STANDBY

Control panel. Energy save settings. Standby after… I don’t know how much time it takes before one stops being active and just switches to standby.

Being in standby is not being shut down. It is almost like that: there is the same difference there is between sleeping and being dead. There is a spark of life in the standby state, a regular breath, which is simply given by that small light (green, blue, orange…) that flashes on the edge of the computer. Yes, there is life even in a standby state. Weak, intermittent, faint but always life. Of course it is not as good as being running fast and productively with a multiple Giga byte RAM. Of course it is not as good as being luminous, multi-tasking, busy, busy, busy… so damn busy… When you are on standby you just do one thing: you stay there.

What happens sometime is that somebody comes and turns you on again and suddenly you’re back to your luminous, multi-tasking, busy, busy, busy, so damn busy state. Maybe you’ll be working differently from the previous session but you’re back to activity and that’s all that matters. God, how you have been waiting to be turned on again by that finger! You have been there, intermittently intermitting your existence waiting for that finger to press the right button because, if it is the right finger, it knows where it has to put pressure.

When you are in standby you always think the right finger will come and press your key to life. Sometimes disenchantment brings you to wait just for a decent finger and not for the right one. Better than nothing is the overall compromise of new millennium. When you are in standby you have one main thought running in your head: if you had to be shut down you would be down in first place. You think: it is cruel to put you in standby, leave you there waiting and then die. Just cruel. Sometimes it happens, though, and it does happen more often than necessary. It happens just because of an absent-minded attitude or more likely because most of the times people don’t know what they will do with you: they put you in standby and wait to see what happens, if they can take a decision, make their mind instead of just being there, scratching their heads with their nails. Rarely it happens that people put you on standby because they need to get away from a second, they admit that, they leave you there but they know they will be back with a decision. The sad truth is that what happen is that nobody switches you to standby: you just switch yourself to that state because people often just go away and leave you there while you’re still way too active. You keep staying active for a while –as I said, I don’t know exactly how much, I guess it depends on people-, then you roll your eyes around to see if there is anybody around, then you go on standby and wait. First you think it is just a natural pause –everybody needs to break from time to time-, then you start feeling useless, then you go on standby even before realizing it. I wonder if in the moment right before shutting down we said some kind of little prayer like we do just before dying. Our own kind of prayer… something that sounds like Please, hold on just a little bit longer… Please. Maybe the right finger will be back. Maybe.

Control panel. Energy save settings. Standby after the time you need to understand they have gone. Shut down as soon as you realize they won’t be back. The quickest, the safest for the whole system. It is the iron law of energy saving. And of human relations.

I SAW A GHOST

I’ve never understood why ghosts come out at night and very rarely during daylight. Maybe they don’t like it, maybe they are busy, maybe they don’t want to get burned. Maybe, though, it is just us. I mean, during the day we keep ourselves busy. We run like aunts everywhere, small and always in a great hurry. We always have something to do and even when we don’t really have anything to do we are busy doin’ nothing. While there is light outside the window we don’t really stop for a second. We are frenetic, lazy, busy, tired, walking, running, jumpin’ on and off the bus, the tube, the car. If there are ghosts around us we are just too busy to recognize them. We can get to the point that we are so absent minded to grasp our ghosts hand, shake it and say “Nice to see you again” – thinking we are talking to somebody we have not seen in a while.

When daylight ends something changes and it is not just the colour of the sky.

I am personally unable to sleep. My head is always on as a radar. Maybe if you have an antenna on the top of your head like I do, then you really can understand what I am talking about: I attract ghosts. In the Ghostbusters movie the brave ghost-fighters attracted their enemies with some kind of electricity, sucked them into their backpack and set everybody’s life free from easy fears. Now, it comes I have a kind of antenna on the top of my head: I’m always awake, attentive, thinking. My antenna attracts ghosts with its electrical outputs… but unfortunately it happens that I have no backpack. I hate backpacks, I prefer bags, better if big and soft, but bags are not shaped to contain ghosts. I have never seen a Ghostbuster with a Dior bag under his arm. Now that I think of it, I have never even seen a female Ghostbuster. By the way, I attract ghosts and then I don’t know what to do with them: I have no way to suck them out my head. They keep on flying, they come and go constantly. They just hunt and haunt me. “Well, it is their job: if you are a ghost you hunt and haunt people…” you might say. I agree with you. Poor ghosts: they have to hunt and haunt me. They have to. Problem: call me a bitch if you wish, but I could not care less about ghosts needs. I think to what happens to me an my little head when they do what they have to do. I have tried, I swear. I have tried so hard to trick and then get rid of them. It just did not work.

I saw another ghost last night. I have to be honest, I tried to fight this one harder than ever. I had a strength in my body, a special trust in my capacities I never felt before. I pulled up my pyjama’s sleeves and said to myself I could make it: “Just don’t be afraid, Kiki”. So, I saw a ghost last night and I recognized it. It was a ghost I had seen many times before. It is the only ghost that potentially could suck me in its backpack, lock me in and set everybody’s life free from their enemy, namely me. That ghost is a freaky Kiki-buster. It is powerful and scary…and we all know ghosts power derives from their capacity to scare us. It was my plague coming and visiting me.

I wish I could tell you an happy ending. I wish I could tell you I fought my ghost and I won over it. I wish I could tell you I did not surrender to tears. I wish I could tell you I did not shake, not even for a second. I wish I could tell you I stood brave and proud in my pyjama in front of my worst enemy. Bullshit. I cried, I screamed, I shacked, I fell on the floor and I start to sail a sea of tears. Coward. I swam to the coast and I put my clothes on, run out of my house and took a train. I tried to run as fast as I could and went away. I wonder how I can be so stupid: when I run out of my house I forgot to take off the antenna from the top of my head. Tonight -even though I will be over a national boundary, I’ll be speaking French and walking on a lake side- the ghost will come back and find me. Look: here it is already… reflected in this little mirror I carry on my hands.