[insert string of offensive profanity here]

Just when I thought I might be on the mend from a mixed manic episode that kept me more or less completely useless for more than a week (aside, that is, from doing totally useless things like manically building bookcases), I was dealt a really irritating modern life blow.

The LaCie external drive I'd bought about 6 months ago kicked it. I'd just finished moving all of my encoded music (about 80GB worth) and six years worth of digital photos to it, to clear space from my working drives.

It started yesterday, making an odd atonal humming noise, not unlike a woman in line with me at the store the other day, who hummed every note of a song in one of two notes. Then, I noticed it was inaccessable. I tried to unmount it - no go. I disconnected it, powered it down, let it rest, re-did... no go.

I took it over to Morgan's house, after a good cry. He took it out of the enclosure and put it in a spare he has. Same bad hum. His computers at least partially recognized it, but couldn't see any of the data.

So, I might be fucked. The idea of this much data loss is really painful. Yes, some of it is backed up, but it's the goddamned insult to my attempts at an organized or rational world that gets me. I am sick and tired of supposedly consumer products which require expert level interaction, and fail like a sixth grader with a glue habit.

Next comes bargaining, I imagine. The disk doctors, the dropping from 2 inches, the freezing. But I think my music and pictures are gone, and it has rocked my mental stability more than is entirely reasonable.

Perhaps I should be more accepting, try to live a more informationally zen-like existence. Is information a posession? Does the desire to retain information inherently corrupt us, keeping us from a truer state of being?

Or do I just have to dig out my cds every time I want to listen to a piece of music again?