A couple sessions ago, my psychologist gave me a little homework: use my living room more often.

This may sound strange to you, but my mind tends to think that my bedroom is the only room where one can truly feel safe, or at least, moderately safe. When you live in a dorm or with your parents and your room door is sometimes the only barrier between you and a father who wants to beat you, this is probably true.

When you live in purposely elevated house with two stories, with heavy front doors that are always locked, there is actually quite a large barrier to your (ever getting older) parents trying to invade and kill you, and holing up paranoid in the bedroom with all your stuff might be called under-utilization of the living space.

As you can imagine, staying downstairs is difficult for me. If I ever forget to keep stay in the damn living room directly in my consciousness, sooner or later I find that my subconscious has tucked me in at 7:30pm. I don’t have cable, so there’s not much that can zone me out into staying downstairs, and I stopped being interested in cooking or eating much some months ago.

Ah, but I do use the internets a lot… and switched to a laptop a few years ago, when I was in omfg run! mode (or at least, more so). Naturally, it migrated to the bedroom along with my DVD collection. I do a lot of stuff on it, like write and blog and suchlike, and it’s sadly the center of my life.

So I took my laptop to the living room, along with various cables and an external hard drive that would make it really, really inconvenient to drag back upstairs. (If I ever get the right converter, maybe I can connect it up to the TV, and then with Hulu, I’d basically have less annoying cable. ((Yes, even if Hulu starts charging.))) With my laptop anchored downstairs, and the fact that my subconsciousness has never managed to evolve thumbs, it would require my conscious mind to dismantle and drag the laptop back upstairs… and my consciousness chooses not to do so.

It’s been moderately successful. I say moderate because nowadays I find myself trying to do everything on my iPhone (which really cannot stay downstairs, because it’s also my pager, and I’m not about to sleep in the living room). Fortunately, Steve Jobs doesn’t believe in old-fashioned keyboards, which means the iPhone will never get an external keyboard without jailbreaking it. And while I have learned enough iPhone typing skillz during my commute to type 1000-word posts with just my thumbs, and the copy-paste feature from app to app has made it more convenient to include links, it’s all still really annoying.

Dear Steve Jobs, please continue disbelieving in external keyboards for iPhones. Love, S∂.