I’m typing this on my wife’s Mac Mini in her quilting studio. “I’ll be glad when you get your computers back,” she said just now.  “Maybe you could try writing your blog on your iPhone, like the Japanese authors that guy was talking about.” She’s referring to Mike Elgan’s story in the interview, of how cell phones in Japan have become a popular platform for reading short fiction, because so many people commute in tight quarters in Japan. And they not only read books on their cellphones, the write them with their thumbs on cellphones.  I’m a decent typist on my iPhone, and I have the iBlogger app for posting to this blog from the phone.  But it’s a slog to create a blog post that way, especially when there is still one operating  computer in the house.

My wife is momentarily distracted by arranging fabric pieces on the floor of her studio, but I know my Mac Mini mooching time will be limited. “Play nice, Lennie,” she said after I had barked at her for unwittingly deleting the WordPress page where I had begun this post. “I feel bad your computer crashed, but I didn’t do it.”  There is no denying the truth of that statement.  And if the tables were turned, I would certainly be nowhere near as generous with my computer(s) if hers had been the one to crash. “You’re going to finished soon, right?” she asks pleasantly.

Of course I am promising my Higher Power that if He will please, please bring my MacBook Air back to life, I will always, always back up everything to a hard drive or my MobileMe place in the cloud.  I’d even offer up the MacBook Pro, which is getting along in years and does not contain my most recent podcasting files.  There are no non-backer-uppers in line at the Genius Bar.

Mainly, I feel disoriented.  I spend so much of my time on the Internet, using my computers, that to have both of them snatched away is sort of major. Like waking up from a dream, or going into one.  Even in the midst of my panic last night over missing the podcast deadline, I understood that this was not fatal,  that stuff happens, and take it a day at a time, and all that blah blah. But still. My father devotes a lot of his time to raising national awareness of the threat of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack that could shut down the electrical grid.  Just this infinitesimal taste of personal disruption makes me understand better why Dad is so passionate about this threat, which he considers to be a clear and present danger.  I mean, what if there hadn’t been a Mini in the house, or my iPhone still connected to the Internet?  I don’t mean to be silly here, because I truly am getting a taste of how much I depend on this network.

It’s getting close to the time to leave for the Apple Store.  It’s a sunny, clear day in Cambridge, and the Cambridge Boat Club is hosting a rowing regatta on the Charles. Sooner or later I’ll be back on the net with all my tools. It’s good to get shaken up once in a while, and to land on your feet feeling more grateful for what’s still standing.

Fridays have always been Political Gabfest days for me, but yesterday on the cross trainer there was no new show, because I had deleted the feed to my iTunes directory.  So I spun the list of podcasts remaining on my iPhone and came up with UChannel, also known as the Univerity Channel, a project of Princeton University.  It’s a series of full-length university lectures from around the world on a wide range of topics.  The audio quality is good, and the topics are serious.

So I listened to a May 25, 2009 lecture at Cornell by David Healy, a psychiatrist and Cardiff University professor, who rattled what I think I know about the world with his passionate critique of the pharmaceutical industry’s influence on the practice of medicine.  He argued that Prozac and similar drugs can lead to suicide, and he called attention to the amount of ghost writing in prestigious publications such as The New England Journal of Medicine.  Click here for audio of the lecture.

The talk lasted more than an hour, so I finished it up in the car later yesterday morning, driving to a far-away optional errand just so I’d be able to keep listening.  Professor Healy has the intensity of a fringe reformer, but if even half of his thesis is valid it indicates the daunting scale of any effort to truly reform the U.S. health care system.

This provocative podcast, unlike the Political Gabfest, left me with the feeling that I had learned something new.  I’m not sure how long I’ll maintain my political abstinence, but so far I enjoy the doors it’s opening up in my mind each day.