Blink
I realize that with so many people losing everything in the fires, it is petty for me to complain about my computer. Especially since mine was a completely avoidable tragedy. I am a fool for not backing up. I even used to have a backup hard drive, but it failed years ago, and I never replaced it. So here we are, and if that bothers you, you might as well stop reading now.
I have heard that a habit only becomes an addiction when it interferes with other areas of your life. For me, I essentially decided a long time ago not to participate in life, and I find other things to fill the gap. I get obsessed with certain things to a degree that appears as an addiction, until sooner or later, I completely lose interest and move on to something else.
Before this week, I did not fully appreciate how much I relied on my computer as a distraction. Obviously for surfing the internet, but I don’t even own a tv, I streamed everything, and it was also the only thing in the house that could play dvds. Of course I used it for games, for reading, for writing, for saving things for later. It was my music studio and my sketch pad. Frankly, I have been mourning it like an old friend.
Ironically, I spent the past three months renovating a room into a home office (slowly, because I am very lazy and, as noted, easily distracted), and my computer died literally the day before I was ready to move it to its new home.
It occurred to me that I could use this as an opportunity to refocus on to some other projects that I have been putting off. Then I realized that my notes are gone. All of them. Notes, designs, calculations. Nine years of my life, from the utterly trivial, to potentially very consequential financial documents, and everything in between, gone, in a blink.