Crash

My computer is dead. I spent an indecent amount of money on it four years ago, wrote more than I've ever written on it, and now it's at Office Depot with an infected, irrevocable motherboard.

I never backed up. Four years' worth of photos, music, and writing will likely be retrieved from my hard-drive, but I won't know for sure until tomorrow afternoon. To top it all off, I just spent nearly an hour writing a long, involved, and to my mind quite insightful blog post about the whole experience, replete with lessons learned and a tidy ending, and just as I was finishing the final sentence, the entire document was highlighted, deleted, and the changes automatically saved. It happened so fast I couldn't even make sense of it.

It's easy to feel devastated. It's easy to loathe computers and their insidious ways. But the truth is, I'm darn grateful to be typing this on M's lap-top, which he defragmented, cleaned up, and gifted to me today. It's smaller and lighter than mine, more square, less gloss. It's already proving to have some issues (the aforementioned erasure of my blog post). Still, I've adorned it with some stickers, I'm enjoying the tight clank of the keys.

And no matter what, from now on, I'm taking the time to back it up.