I've been keeping an eye on Craigslist, waiting for something that A) worked and B) I could afford. You'd be surprised how mutually exclusive those two turned out to be.

All the while I was going to work at Starbucks, watching all our customers typing away on their pretty laptops, and sighing enviously, "Oh, how I wish I could go to the ball!"

But patience paid off-- I found a laptop for $100, went and picked it up, and whoomp, here it is. (I'm sorry, I'm a little giddy.) It's not a very exciting machine from a technical standpoint-- I told Tim I was going to pretend it was 1992, so I could feel like I was all state-of-the-art. (Politics being what they are, this isn't difficult to pull off.)

Now I have to figure out how to move things from my PC to my laptop. I asked Tim's advice, and he was all, "Blah blah Ethernet, blah blah cable, blah blah I am a networking genius blah," and my eyes sort of glazed over and I went back to making my laptop pink. (With a strawberry theme, as soon as I can figure it out.)

So! It is pretty, but neither fast nor powerful. It's a Pentium preemie. But I don't care; I don't need a fancy laptop; all I need is Microsoft Word and maybe a game of solitaire. I want to be able to go to a coffee shop and write. Which I will be able to do soon!

As soon as I can figure out how to make it go.

Speaking of writing, my thesis is 71 pages long, all of a sudden. Holy iambic pentameter, Batman! How did that happen?

Actually, I know exactly how that happened. I went and hunted down some older pieces from the past few semesters that seemed like they might mesh with the gestalt, or whatever. I printed them out and added them to what I already had, then started working on putting the poems in some type of order.

I found that some poems didn't fit at all, and pulled them out. Found that some fit perfectly, and there was much rejoicing. (Some of the transitions between poems are very serendipitous.) Did some tinkering, updating, revising here and there. Wrote a couple of new things. Added page numbers. Typed a table of contents. And whaddaya know? A thesis is emerging!

Of course, is it good? That's the important question. I don't have an answer to that question right now! And there you go.

This weekend, I finally got in gear with the submissions. Every once in a while it hits me that I'll be graduating soon, and it would behoove me to have as many publication credits as I can get my hands on. It sounds mercenary, but there it is. Plus there's the fact that I love having my poems published. So there's that on top, then.

I sent out fifteen submissions out into the universe. (Send all Mo-fame vibes my way.) I love getting the envelopes back in the mail, even rejections. Because I am weird. At least it feels like I'm putting forth the effort. And there's that glimmer of possibility-- dare I call it hope?

Hey, since writing the above, I figured out something I can do with my laptop.

The laptop has a modem (a 28.8 modem, how sweet) and I burned a CD from my PC with the necessary drivers on it and configured my dial-up (thank you, thank you, I'm not totally useless) and the long and the short of it is my laptop now connects to the internet.

Which is perfect, because if nothing else, I can email files back and forth to myself. A silly, yet elegant solution. And I can pack up my new laptop in its new carrying case (yes, I went shopping today) and take it to a coffee shop and write to my heart's content.

I also got a teeny little scroll mouse for the laptop. It is the cutest, seriously. It plugs right into the back and I can use it instead of the thumbpad mouse. And it is teeny! So teeny. And it scrolls! As mice tend to do.

Okay, before I start waxing eloquent about the placement of the function keys or something, I'm gonna go. Woo!