I don’t really know what to say about it yet, because it hasn’t really sunk in. It’s gone. Stolen, 99% likely from the airport in Charlotte. I didn’t have anything on there I can’t replace except for the last month’s work on my PhD, which I hadn’t backed up because of the sheer volume of data (I deal with large volumes, tens of gigs of data, and it’s not practical to back all that up). Still, the thought that someone else out there has all my stuff that was on there is icky, and the sudden lack of my trusted computer, the first computer that had been definitively *mine* in years (I had many computers, but all of them were ostensibly owned by work) is shocking enough to me that I really don’t have words for it.
And it’s funny, because it’s not like I’m really all that bent out of shape about it. The words I lack aren’t lacking because they’re so dire, dark, angry, or gloomy, but really I can’t decide how I feel about it most of all.
I’m here in Chicago, a city that I have missed, and I’m not about to spend the next few days obsessed over what someone might be doing with my computer, or over the vague ache that I have somehow lost a limb, as despite how very much mine the computer was, it’s nothing that dramatic. People steal things, and I was an easy mark with an obviously valuable article in a busy airport secured by a velcro bag out of which nothing had ever been stolen before. I was an easy mark for my own complacency that my stuff was mine. I’ll be more cautious in the future, of course, locking my bag and encrypting the portion of my harddrive that holds important data like passwords (I’ve changed all my passwords and I’m watching my credit cards and other accounts to make sure they haven’t been compromised).
But I’m here, surrounded by friends and snow, cuddled against my best friend in the world and an elderly, slightly wierd, and very blind cat. I’ve had coffee while walking in a foot of snow in clompy boots. I have tea and cocoa and Pat Rothfuss’s excellent Name of the Wind. So I guess everything’s alright.
