Why You Punish Me?

I listened to Hootie and the Blowfish today, and I was so happy I nearly cried. Okay, not really, but I was pretty fucking happy. Saturday night, at 7:18 pm, my iPod froze up 46 seconds into the Flying Lizards “Money, That’s What I Want” and refused to a) turn off; b) reset; and c) stop pissing me off. But when it froze, I was at work, unable to take any real action to try and remedy the situation, save for pressing and holding, over and over, the play button and the center click button. No joy.

After I went home, I decided to let the battery run down and see if it would reset itself. If not, I would take it to the Apple Store and start executing Apple Experts until one of them fixed it. Fortunately it did not come to that. The battery eventually ran down, it reset, and now I'm ecstatic that I can listen to Hootie whenever I want. But all was not totally bleak, for even as my iPod lay stricken, I comforted myself with the notion that at least all my stuff was safe on Tian Tian, my hard drive.

Then I dropped the fucker 8 inches to the floor. It made a strange noise, but kept functioning. Yipes, man. Just yipes. I moved it off the floor, which is a terrible idea. Paramedics will tell you not to move people who have spinal or neck injuries, cause you might leave them paralyzed. Yeah, that advice is also good for hard drives. After I picked it up, it quit working so much. Damn. Damn, damn, damn, damn. Now it has lots of damaged files, an inability to connect via Firewire, and an inability to connect to my iBook. One hundred and sixty useless gigabytes of storage space. Ninety gigs of music and video inaccessible. Over three hundred dollars worth of iTunes purchases in serious jeopardy. Well, not entirely. The thing stills shows up, spottily, on my Windows machine (yes, I have both Mac and Windows, a portable and a desktop, and yes I’ve customized them both; so now I’ve been outed as a dork) and I’ve been able to copy some of the files to Butterstick, my new 250 gigabyte external drive. But it’s taking for frickin’ ever. First off, my Windows tower has no Firewire (which perhaps doesn’t matter) and must rely upon USB 2.0 to move these huge folders of audio and video. They say it’s as fast, but I’m unconvinced. Secondly, every so often I will encounter a file that’s damaged that has not been spotted and removed yet. This causes the file transfer to hang, wasting lots of my precious time. Then the drive will fail and disappear from the computer. I turn it off and back on, and it reappears. That’s not good.

I have been able to make some choices about what I need and what I can leave behind. For instance, I had to ask myself “do I like Alison Krauss enough to dig through these songs and find the one damaged file that’s holding up the transfer?” No, I don’t. It’s not exactly like throwing away media, which I cannot do, but rather triaging survivors into life rafts and letting others go down with the ship. I’m looking at you, Tom Waits.