I am toying around with my new desktop computer.  It's nothing fancy, but it did come with Vista Supreme, or something — "Vista Homo Pro Plus Preferred Select," I think it's call.  Thye can call it whatever they want.  It's still not a Mac. 

As I said a couple of posts ago, I am trying to keep myself better organized this time around, but I think it's probably futile.  I had my old laptop for three years, which is a long time, and there are still nooks and crannies of my hard drive I'm afraid to look into.  God only knows what I'd find.  A secret life, probably.  Which would explain all those weird animal husbandry dreams, and waking up hacking fur balls.

It's slow going, anyway.  I could transfer everything from one computer to the other with a simple cable, but that would only deepen the mystery.  So I am doing everything old-school.  It's always a real trial for me to get used to a new mouse and keyboard.  My fingers are not as nimble as they were back when I could do a Chopin Fantaisie Impromptu in C Sharp Minor, Op. 66, in a minute twenty-seven seconds (three seconds shy of the world record).

As slow as I've been slogging through it, there have been harrowing moments.  In the process of installing software and organizing files, I had a disturbing experience, and I'm afraid I may have opened up an irreparable hole in the space-time continuum (are we still using that old thing, or have we upgraded to space-time Vista?) — anyway, here's what happened: I DELETED MY DESKTOP TRASH CAN! How is that possible?  Can you toss your trash can into itself?  Apparently, with Vista, all things are possible.  There was a ploop, and it was gone.

Well, first there was a pop-up window, of course, but who pays any attention to those? 

The way it went down is, obviously, instead of deleting the contents of the trash, I deleted the icon.  A window popped up asking if I really wanted to, and another followed asking if I really, really wanted to, and then, finally, one saying, "OK, but you'll be sorry." 

I just click the "fuck off" button on pop-ups.  I mean, in setting up this thing so far about a thousand windows have popped up asking me all sorts of inane questions (the stupidest so far were "would you like me better as a blonde?" and "does this monitor make my butt look big?")...

It's funny, but in all these years I have never thought to throw my trash can into my trash can. (And, for the record, I refuse to call it a "recycle bin" — when they make a little virtual paper-shredder that makes that paper-shredding sound whenever you delete something, I might consent to virtual recycling, but not until.)

So now I guess I'll do what every PC user does when he's at a loss: reboot.

Somehow it's comforting to know that the more things change, the more they stay the same.