Tag: time | A Banana Peeled

Money vs. time

Posted on July 9, 2023 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I have a Taiji classmate who has a used laptop that I think was giving to her. It has Ubuntu on it, and she has complained that it does run properly. Like, one out of three times, she can’t use the Zoom link for class properly. For whatever reason, it does not have Google or Microsoft, so it makes life difficult for her. I have no idea if she paid money for it or if someone gave it to her, but the amount of time she’s had issues with it has been in equal parts amusing and aggravating.

The former because who has Ubuntu other than uber-tech people? The latter because she has to go on and on about it and how anxious she is about it. In that, she reminds me of my mother, which is probably why it annoys me as well.

Here’s the thing, though. She buys used laptops (or is given them?) because she thinks it’s outrageous to spend money for a laptop when it’s going to be useless in three years. I can’t blame her for that, exactly, because PCs aren’t cheap. At all. You can get a basic one for $600, which, for three years, isn’t terrible. But if you want any amenities that make the machine more than a glorified tablet, it’s gonna cost you.

My current laptop was a thou or so. I bought it four years ago, and I felt the limitations even when I bought it. See, at the time, I wanted to keep the price down, so I went as low as possible. I got the bare minimum amount of memory, for example. Then, I ran out so quickly.

In addition, the keyboards are crap in a laptop. I am a heavy user, yes, but a keyboard should last longer than three weeks. That’s how long this one lasted. Yes, I hit the keyboards hard, but three weeks is outrageous. Now, i just use an external keyboard, and even then, I have to replace them every other year (and they supposedly last 100 million keystrokes).

Then, I ended up in the hospital and was not supposed to live. Afterwards, I realized I had to get a desktop in order to play Elden Ring. And, yes, everything is related to FromSoft somehow. They dropped the specs for the PC version rather late, something like ten days before the game released.

My laptop was not going to cut it, and my desktop was about a decade old. I hadn’t touched it in years. There was no way it was going to play Elden Ring. I scrambled to put together a new rig, and I decided to splash out. I had already known the joys of SSD (after had said I would never get it), and I made sure to get plenty of memory. The specs for the game was 1060 Nvidia, and my laptop only had 1050. I got a 3070 graphics card in my desktop.

One week

Posted on November 28, 2021 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

One week. Barring a positive COVID test, that’s how long I have until I get to return to my bachelor’s life. It’s incredible. At the six weeks to go mark, I was despairing of ever living alone again. Then, I realized it was only five weeks and suddenly felt freer. I don’t know why as it’s only one week less, but five weeks felt doable whereas six weeks seemed insurmountable. Now, it’s one week, and if history is any indication, this is going to be the hardest week to get through.

I don’t know why, but the last part of doing something is always the hardest. I mean, I have my theories, of course. It’s because the finish line is in sight, but out of reach. It’s right there! I can see it so why can’t I be there already? A week is nothing in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, a week is how long I was lying in a hospital bed unconscious. It’s enough to change my life–and to not change it at the same time. Everything is the same and yet completely different because of that week. Or rather, because of the events that led up to that week. Me having pneumonia, calling 911, passing out in the front hallway, and then suffering two cardiac arrests and a stroke on the way to the hospital. That all took half an hour or so to occur, which is such a short period of time.

When I first left the hospital, my recent trauma was all I could think about. Even when I wasn’t focusing on it, it was poking at me in the back of my mind. Why it happened , what exactly happened, was it going to happen again, etc. I talked about it with my medical team and with friends and family. I wanted to know everything that happened while I was out. My brother was good for the basic information as he started a Caring Bridge journal in which he wrote daily of what happened to me. He noted all the things the docs told him and directed everyone to the journal when they had questions about me. He said it allowed him to have a nexus for people to consult rather than to pester him in several outlets. In addition, it helped him order his own thoughts about what was happening and keep everything straight. He’s not one to emote, but I know it was really rough on him. He was my default contact person because I’m not partnered, have no kids, and my parents live in Taiwan. He’s the closest person to me, both geographically and familial-wise. He was the one who made decisions as to what happened to me, which is a burden I would not wish upon anyone.

The elasticity of time

Posted on November 10, 2021 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

Time is weird. This is not a groundbreaking statement, but it astounds me how true it is. We all know that time seems faster the older you get. I’ve heard it explained that it’s because when you’re a kid, a year is, say, one-fifth your lifespan. That’s a huge chunk. When you’re thirty, though, it’s one-thirtieth of your lifetime, which isn’t as big. That’s why waiting for Christmas when you’re six or seven seems like forever whereas when you’re a parent, the time between Christmases can be distressingly short.

That makes some sense and I can buy it to a certain extent. However, it doesn’t explain how time can fold and expand like an accordion. Or how it can appear to be passing both quickly and slowly at the same time.

It’s been 7 1/2 weeks since I left the hospital. Ian and I were speculating when I would stop using weeks and go to months instead. He said probably three months. That had been the number in my brain, but I said at the time that maybe 2 months. And I feel like that might be truer because I’m almost there and I’m tired of counting in weeks.

More to the point, I cannot believe it’s been almost two months since I came home from the hospital. I only spent two weeks in the hospital! One of those weeks was me being unconscious, so it was harder or everyone else than it was on me. When I talk to my loved ones about that week, I get a taste of what they went through. I, on the other hand, just laid there and didn’t do a damn thing.

Time is a tricky thing

Posted on November 1, 2021 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

When I first started wearing my heart monitor, I thought I would lose my mind before the month ended. It was supposed to be so easy. The heart nurse assured me that it was easy to put on. The company would call me and walk me through it. I could essentially set it and forget it. She did warn me that the company had a weird name and a 1-800 number so they sounded like spam. We both laughed before I went my own merry way. Oh, and she said it would be a week or two before they contacted me. Fine. Dandy, even. I’d deal with it when it happened.

That was nearly two weeks later. I had my weekly nurse explain it to me and waited until my brother was over to set it up. It was fine and dandy until the next day when it kept saying I had poor skin contact. I thought I set the Do Not Disturb mode, but I apparently hadn’t done it properly because it kept buzzing at me every few minutes. The next day, I used a different holder for the battery because I thought maybe I had put on the first one incorrectly. That didn’t help.

I could deal with the beeping during the day (for some reason, I couldn’t completely mute the audio, which I didn’t understand. They were not a hospital or a clinic–they were just gathering the data. So why should I be notified when something went wrong? It’s not as if they could do anything about it. I guess so I could call 9-1-1 or something like that, but still.), but it was driving me batty at night. I put it in a tissue box with just the sensor sticking out, then put the tissue box in a plastic container filled with books in the corner of my room. I have a white noise machine that I turned to high and I wear earplugs while I sleep. None of this helped. It was torture.

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