a summer semester instead of reveling in my last days of being an irresponsible teenager. My parents gave it to me as a graduation present. This printer never left me. It moved down to Provo, it moved back home with me to Centerville. It moved to my friend's condo with me (in another part of Centerville) and then back home once more.

If I was a boomerang child who constantly bounced back home, my printer boomeranged right along with me. It endured the entirety of my undergraduate education and almost three-fourths of my master's work. My first real-life, full-time job in the corporate world.

It moved with me to my first apartment in Salt Lake City. And it's moved twice more, to different SLC locations, as I've moved on with my life. It printed faithfully (albeit slowly...seriously, I could sometimes straighten my hair, apply make-up, and change my outfit a couple of times before it printed my longer seminar papers) until this fateful evening.

This printer stayed with me through several classes, several boyfriends, and several roommates. It endured crowded space on the floor when I didn't clean; it suffered (unintentional) kicks as I moved back and forth across my messy room in the dark. It printed the poetry and essays of others, but showed fairness and equality in printing all of my poetry and all of my essays just as easily. As tidily.

Rest in peace, my fair printer.

Also, for the record, you chose a heckuva time to die. (Seriously? This close to the end of the semester?)

Random Conversations

Sometimes, I don't even know how things pop into my brain. But sometimes they result in interesting conversations. To wit:

On Saturday, while I did some laundry, I bemoaned how long it was taking. And then I told my roommate that I wished I had Superman's powers because it probably wouldn't take Superman long to wash his clothes. My philosophy was (and I guess, still is) this: he could a) hand wash his clothes super fast and shake them around to dry them super fast or b) if he can fly around the world fast enough to go back in time, couldn't he fly forward in time...and just throw his clothes in the wash, make time speed by...and then throw his clothes in the dryer and make time speed by...and then voila, have his laundry be done?

I'm sure there's some sort of theoretical error to that, and I'm not even sure why it came to mind that if I were Superman, I could do my laundry faster... Anyway, my roommate put an end to the conversation when, as I continued to think out loud, I asked: "Do you think Superman has to do laundry less often because he wears his underwear outside his clothing?"

I don't know. What do you think?