ARRRRGGGGHHH!!!

Just like Charlie Brown used to scream.

This is turning into a blog of disasters.

A few days ago, in preparation for my friend Justice reformatting my hard drive and reinstalling Windows, I backed up all my files to my 120GB Maxtor external hard drive. This included all my work for law school, all writings, all scraps of notes and ideas, my tax returns, pictures, my bar application, and, to top it off, a lot of media files (the bulk of the hard drive).

Well, after a successful reinstall, we hooked my external hard drive back up. And, lo and behold, after a brief period of acting funny...IT DIED. Gone. It's all gone. I spent the evening I should've used studying for my Evidence final trying desparately to get my computer to recognize the external hard drive. I reinstalled, plugged, unplugged.

There was much swearing.

Of course, my mind races thinking of all the irreplacable data. It boils down to only about 10GB of absolutely irreplacable stuff. But still....

The irony: Justice didn't wipe the drives in my computer. Had I not transferred the data, I'd still have it.

Oh, also, I lost my scholarship at TU. I was THIS CLOSE to keeping it. The equivalent is having an 89.5 in a class and the prof won't round it up to a 90. So now I have to scramble for funds to continue to attend the fourth-tier, yet ridiculously expensive, TU college of law.

I spent almost $200 on the external hard drive back in December, in anticipation of the new computer Justice helped build for me (I had been using the Win98 machine I bought from George in 2000). So, if I even want another Maxtor (or external HD) I'll be out even more.

I'm tired of spending so much money on technology and having it fail on me. I'm on my third DVD player in as many years. All this junk is piling up, and I hate the idea of just throwing these broken devices away. It seems like it's my fortune to purchase lemons. The new computer Justice built for me has had issues with freezing up ever since he built it.

Today, I don't feel so hot. I have no money, and I'm getting massively in debt.

The moral of the story: back up your back ups. Also, study hard.

Self-Trepanning and Other Delights

About a week or two ago, I dove into bed, tired as hell, eager to get started on a long night's rest. I slid a little further than intended and banged my head on the very sharp corner of the bookcase-dresser right next to my bed (the unfortunate consequences of not being feng shui!) As you can imagine, it hurt like hell. I reached up and felt a very pronounced puncture wound on the top of my head - a real hole. For a second I had a full-blown freakout, imagining a life of cleaning out my hole with Q-tips and rubbing alcohol, protecting my brain from little critters trying to burrow in there, knowing that, due to a foolish dive, only a thin membrane stood between my naked brain and the exposed air, and would present a myriad of problems, including just generally altering the way I'd shampoo for the rest of my life. Fortunately, the puncture quickly scabbed over. In fact, it healed faster than almost any wound I've ever had in my life.

Unfortunately, this morning I did something else very stupid. Those who know me know that I have a zillion video tapes filled with what are, to me, interesting programs I can't bear to part with. I've been trying to keep the rising tide of tapes at bay by using every portion of blank tape I can scrounge on my existing tapes, in lieu of buying fresh tapes. I had one in the VCR that I thought was properly queued up at the end of aforementioned interesting programs.

It wasn't.

I wound up taping over - 1. Sofia Coppola on MTV2's Subterranean (pre-two-headed-dog makeover) talking about Lost in Translation and showing really cool videos directed by her and her brother, Roman. 2. an IFC clip about Roman and the making of CQ, and 3. The recent George Lucas AFI Lifetime Achievement Award special - with a bunch of stupid shit off the E! channel. I have tried to avoid profanity in this forum, but the euphamistic "crap" just won't cut it when describing the majority of the E! programming slate.

When the hell are they gonna give VCRs an undo button?