Recursive Words

In the moments before waking up this morning I had the worst dream in quite some time – so bad that I can still remember it, 18 hours later. I told the rest of the family about it at dinner this evening, so I suppose that might have recorded it permanently into my subconscious – who knows.

It’s funny how that works. If I type notes into the computer, I’ll invariably forget them – if I hand-write them into a bullet journal, I’m far more likely to recall them. I wonder how that works?

Perhaps I know that I don’t need to remember things that are stored in the computer, so my brain doesn’t hold on to them?

Anyway. The dream.

I was sitting at the front of a classroom, and a female teacher with dark hair walked up to me from her desk, carrying my exercise book, and slammed it down in front of me. She had a face like thunder.

I opened the exercise book to discover other people had written all over the insides of it with horrible messages about the teacher – but made it look like I had written them.

The teacher had written in red ink that she was horrified, and that I was to stay behind to talk to her. The feeling of emptiness, dread, panic, and injustice was enormous – I woke up moments later with my heart racing, not really sure what was real, and what was imagined. It took a few minutes to calm down and remind myself that it had all been a dream.

Of course looking back, it was utter madness – I haven’t sat in a school room for decades. My dreams always make so much sense in the moment, but when I pick them apart they rarely make any sense at all.

So.

The title alluded to a very expensive text editor. Two days ago during a moment of weakness, I caved and bought myself a copy of iAWriter for the Mac. I gather it’s somewhat famous among the literati – very, very minimal text editor that has all kinds of quiet doo-dads to help you write. Or at least, that’s the marketing angle.

We’ll see.

This is the same person that has bounced between Obsidian, Notion, Scrivener, Google Docs, Bear, Journal, and even Visual Studio Code while writing blog posts.

Something I did realise this week – that I should have thought of some time ago – is that iCloud supports plain markdown files very nicely. So I can quite happily throw everything I’ve ever written into iCloud and access it from my phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop.

Of course this is me though, and a little voice on my shoulder starter whispering about backups. Is the cloud copy really a back-up? What if Apple delete my account? Should I not have my own copy too? I could use one of those old hard drives on the shelf over there…

And that’s how a USB caddy for an old hard drive turned up in the post today. The innards of an old desktop computer have been pressed into service as a backup drive. Of course I haven’t figured out the best way of backing things up yet, but that’s besides the point. I’m aware that Macs have a “Time Machine” function – but am not really sure if I need anything that clever.

I need to stop thinking. It’s late. I should have been in bed reading my book some time ago. I’m reading “The Graduate” by the way. Never read it before. It’s kind of hard going – the protagonist is difficult to like in the early chapters. I guess we’ll see. I’ve never seen the movie.