THE CLOISTERED LIFE

The life of a cloistered old woman who relies on the Internet to interface with the world is not an easy one. This computer evokes more profanity than prayer, though that, too. I keep bumping my head on different kinds of limits, which the indefatigable researchers assure me will prevent Alzheimers because no doubt I’m causing many new brain cells to form all the time because the brain -- it turns out -- is a muscle after all and forms paths just like Mrs. Othus taught us in 1949 when she was trying to get us to memorize poems from Palgrave.. But I’m beginning to suspect that like an old computer, there are only so many gigabites of space in my skull.

The other problem is that like a “dirty” electrical stream my blood glucose (the power source of brains) is unreliable. After a winter of fighting slightly high scores (never above the 140 that I’m told begins to cause cell death in kidneys, toes and eyes), summer means that I’m out in the yard working and my blood sugar plunges into the low seventies. Diet must be adjusted but more importantly I need to monitor “how I feel” which I don’t remember to do if there’s a really absorbing project at hand. At dawn my blood glucose is optimal. The only problem is that dawn here comes about 4AM. The solution is already provided: living alone. I just get up and write.

The money stream problem is harder to solve. My eMac is barely new enough to handle Leopard which is the new system I must now buy in order to run iWorks which replaces AppleWorks, my present exasperating all-in-one system. It’s slow, slow, slow and sometimes stubborn but all my files and books are in Appleworks. I would put up with the slowness but, fiendishly, MAC is in league with the Devil: Netflix. It takes Leopard to interact properly these days.

Not that Netflix is evil. In fact, it is Netflix that really transports me in the evening, back to my own past, forward into the future, and horizontally to other lands. Movies enlarge my experience and my heart these days. Magazines have shriveled. Books after a day of onscreen print weary my eyes. So far I haven’t found anyone in town who is interested in many of the same subjects. (They would be offended if they realized this, considering it a snobbery.) I begin to suspect maybe a few do, but combine it with alcohol, which I don’t.

I am, to my embarrassment, not at all interested in the town’s topics except for infrastructure. I’m out-of-sync to the point of amusement. A hot topic at the last town meeting was the number of yards harboring horses. There are three separate households keeping a horse and the ordinances allow this, since the rules hark back to the days when a horse was a transportation necessity. One of the complainants was a mother worried that a horse would escape and attack her children. She may be like the early Blackfeet who confused horses with elk-sized dogs.

The larger Montana community has also found me limited. The old liberal world of the Unitarians -- Democrats, peace organizations, organic producers, humanities circles, “Montana writers,” and English teachers -- none of which have changed much -- expect me to react as they do, but I’m quite different now, not quite welcome because I’m too rude. Much as I continue to admire Scott Crichton and Frank Kromkowski, Paul Dietrich and George Cole, the many Unitarians -- declared and undeclared -- I’ve gone some crazy hybrid place of my own. None of those would touch Tim Barrus with a ten foot pole, though in many ways he’s my most satisfying correspondent. It’s not the erotica. Are you kidding? With what the doctors insultingly call “a senile vagina” I can barely tolerate a visit to the doctor. (I think I just won’t go.)

Anyway, the physical limit that frustrates me the most is finger dexterity. I can’t make the cursor hit the right teeny spot on the screen, much less avoid what my fellow cashier in Portland called “finger booboos.” Well, maybe increasingly bad eyesight is as frustrating. Lamps proliferate all over the house and I’m glad I bought a fancy magnifying glass for the way it looked, so long ago that I got it at Bill Naito’s Import Plaza in Portland. It has an inlaid mother-of-pearl handle.

The other growing edge that I’ve had frozen by lack of software is pod-casting. There is a new program for pod-casting for a MAC, but like everything else -- including the shelves of the Montana office suppliers and the world of hackers -- Microsoft leads the way and MAC comes along months and years later. Which is okay with me unless I need some small thing peculiar to MAC and have to search around online. Montana doesn’t approve of MAC’s. This state admires conformity, though in fact outsiders never realize that until it’s too late. Anyway, I’ve hit the limits of my credit and must stash five dollar bills until I’ve accumulated the requisite total.

Another limit is the neighbors’ standards -- this time of year mostly about lawns. They would sooner save for a new riding mower than a new computer. This afternoon after I go down in the crawl space and re-attach the feed to the hose for the summer, I mow with the weed whacker. They like Roundup better than weed whackers.

You’ll understand that another limit is this little old house, though it’s also a support and enabler. I love to buy copies of “Art and Architecture” but the prospect of maintaining acres of shining floor, three-story stone fireplaces, and elegant but stain-able limestone countertops embedded with tiny fossils is just too daunting. I already did museum maintenance for a decade.

The real reason I chose this life is that I want to push the outer boundaries of thinking, not just thinking but “re-framing.” It’s a time of amazing ideas about both possibility and limitation, including mortality. I put reflections into this blog, not for you but for me, blazing trail so I can find my way home. Wherever that has gone. It seems to be traveling in its own way. I hope it’s ahead of me, not behind.

I’m watching the limits of the Internet. Spaminators and filters and firewalls are so powerful that I’m hardly getting any spam at all, but what potential ideas and friends are being suppressed? Who is out there deciding what “pornography” an old lady should not know about? The Internet, it turns out, is as fragile as our banking and stock market systems: terrific when it works, catastrophic if some small thing goes wrong. Just like human bodies. But if my info stream gets strangled in the interest of protecting bank business, I’ve got lots of books. And I have NOT allowed automated access to my checking accounts.

So the formal position I take -- and this is Barrus talking -- is in the NOW, richly living the present. But I’m too much me to leave the past and future alone. Or do housework and yardwork, except for the minimum.