Meaning in the Cleaning

Death. No other word could possibly describe what my computer was going through. I tried every techie term I'd ever heard (thanks, google, for how-to's) - defrag, BIOS, reformat, drivers, etc. The success was minimal, reducing crashes to a few an hour instead of every few minutes, so the other night I reverted to an act of desperation - cleaning.

Of course, cleaning out the computer meant opening it. For a brief moment I contemplated whether or not it was the wise thing to do before I was completely consumed by curiosity and an overwhelming desire to tear something apart. Indiana Jones quickly came to mind as I pried open the case, the tomb-like parallels aided by its contents - cobwebs, dead bugs, and clumps of dust that looked like hamsters munching on the motherboard.

The adventure of discovery and treasure hunting lasted an exhilarating 20 minutes before the lull and humdrum of everyday life crept back in under the guise of needing to clean and put things back together [which, by the way, took nearly 5 hours... ugh].

I was talking about it later with a good girl-space-friend of mine when she asked me what it was that drove guys to do the things they do - take things apart for fun, ignore instructions, refuse directions. Was it a form of conquest? Of exerting dominance? An attempt to display our strengths? None of those seemed right, but I couldn't think of anything better at the time. So I spent awhile contemplating ('awhile' = anything more than 10 minutes), and I'm starting to think that it comes more as a response to the question,

"Do I have what it takes?"

Different guys finish the question in different ways, like 'do I have what it takes to have a successful career?' vs. 'to get good grades?' or 'to get married and have a family?'. But regardless of the context, I think it's a question that all guys ask themselves (obviously not just guys, but I think it's different for women, just like a guy's take on attractiveness is vastly different than how a woman approaches beauty). Those types of situations help us to reaffirm our answer - Can I solve this problem? Do I have what it takes to get through this? Life doesn't always come with directions. Perhaps we are simply taking the opportunity to practice with small things, training ourselves so that we'll be ready when it counts.

Then again, perhaps it's simply boys being boys. Like when my roommate EY got a paper shredder for Christmas and decided to test it out by shredding the instruction manual. [I admittedly was there, and was probably even majority instigator... So much for being philosophical!]

Regardless, my computer has now been running for 11 hours with no crashes :D