Note: Occasionally, rather than posting old entries, I'll just write reflections about whatever. This is one of those times.
Since my personality is largely a combination of overconfidence and cheapness, I have a strong tendency to try to fix all the many broken things around me rather than doing something sensible like asking for help or simply replacing it. Here is a list of things I tried, in vain, to fix:
1. Y2K apparently--Yes, as we learned in the last entry, when I was 10 years old and barely scrapping by with a C in our once a week computer class, I thought I could solve the potential technological crisis that some predicted to come with the dawn of the new millennium. I actually remember this day very well. What stopping Y2K entailed, in this child's mind, was rummaging through a dumpster next to where the nun's lived at our school and finding an old, thrown out desktop computer and pretending to my friends that I knew what I was doing as I proceeding to make an already non-functioning computer even more broken.
2. My own computer--My insistence that I knew how to fix a computer actually lasted through college. Let me tell you that my computer really just needed to be busted up with a baseball bat. There was no saving it. It froze every 10 minutes, literally. And when it wasn't freezing, it was blue screening or doing this weird thing where the mouse dragged and a loud repetitive sound like a truck backing up emanated from it or this other weird thing where the screen would suddenly flip upside down or sideways or who know's what. So how long did I put up with this insistent that I could fix it? A month? Three months? Try three years.
3. Falling out of love--Brace yourself. This is a serious one. Most people, when they fall out of love, simply break up with their partner. But when Ms. Fix-it fell out of love, I was so confident that this was a tangible thing that I could fix, that I didn't let it go very easily. I led myself down the dubious path of spending hours scouring Christian websites that teach you how to learn how to choose to fall in love with someone. These may or may not have been websites geared towards reorienting gay people? I don't know. Whatever it was. It really didn't work.
4. Plumbing--This year, sharing a bathroom with one sink with 20 girls had the predictable effect of having a perpetually clogged drain. Thus, one day I got it in my mind that even though I have no experience whatsoever with pipes or plumbing, I needed to disassemble the pipes, clean them out, and reassemble them. I got my friend Stephanie on board with this, and rather taken with the idea that we were the Mario Brothers, we set to work. Disassembling was easy. Reassembling was...less easy.
5. My pants (repeatedly)--This summer I had a great pair of thin waterproof pants. They were so awesome. But then, after about a month they ripped. And I was like, no problem I'll just so them up. Then they ripped again--like embarrassingly so during the work day on the trail I was working on. No problem. Sewed them up again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Finally, my supervisors actually had to talk to me about it (mortifying).
