The die is cast. After about 6 hours of cumulative talk-time with Dell tech support over the past two days, I had to clean install this morning. So now I guess my system is spring time fresh, and all that info is gone. If you’re a friend and reading this, I probably no longer have your email address. What has been most overwhelming here has been the loss and frustration I’ve felt. Disproportionate to the event I think. The actual documents and such I don’t miss so much. But while the machine was down, I could barely think about anything else. I was medicating myself by watching season one of Futurama with the commentary track on, which was both comforting and irritating, since it meant that I couldn’t hear the jokes on the show unless the volume was so high that the commentary was completely disruptive. I took a one hour break to watch the Joe Schmo Show, which is one of the only bearable reality shows. So what was I mourning in this whole process? the ability to go online easily? That’s a need I couldn’t have even articulated a few years ago. So perhaps the computer has become one of the battery of distractions I deploy about myself daily. Interesting after London where my media input was greatly reduced: no tv, a little news on the radio, occasional email checks from the gallery’s Imacs. At home I have a media regime and it’s interesting that I got home and almost immediately screwed it up. (I wish I could pretend that this whole foul up was something that happened to me but it didn’t. It was something that I did) One interesting side effect: computer crash stories play around the office like family illness stories.