A Few Hours Pornfree

The RAM went in without incident. What went less smoothly was everything immediately after. Flushed with the success of not destroying anything, I decided it was the right moment to do a clean install of Tiger. I wasn’t paying close enough attention and formatted the entire drive. Watched the installer run, waited for the desktop to appear, and then slowly understood what had happened. Every file I owned—gone. My Mac was, for a few hours, completely pornfree.

What surprised me was the absence of dread. In 2004 I had a genuine catastrophe—I was messing with a dual-boot Linux setup on my Windows machine, got something wrong, and wiped both systems simultaneously. That one hit like a fist to the chest. This time there was just a strange weightlessness, like the universe had zeroed the counter and I was too tired to argue. A forced new beginning. Sometimes those are the only kind that actually stick.

The night before, Lydia had a party. Mille convinced me to bring the new video camera, so I filmed most of it. The footage is funny if you were there—which is, in fairness, the only condition under which party footage is ever funny to anyone. I can’t put it online anyway: even compressed down to a smear of large pixels, the file sits at 20MB, which defeats the whole point. One guest emptied her stomach at some point. She’s reportedly fine now.

Also: Ben, I gave you roughly 13 euros. I’m not saying I’m counting, but I am absolutely counting.

School starts again tomorrow. Ten hours. My entire website survived the wipe because it was sitting on the 1&1 server rather than locally—the one good decision I made this week. I keep telling myself to burn a backup to CD. Maybe this time I’ll actually follow through.

Relationship update, since apparently I run a gossip column now: Ana and her Flo are back together. John and Mandy have split. As I said before—an ending isn’t the end of anything.