Dear Frequent Readers,

Many of you know I have been staunchly against AIM ("AOL is the corporate incarnation of Satan"), and this is related to that.

Dear Most Frequent Reader who reads when she is supposed to be doing other stuff

Hi mom, send money.

So Saturday I downloaded AIM, and by today, Thursday, I consider myself decently proficient at it. I have cut back on talking to away messages, and have been working on the fine art of leaving sarcastic away messages. I have figured out what most of the weird icons mean, and I have discovered the simple joy of frittering away an afternoon reading the same away messages over and over again. But most of all, I am proud of my expansive buddy list, a whole, prepare yourself, seven people. And only four of them know I have it. How cool is that? So I have also discovered its use as a stalking tool.

However, AIM has apparently cursed me, or rather, my computer in the short time that it has resided in my hard drive. In a terrible accident which borderlines on a boring, predictable sitcom joke, one lovely Tuesday afternoon, while deciding to put my computer down in an amazing display of willpower to study chemisty or some subject that really doesn't matter right now, my computer was killed in a tragic accident. I always put my laptop upside-down so that a maximum of air flow can get through the computer. On the bottom of the computer, one will find the air holes in which air enters the computer so that it can cool down the beastly heat-making machine inside known as a processor. Since my computer has a tendency to overheat sitting down doing nothing, I put it upside down so it doesn't overheat too much. Since my couch was filled with junk and clothes, some clean, I decided to clear a spot on my desk and put it down there near the edge, shoving a large amount of junk that didn't fit on the couch into a very large pile in the back of my desk. Next to this clearing I placed my freshly filled cup of water. As I laid down to study engineering or something, I placed my two pillows up against my desk and laid down. I heard something quietly fall, so I knew it wasn't either of the junk piles shifting, and I quickly put my math away and got out of bed to investigate. You guessed it, my cup tipped over, neatly getting most of the water into the airholes that lead directly into the computer. I thinks to myself, "Well, poop."

Not wanting to act too rashly to what just happened, I analyze the situation carefully, and decide that panicing was appropriate. Attempting to do ten things at once, save the computer, clean up the mess, and keep the pillows from getting wet (okay, so three things) I didn't do any very effectively. I finally decided flipping the computer over was the most important thing, followed closely by keeping the pillows dry, and lastly, I decide to wonder why I thought cleaning up the mess ever deserved to be on the list. The good news was that the computer still ran when I flipped it over, and I thought to myself, remembering preschool math, water + electictonics + electicty = bad stuff. I turn it off, and last I knew it was in perfect working condition still.

I decide to let the computer take a break from being on all day and see if it would dry out some. Thinking 30 minutes was enough for a lot of ounces of water to dry out, I turn it back on and see not much is working. Like all of it. Which isn't very cool when way too much of my homework is done on the web, along with my website typically being accessed from that computer, and I have a new AIM addiction to nurse. So I must live off of decade old lab computers five floors away. Three days and two times taking the whole thing apart later, it still doesn't work, and I hate this keyboard. The feeling of your fingers sticking to the grime on the keys isn't a feeling one looks for when typing. It makes you want to stop typing at the first available