A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to travel to Asia and before you think this post is about my wonderful adventure, let me say, I will save that for another date. Today’s story is however about something that occurred while jaunting halfway around the world. A friend had used my MacBook to access something via her thumb drive and my hard drive crashed...well, twenty minutes later it crashed. Coincidence? I think not. For any of you mac users, when you see the faint light grey file folder with a question mark blinking at you, you know how this feels. It reminds me of the coon dog that would enter the foreground of the screen during old school “Duck Hunt” from the original Ninetendo. It pops up and laughs at you and shakes up and down a little as if its laughter at your failure is causing it to convulse rhythmically. I would always try and shoot the dog to stop its berating of my hunting skills once and for all, but alas the gun only worked on the poor ducks. In other words, you feel like you are the butt of a huge practical joke. Like someone or something is laughing at you saying, “Ha! Your stuff? It’s gone! Sucks to be YOU!”
I didn’t have time to mourn the loss of my laptop while on the trip, but as soon as I returned home, the reality of what happened hit me like a ton of bricks. Questions circled about. “What will I do for school when I start classes again this fall? How can I afford to fix it or buy a new one? Are you supposed to keep graduate school papers for anything important? How many pictures did I have on iPhoto? What kind of small fortune did I drop on iTunes in three years?”
Craptastic!
I was able to grieve the loss of my papers quite quickly in almost as much time as it took to write them (don’t tell my professors), but when I started to think about the pictures and the iTunes, my heart began to sink.
Off to the Mall of America Apple Store where in a miracle of sorts the manager honored my expired extended warranty (that I forgot I had purchased once upon a time) and installed a brand new hard drive for free ($800 value, gasp!).
As I went to pick it up the next day, I was explaining my plight to a cute, little Apple Store associate not quite nineteen years of age. As she returned from retrieving my computer in the back, she handed it to me and said, “Well, you could look at it as cathartic!” Now aside from the fact that lil’ miss Apple probably just learned the word ‘cathartic’ the previous year in her freshman ‘Intro to Theatre’ class, it made me think – “Maybe she had a point”. My entire hard drive was wiped clean. Everything good and bad, gone. A fresh start. A new hard drive with no mark of my history of my struggles or memories I’d like to erase. Hmm…
Now, to be honest the three years I’d owned that hard drive had been riddled with some crazy memories. Most of which have been deleted. But, you can never completely delete things off your hard drive, right? CSI could probably locate those bad memories in two minutes flat. So, yeah, I like this new hard drive. Cathartic indeed! But then I start to think about the memories that I would never, ever want to delete - Pictures of my nephews growing up, years I spent in CA as a youth director with students I love, goofy photo shoots with forever friends, secret songs I got from ordering Matt Wertz’s latest album early!!!!!
I think what it comes down to is you can never erase just a part of who you are. The good comes with the bad. It makes up who we are. Even though I have painful memories that make me nauseous to think about, I love who I am today and I know that those painful days played an intrinsic part in making the “today me” happen. I think about the many photos I lost and how many I had uploaded to facebook (oh, thank goodness for facebook). But, isn’t true that you only upload the best to facebook. You don’t upload the photos where someone blinked, or when someone is cracking up because someone said something funny or farted right before the shot. You edit life a little for facebook and that’s what I missing. So, as thankful as I am to have a new hard drive for free (plug MOA Apple Store once again), I would rather have an unedited version of me and my memories. I’m learning that the journey isn’t worth deleting no matter how silly or painful it is and that the destination is just another starting point.
