I was working in my studio today, happy as a clam and whistling a little tune, when all of a sudden I started hearing this unholy grinding noise coming from another room.
After ruling out anything easily fixable, I wandered over to the (brand new) computer with my throat closing with every step. I have such irrational panic about the computer. I have so much of my work on it, all my designs and pictures, Atti’s whole life worth of pictures, music and podcasts I listen to all day long, all my phone numbers and addresses, my whole outside world. I don’t spend a lot of time with people in the flesh. I have therapy appointments of one kind or another with Atti every single day. On top of all the hardships of this year, I have no social life outside of the internet. The internet is what allows me to function happily in my hermit existance.
Hearing the sound of gears grinding growing louder and louder the closer I got to the computer sent me panicking nearly to convulsions. The computer was completely frozen, so I turned it off and turned it back on, except it wouldn’t turn on. When Bear came home we rushed over to Fry’s hoping it would be a simple fan problem. Maybe all the cat hair I swim through made it’s way inside and is jamming up the works. No luck. The noise appears to be a catastrophic hard drive failure.
The computer’s under warranty, so we’ll get a new one with no problem. The issue is that they’re not certain they’ll be able to get anything off of it. At all.
No pictures, no patterns, no programs, no podcasts, no pictures.
Bear is confident that everything will work out OK, but what really hacks me off in the moment is that I had been working on the pattern for a stuffed black cat I made LAST YEAR that I was so excited to share with everyone. So now even if they manage to get anything off of it (and Bear is literally calling the people who retrieve data for the US military to make sure they do) there’s no way I’ll get it in time to share the pattern I’ve been sitting on for a year. Plus I’ll have to live without podcasts for two weeks, and surf the internet on an ancient laptop that takes five solid minutes to open a page and isn’t even compatible with flash.
I realize this is the very definition of a first world problem. But it’s the first world problem that hits me the hardest in my soft spots. Wanting to be productive, creating roots and commemorating branches, treasuring the life we’re creating together, overcoming the anxiety I struggle under….this darn computer is a symbol of my whole life and all my efforts, and it’s broken. It’s hard not to extrapolate that into meaning more than it should.