Failure as Artwork

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a shiny toy while Brandi was out of town: an eeePC netbook, 8.9" of screen almost enough to squint at while writing the great American novel.

Almost immediately, my attention was drawn to it, especially after I realized I wasn't going to make it through my Java programming class in one piece. So I dropped the class and picked up the mini computer.

After a day's worth of tinkering with it, I realized I had completely hosed the system and had to wipe it, reinstalling from the DVD Asus kindly included. This happened shortly thereafter when I installed the wrong system, very deliberately as it turned out.

Eventually, I figured out a less ambitious vision of what the computer could accomplish and put that together. The final system could compose documents in OpenOffice's Writer, race lightcycles in Armagetron, and play text-based adventure game Dungeon Crawl, a game so addictive that it advanced ahead of the twenty-years-more-contemporary Wii to become my favorite computer addiction.

Eventually, I got curious again and started adding things to the system. I went a bridge too far on that one. Turns out, the package manager for the Basic desktop is not compatible with the Synaptic Package Manager, and the security update I thought myself so clever for downloading hosed my system to the point where, to update any programs, Synaptic told me I had to uninstall absolutely everything. Xandros, and probably Linux in general, is one of the few environments where you can actually dig so vigorously that you will open a hole underneath you into which you will promptly fall. And so I did.

I lost a few things: the ability to compile Java, a few weeks' worth of diaries that mostly recorded my angst at dropping the class (and yet still receiving email updates from the teacher) and trying to write more stories to fill the gap of creation, a desktop I thought pretty cool. I wish for the life of me I could recall how I ever got the Java compiler to work on this computer, but it may call for the blood of a goat, and we ate the last of him two weeks ago.

Also hammering home the lessons of failure for me this week, my agent sent me on two auditions, with a third one tomorrow. I don't think I did well. Today, I spent an hour and a half waiting to perform four lines of a monologue about the great, low prices offered by a local flooring/carpeting company with a famously low-rent theme song. Ninety minutes to memorize the four lines, and when they asked me to go off script ("Okay, now we'll drop the crutch...") I just stared blankly. Off... what? I'm terrible at memorizing. The first two went all right, delivered in a spokesman tone, but the last two, a testimonial, I'm pretty sure I whiffed. And here I'd hoped I'd finally made it (locally) to be played ad nauseum in local commercial spots. Damn my Absent-Minded Professor attitude!

At least there's always tomorrow.