Starting fresh with 120 gigabunnies

At the moment, I’m sitting easy once more in my beloved office chair in front of my computer, staring at the text-only configuration screen while Windows XP decides precisely how much havoc it will wreak on my motherboard. It turns out that the ominous grinding noise I heard earlier came not from my own trusty hard disk, but from the puny 7 GB one that Bjorn gave me almost a year ago. It doesn’t really matter; my system wouldn’t boot and there wasn’t any way for me to fix it, so I’ve been computerless. The 120 GB drive that Nathan was kind enough to order me online arrived today, so I’ve been neck-deep in power and ATA cables, laboring away with the little screwdriver on my Swiss Army knife, getting everything inside my dusty computer case cozy and connected, and now the exciting part has passed and I simply must navigate the Windows installation process, clicking “OK” until something interesting happens. I’m still waiting.

In the meantime, I’ve got Kelly’s iBook perched in my lap, killing time with adverbs.

I realize that the Week of Europe has come and gone with only one scant post to show for it. Maybe it’s for the best. It’s as I mentioned earlier: writing about it, especially after the fact, just doesn’t cut it. It’s a hollow kind of activity for me, and, to be honest, not one I was really looking forward to. I already said my piece about the things that matter to me, scrawled upside-down in the pages of my all-purpose yellow spiral notebook, and most of those will never see the light of day. Being stranded high and dry, computer-wise, gave me a convenient excuse to neglect my duties as webmaster, and I dare say I feel little remorse for my actions. Don’t fret overmuch; I’m sure that The Europe will be making more than the occasional appearance in my posts for some time to come.

I think I once wrote something about my love-hate relationship with my electronics. The melody hasn’t changed much since then, let me tell you. As if to say “welcome home” when I first arrived back in the states, my toys started playing dirty almost immediately. First, the day after arriving back in the country, my cell phone lost its will to live. One second it was in my pocket, switched on and doing its thing, and the next it was inexplicably off and wouldn’t power back on. Quite troubling. AT&T Wireless, ever the loyal customer service force, told me that since I was past my year of manufacturer’s warranty, I was essentially screwed – but kindly offered to sell me a new phone for a couple hundred dollars. I was crushed. Not only did they want cash money for the new gadgets in their store, they had discontinued my sexy little phone, the Nokia 8390.

Not to be outdone, I went on eBay and bought another from a sorority girl in Santa Cruz. It arrived yesterday, and with the exception of none of the numbers from my old phone transferring over, I’m very happy with it. It came complete with one of those sexy face plates I’d always wanted but never sprung for; I think mine’s called “Dusk” or something equally seductive. Maybe “Twilight”. Or “Pheremones.” It’s blue and dark grey, just like a certain website. Rad. When I switched it on for the first time and browsed to the phone book, I was disappointed to see, instead of my own list of carefully catalogued first-and-last-name entries, a list of the sorority girl’s friends and family. Nathan suggested I call a few of them, just to mix it up, inform them of the phone’s new owner, but I just wanted my numbers back where they belonged. And so I sat, deleting this other person’s life entry by entry, until my thumbs had the dance memorized. My phone book was blank yesterday, and today I have around a dozen entries, having pirated them from emails and other people’s phones. I’m trying to look on the bright side of things, for example, that all the people I never really called but was unwilling to discard from the directory have been magically deleted. A fresh start.

This means, by the way, that if you want to be included and I haven’t already called and told you that you are, you’re going to have to call me: 206.331.1610. It will only hurt a little.

Between my computer and phone both giving up the ghost in the same week, I’ve come to realize exactly how much I rely on the damn things. It’s exactly as I wrote last year: I can’t function without them. Having my two most important pieces of consumer electronics out of commission simultaneously absolutely crippled me socially. Without AIM and easy access to email I couldn’t chat, and without my phone and with no way to access my address book on my computer, I couldn’t retrieve anyone’s number to call them. I told Naomi earlier that, socially, I had turned into a giant, soft baby. Upon reflection, that was a fairly apt description.

I’ve been home for almost two weeks now, but only now, after getting these two final, ineffably crucial pieces of my life back into place, do I feel “back”. It’s good to be back.

So I lost a few phone numbers, a few dollars, and a couple hundred megs of data. Only the last really hurts, especially the pictures and the short stories. But it’s kind of nice, in theory anyway. A fresh start, with no cheating.

One good thing (besides increased HD capacity) came out of this mess: while I was away, AT&T Wireless decided to get on the ball and merge with Cingular. For the first time ever, I have cell phone reception inside my apartment. So call me. I’ll pick up.