On Thursday, I had prepared a lovely post that I was very (very being a word I once was told not to use while writing, and ever since I cringe whenever I use it) eager to share.
Then my computer began to die. It's an odd thing, to watch a computer slowly descend into death. I tried CPR, I tried everything I could think of, but as one file after another mysteriously breathed its last breath, I had to admit to myself there was no hope.
So (so being another word I have issues with) I sit here now in front of the reformatted and recovered version of this beast, an empty shell that held at least three years of my life, which is now mostly gone. Yes, I had most of my writing on disk, but the little things (remember, it's the little things that matter most): logs, pictures, assorted ramblings, artwork from various friends, music, and all the things I can't think of right now but know are missing and will eventually look for and remember are gone, it's those things I'm saddest about.
The ironic thing is that while I had composed a long, self-important blog to post, I thought of a different post, a side-post, if you will, that I wanted to write about. I thought about it as I walked through the campus Thursday afternoon, on my way back to my car.
It was simply this (ironically):
What if I wake up one morning and the Internet is gone? I wonder how I would deal with that loss of connection, the loss of the ability to look up anything (Orion's Belt, Meyer's parrots, the Grand Canyon, Soy products, and the list goes on) I'm currently wondering about. But what if the Internet dissapeared, and all my friends with it. I can back up files, I can save anything I'm working on to disk (something I obviously need to do more), but I can't back up my friends. And yes, I have most of their physical addresses. Yes, I have phone numbers. But there are some people, more elusive than others, that I do not. The thought of waking up one morning and being unable to reach them is disconcerting.
So I have issues with abandonment, and I've transferred it to the Internet. The mind truly is a beautiful thing (ha).
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