Wednesday, April 28, 2004

bad readers - I have broken, mis-used, or otherwise destroyed two laptop computers during the past week.  I have also fallen victim to poor planning, procrastination, bad mood, and other assorted, completely and utterly self-inflicted, things that have completely screwed up my week. I spilled a beer into the guts of the first laptop.  I borrowed another from work, and promptly proceeded to forget everything I knew about logging into my company's server.  Result:  I wrote the comprehensive outline, and the first 4.5 pages of a ten-page paper on a guest account.  So that's gone, and the paper is due in less than 24 hours.   I should mention that the FIRST outline I wrote was on the computer I stupidly poured a beverage into.  I was sitting in a coffee house with the second computer, with a 256MB hard drive hanging from my keychain.  Did I stop and take the 45 seconds necessary to drop my work onto my portable hard drive? The hard drive I explicitly purchased for the purpose of backing up my sensitive documents?  I did not.  I can't blame machines for this, I am simply stupid.  I cannot count the times that I have smugly stated "the failure rate of hard drives is 100%," to anyone within earshot.  No, this wasn't a hard drive failure, but I am still an idiot. I had tickets to the David Bowie concert last night.  I considered giving my highly sought-after ticket away.  But I didn't.  This was before I knew I'd blown away the second outline, and bulk of my first draft.  It was a GREAT show, I'm not sorry I went.  We were standing in the huge, general admission crowd, enjoying the show, when a complete stranger walked up to us and pressed two "tree deck" passes into our hands.  So, up into the 100-year-old live oaks we went, and planted ourselves front-row, center stage, overlooking the entire crowd.  The night was beautiful - 77 degrees, cooling down to about 68 as the sun went down.  Clear skies, light breeze, perfect half-moon peeking between the oaks' leaves, David Bowie.  I don't feel like rhapsodizing about it here, I'll just say that I worked pretty diligently at storing the evening's events in long term memory. 8:29:09 PM