I plop down in front of my computer; placing my hands on the computer and type for several minutes, the silence broken solely by the tapping of my keys.
Resting my chin on my hand, I scroll down the page, reading what I have written. Muttering to myself, I delete several lines and try to mash these jumbled letters and words into sentence fragments, then sentences, then finally something worth showing. At last I decide it is good enough and start to leave, I hover between leaving and staying, finally raising the mouse and in one, hard stroke deleting everything I had just done.
My eyes grow wide, what have I done? I frantically scramble for the clipboard, sighing with relief when I see my almost-lost labor is still there. I carefully paste it back into the document, setting it aside for a time while I fill another page with my ramblings. Again, I delete lines, sentences, whole paragraphs; today it is difficult for me to express my feelings with keyboard and computer in a form that is understandable even by the moderately-insane. I lean back in my chair to recharge, hoping to get a brilliant brainstorm, letting the creative juices flow while hoping they won’t merely ferment. My eyes open, Eureka! The perfect notion has occurred to me and for what seems eons there is nothing but the glare of the monitor lights bouncing off the keyboard into my eyes while my hands type at a relentlessly fast speed, the only obstruction to my genius is my misspellings of several crucial words which, painstakingly, I comb through and retype, this time correctly. Or so I hope. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. I type the alphabet for no reason at all, then for again, no good reason; leave it in the middle of my half-finished work. I scroll down once more, reading critically, occasionally changing the wording of a sentence, mostly pleased with what I have just done. I stretch and look at the clock. Can that be correct? For before my startled eyes, the clock smugly pronounces I have been laboring for a mere twenty minutes. Wrinkling my nose I turn back to the key board and type as fast as I can, wanting to at least find a good ending. I try several with as much care as if it were an evening gown I was selecting to wear on a first date. I discard most, toy with a few others, decide on one, type it; then displeased with the effect is has, delete it. I type one last ending, my jaw drops and a tear fills my eyes as I realize my half-hour-long struggle is perfect. My infant has teethed, become diaper trained, went through adolescence and grown up and left the house in the thirty minutes. I sniff once or twice then blow my nose with a wrinkled, already-used-at-least-once Kleenex that I discover hibernating in the deepest recess of my pocket, no doubt dreaming of growing some deadly bacteria in the middle of the night, then climbing out of my dirty-clothes-bin to slaughter me in my sleep. I toss the disgusting item in the trash. “Ha.” I proclaim, “Thou shalt not grow some deadly bacteria in the middle of the night then climb out of my dirty clothes bin and slaughter me in my sleep. So there.” Highly pleased with my victorious speech, I turn my attention back to the computer and resisting my first impulse to lean forward and hug my computer, I post my darling manuscript on apricotpie for all the other crazy homeschoolers like me to enjoy.