Oh yeah, forgot the heartbreak

That's right before I go - I did promise heartbreak, too.

Today my iBook crashed. I dropped it while I was sitting on the couch, chatting with mom on the phone, and then it wouldn't wake up. So I swaddled it up and rushed it as lovingly as I would a baby through the rain. At the Apple Store, which teemed with tourists (it's the famous, cube-shaped one at 59th and 5th), they delivered the bad news: it was fatal. The hard drive was failing. The little spinning hard-drive disk are more delicate than you would think and the fall seemed to have dislodged them. A transplant was my only hope: they pointed me to TekServe, at 23rd and 6th, so out into the rain I went once again, wishing I had a trench coat and some sort of really high-tech umbrella with a built-in plastic sleeve (dripping umbrellas on the subway - ugh).

Thanks to the move, it had been weeks since I'd backed up my data. There were things I needed for stories and pitches in the works, plus all my job-searching materials and emails. So I pungled up $925 dollars (including tax) and next week I'll have my computer back, with a new, larger hard drive, and hopefully all of my recovered data. Ouch, I'm still smarting.
I'm going to install a little button here where you can donate and help me offset the cost. Right. Here. Wait for it.

On the way home, my bag felt empty where the laptop had been, I kept expecting its weight to be there. There's your heartbreak.

Anyway, I refuse to believe this is a streak of bad luck or anything like that, because I believe those kinds of thoughts are self-perpetuating.

But I do wish it would stop raining. And I suddenly have an intense desire to invest in a trench coat and get up to speed on the latest innovations in umbrellas.
I think I understand New Yorkers' sartorial obsession: when you're actually out in the elements it matters tremendously what you wear. Think about it - all the other fashion-capital cities are walking cities: Paris, London, Milan... Dressing well is a desire to conquer the outer environment, And once you go there you start thinking along the same lines for your inner environment. I think I'm onto something here.

But I'm sad about my Mac! I may be making light of it, but this really sucks. As if things weren't chaotic enough, with the stabbing, and my room still in boxes, and my needing to job search, this had to go and happen!
I'll get it back in a week. In the meantime, my roommate's letting me use her laptop, which she dropped yesterday and cracked. Egads.