I didn’t realize how dirty my laptop could get until I tried cleaning it. Sure, my iBook was the 12-inch white one that would definitely attract loads of dust and dirt but I have always took care of the cosmetic aspects of the iBook so it didn’t appear that dirty. It was only when I started moving wet tissue over the keyboard keys that I realized how dirty my fingers could have been when I was typing (for the last 3 years). I lifted the whole keyboard and cleaned the inside – the edges were surprisingly dusty. I seriously wonder how those dirty stuff got in there.
Then came the trackpad and the surroundings that looked a little yellowish – the ethanol on wet tissue did the job of getting rid of those stains. Now the ‘interior’ of the laptop looks much cleaner, so on to the base. I expected the base of the laptop to be the dirtiest but it was unexpectedly clean. I just went over it once and it remained as white. The top required an extra bit of effort but those didn’t deter me and soon, I got a iBook that looks as good as new.
My iBook just entered 3 years old this year, with it’s day of first usage sometime between 30 October to 1 September 2003. It’s a G3 so most new softwares cannot run on it anymore, that applies even for Google Sketchup, which is pretty sad. Fortunately, I have had several old, and outdated but nonetheless powerful softwares that allows me to get by with graphic design work and other miscellaneous stuff.
Much like my iBook, our minds have been around for quite some time. We are probably no longer ‘compatiable’ for news things at some point of time but that’s okay as long as we retain our powerful selves and not be swayed by the new and trendy stuff. More importantly, I guess we don’t realized how contaminated our thoughts or how corrupted our ideas have become in the process of existence in this reality. Like the dust or ash particles that pollute our air, reality is filled with vices and contaminants that will linger around our minds and we really should take time off to clean them off – that’s to say we should practice a little more thinking, about what we know and believe in, a process much like hard disk fragmentation and identification of bad clusters except this time, you can completely remove the corrupted documents with your willpower. Only so, would we not fall victims for the fallacies or untruths that we have to absorb to get by in reality and allow ourselves to be clean and new to the world every single day – to shed all the fatigue(ness) of being.
Stay on the tip of the rabbit’s fur. [With reference to ‘Sophie’s World’ by Jostein Gaarder]