I was innocently sitting in my bed, procrastinating by reading an article on New York Magazine's Vulture about the female characters in Boardwalk Empire (I haven't managed to get through a single episode on On Demand yet). "…when women were more likely to be thought of as sex objects or mothers than equals…" Click. Click. Click. I knew it immediately. It was the sound that all of the Apple support blogs call "the click of death." The click that means complete hard drive failure. For the second time in less than a year, my computer's hard drive had tragically and suddenly died.
Since, I've moved quickly through the stages of grief — denial (just ask the nice man with the Southern accent at AppleCare), anger (yelling and stamping, then Copa Tuesday and quincy at Kweder), bargaining ("This is God smiting me for voting for Democrats"), depression (a couple long naps) and now acceptance.
The reality is that I'll be just fine — all of my work is saved either on flash drives or in Gmail attachments. And a new hard drive isn't a fortune, nor that difficult to procure. Or at least this is what my more rational friends keep telling me. I just can't help it — I truly feel as if I've been betrayed! Like my computer Serena–style slept with my boyfriend and took off to a boarding school in New England without so much as a goodbye letter. I know it's ridiculous, but in its death, my MacBook hurt my feelings.
My laptop is (or was) such an intregal part of everything that I do in life as a college student — school work, Street work, communication with people I see both every day and once a year. It was my entertainment, my informant, my distraction. And even in the year since this happened to me for the first time, my computer had developed into a reflection of my personality. More than just my music and my photos; my aesthetic, my organization systems (or lack there of) and my preferences are up and gone. With the inevitable, yet unpredictable malfunction of a stupid piece of hardware, my main life line has abandoned me.
Am I pathetic? Is it scary that I'm so emotionally dependant on a piece of machinary? Probably. But it's also, I think, not that out of the ordinary in the modern developed world. Welcome to the 21st century I guess.
'til next week,
