Back From Nothing

I formatted my hard drive. Not intentionally—I was doing a clean install of Tiger, got sloppy, and erased everything instead. All my files, all my shit, gone. I sat there waiting for the OS to load and realized I was staring at a completely empty machine.

I figured I’d freak out. After 2004, when I wiped Linux and took half my Windows setup with it, I thought I’d learned some paranoia about data. But this time felt different. Lighter. Just this weird sensation of okay, start over. No dread. No panic. Just emptiness that was almost peaceful.

The RAM installation part was the real careful work. I had this plastic spatula (!) and kept thinking I’d snap the little retention clips. Got it done, though. The hard drive is where I checked out mentally.

Night before all that, I went to a party at Lydia’s. Mille talked me into bringing my new video camera and just filming stuff. It came out genuinely funny, if you were there, but at 20MB compressed it’s not exactly shareable. We had a good time anyway. Someone got sick but she’s apparently fine now.

Ben, if you’re reading: you owe me like 13 euros. Or maybe I owe you. Honestly can’t remember. Not being cheap, just want to put it on the record.

School starts tomorrow. Ten hours minimum. I’m not looking forward to it.

The real pain: my website was on a 1&1 server, so I didn’t have backups locally when the drive got nuked. I keep meaning to burn it all to CD for insurance and I never actually do it. So that’s sitting in the back of my mind now.

Love life news: Ana and Flo got back together. John and Mandy broke up. People separate and reconcile. It’s just how things go.

He should apply the lotion.