It's now safe to turn off your computer.

I'm scared. I think my computer passed through evolution when I wasn't looking and now it's *gasp* alive. Any moment now the monitor is going to open its eyes and blink at me to prove that I'm right. I do not pronounce this lightly. I know what I'm talking about. Just now I took 20 minutes to reboot because as soon as Windows loaded, the screen told me that it was now safe to turn off my computer. I'm sure it was safe, but what about it being desirable?

My machine has possibly laid claim to 'intelligence' overnight. Or maybe it was bit by tiny bit every night for the past so many nights, but that's not the point here. The point is that it has developed a mind of its own. And it knows a weak opponent when it sees one. I have no qualms about admitting that I know zilch about computers and their workings. Sitting duck, me. The big bad machine sees me and thinks, there's a dumb one. Let's play with her. That's so not good.

My sole aim these past few days has been to make explorer, yahoo messenger and MSN messenger work at the same time. But my sadistic computer, it doesn't let me. Yahoo.exe has caused an error in so-and-so and will now close. Explorer has performed all illegal operation and will now close. Restart your computer and try again. Contact your vendor if the problem persists. It's raining error messages.

I'm too scared that the computer will finally stop working one fine day and I'll have to call a computer person. He will want to hit the monster on its head and kill it, then breathe artificial life into it again so that it works like I want it to, not how it wants to. In other words, reformat.

Here comes the absolutely scary part. The reformatting has been done earlier and that I count as one of the most traumatic experiences of my life which has been instrumental in shaping me. In fact, I might go so far as to say that I trace the start of my paranoia back to it. Even after 'mother god promises' and umpteen assurances, I simply cannot stop thinking about scenarios involving the loss of the precious information that I have in my system. Complete and repeated explanations regarding copying the information on CDs before formatting and writing down of what I want saved does not help either. I cannot tell you how hard it is when a computer goes for reformatting. That one day is absolutely horrendous. It's like you're giving off pieces of you.

Amidst all this hand-wringing upheaval and distress, there is a very real possibility that I'm falling dangerously in love with my monitor because it has this as a desktop wallpaper. How can one not fall for that? Here's a secret: I sometimes grin and wink at it when I'm alone. Hmm. For all future purposes, I did not write that.

But you see the pure dilemmatic situation?! I'm falling in love with something that will surely hurt me in the long run. Sooner or later, it's bound to. It's even more certain than death and taxes. And I'm unable to fight the love or the dependency. I cannot take it off my desktop the same way I cannot cut my arm off. I might even do away with the arm if comes to choosing between the two. What's an arm when there's irresistible sexiness to be considered? See? I'm doomed.