Day 2: Screw This

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Felicity Heal's REFORMATION IN BRITAIN AND IRELAND)
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: one egg, baguette, carrot juice, grapes, vitamins
lunch: leftover chinese from that good place on college near ashby
apartment clean: yes

The computer situation has worsened. I finally succeeded in getting the Dell Customer Care rep to understand that not only was my hard drive suddenly not working, but the tops of the screws were becoming stripped, so that I was worried that each time he had me remove and replace the hard drive would be my last. And lo and behold, after I hung up and tried to remove the hard drive one last time -- bam. One of the screws simply will not budge, is no longer a screw by any definition. I tried. Ara tried. The hardware store tried -- actually, various members of the family-owned business emerged one by one, trying an array of different gadgets. The used computer store guys tried. We tried everything, every home remedy, every online suggestion, there are none left, don't bother, and you know what? It's Dell's problem now. I called Customer Care back and now I'm sending the whole damn thing in, and they will either extract my hard drive or they won't and if they don't then it's on them to replace everything, because everything is under bloody warranty.

Except, as the Customer Care rep pointed out, my data. Let's be honest: the chances that I will retrieve anything off of my hard drive... are low. The next person to say, "Well, I guess that's why they say you should back up every week" gets a kick to the face. I don't know why anyone (my wife, my mother) has had even the slightest impulse to say that to me. Honestly. Thanks for the life lesson.

But anyway: the last backup -- only a partial backup, really -- was in late July, it seems. Beyond that, my dissertation is relatively safe because I have been emailing various drafts of everything to various readers. Some notes have been lost, but a lot of it was deadendage anyway. My teaching files are intact as far as the middle of the summer: the second half of summer teaching is gone forever. Files I kept for fellowship apps are gone; tax forms are still there. All our music is safe. All our photographs, I'm pretty sure, are safe (except possibly for unmemorable recent ones -- not sure).

And then there is the creative stuff. I wrote a ten-minute play over the past few weeks, and as I sent it out to a contest, I kept a hard copy for myself. It is now the only copy left. I made quite a few changes, some of them very good, to my full length play GLORY FOR YOU. All of those changes are gone, and the play is reset back to the state it was in when we held a private reading of it some weeks ago. Also lost are the massive notes and drafting that went into GFY, which has taken a fuckload of research. The only other creative pursuit that has received my attention since the July backup is my NaNoWriMo project, THE PHANTOM TUTORIAL, which I only began a couple of days ago anyway (and which, miraculously, I partially emailed to myself on the first day). Still, it will be tragic to watch the NaNoWriMo progress meter drop, rather than rise, when I confirm that 3500 words of progress are indeed gone forever.

In the meantime, there are some brightsides to this. It will force me to upgrade to Windows 7 (when I get my fixed computer back), and it will give me a sense of "new beginnings" in all of these pursuits, a good few of which (the play, the chapter) had grown a bit stale in recent weeks. I just wish my new beginning didn't have to happen on my wife's Mac.