During the past year to year and a half I have been having a reoccurring problem with my neck and shoulder muscles. About once a week, more or less, these muscles would tighten up and cause a great deal of discomfort, sometimes it seems the discomfort would reach all the way to my stomach and make me feel a bit sick. I didn't know if it had to do with the way I had been sitting all day in my office, or if it was that I had bought a laptop and sat differently over the keyboard.
The answer has become apparent because some of the keys on my MacBook, the "S", "W" and "2", all in a row, just stopped working. I have had this laptop for about a year and a half, so that was why it was on the suspect list. I really like Apples, before this I used a Mac-Mini for six years.
So I ran down to the "Genius Bar" at my local Apple store and was told pretty abruptly that yes, the keys don't work, and that even though I didn't spill any coffee on them since it was over a year and I didn't buy the extended warranty they could fix it, but I had to leave it for a week, and it would cost me $180.
I asked if there was any other solution, and the kid said that I could use another keyboard.
I was in a bit of a state of shock because I thought that Apple was such a magical company that they could just sprinkle fairy dust on the keys and they would work again. I didn't make a decision what to do and took the machine back home. On the way home I realized that I had used a wireless keyboard for the Mac Mini for years. It was now way out of date, not the sleek, flat keyboard they sell now, but it was still an Apple, so I thought I would try that.
I went home and tried to connect the old keyboard and didn't have much luck. Then I began to Google though ideas about how to get it to work and after half an hour searching around I saw that someone posted a solution. Now, as you can tell since there are the letters "s" and "w' in this post, that it works.
What has also become clear is that when I use this old keyboard in front of the laptop I sit up much straighter, I don't hunch over to reach the smaller keys of the laptop and my shoulder has not hurt me for three weeks.
So, taking this all a needless step further -- why did this happen to me? Is this just good fortune that those keys broke? Did I cause them to break because I was in such a bad position that I was banging away in a destructive manner on those letters?
or
Did the gods of laptops and backaches smile down on me, and since I am such a blessed soul in their eyes they decided to offer me a solution that I was too blind, too lazy, or too cheap to see.
I only propose this last idea because it is the kind of thinking that seems to be pervasive in both my patients and in some of our national politics. It is the kind of sloppy, lazy, magical thinking that leads to trouble. When a candidate for the office of President can announce that she feels that the tornadoes and hurricanes we have been having are God's way of telling America to cut the deficit, then things are getting pretty scary.
When people are able to say openly as Rick Perry does, that God approves of his running for President, or as one of my patients does, that the people living above her have invented a noise machine that goes on when she comes home, goes off when she leaves, and knows when someone else is with her so that no one else can hear it, and this is being done to her to make her leave the apartment because they disapprove of some of the things she had done in her bedroom, we are dealing with problems. People tell me they won't go out on days with certain numbers in it, or that she went back to the guy who broke her nose because he said he was sorry, again. This is not good thinking. There are more effective ways to link cause and effect.
But so much of what people think about is totally preposterous, from extra-terrestrials, to get-rich scams, to waiting for The Rapture, to talk radio, that people become accustomed to sloppy, lazy, distorted thinking. It becomes easy to scapegoat minorities, to blame outside sources, to expect miracles, to get sucked in to advertising, and to be used, fleeced, manipulated and screwed, and then blame it on your spouse or the government.
In short, I don't think that God broke my laptop to keep me healthy, so that I could continue to keep typing and write such an illuminating blog.
I do appreciate the coincidence.
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