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I am typing these words on my brand new MacBook laptop. The reason I have a brand new MacBook laptop is not because I have a tendency to buy exciting electronic toys. I had a two year old entry level iBook which I had no intention of replacing, even though for the past six months or so I have not been entirely overjoyed by it. But three weeks ago my car got stolen. Okay, it was really Gin’s car, but I was the one using it that day, and all my stuff was inside it. And although the thief left the car in another area of Salt Lake City and it was found by the police that very night in no worse condition than it was before it was stolen, the thief did not leave behind all my stuff which I had inside the car. Namely, six cans of Mountain Dew, a North Face down parka, and my wonderful eight year old backpack (which contained my iPod, my digital camera, my scriptures, a library book about Utah’s national parks that I was going to return after work that day, a copy of The Wednesday Wars which I had just started reading the night before, and, as you might have guessed by this point, my laptop).

Strangely, I have not been super-bummed or angry about the whole experience. Mind you, I was not happy that it happened it by any means. But on the whole I think I’ve maintained a pretty decent attitude. We did get the car back, after all. And it turns out that we are getting a fair amount of reimbursement money from homeowners insurance, which makes it a possibility to replace a lot of the items now or in the near future without too much financial
strain. And, in the case of the iPod and digital camera, I did have an understanding with myself at the time that I bought those items that they could be lost or stolen or break at any time, and that was just my risk for having the convenience of carrying them around with me all the time.
So I was already prepared mentally that I could lose those items at any time and either need to replace them or do without. And please don’t fret about my music; because I have an old-school fetish for buying actual CDs and keeping them meticulously arranged on my shelves, I lost virtually no music.

However, up to this point, I have neglected to mention one fun fact: in what I thought was an act of efficiency and wisdom, I was using my iPod as the backup for all my photos and other files I wanted to save from my computer. I didn’t anticipate losing them both simultaneously. So, most of my digital-camera-era photos (2.5 years) are gone forever. Many of my writings and drafts are gone forever. Files, software, bookmarks, and probably a bunch of other things I haven’t thought of quite yet are all gone. Things such as my novel rough draft that I gave up on halfway through because I was sick of it (although I think I have all of it printed out somewhere).

I’m sad that I no longer have these writings and photos, and yet in a way it seems like an almost positive thing, a purging of some sort. I am forced to start over with everything, which is what I needed to do in the first place but couldn’t bring myself to do. So now, I start writing afresh, with no copying and pasting stale things from old drafts. I start taking pictures in a new way. I start computing with a brand new computer that is fast and has a big hard drive and I can organize it from scratch however I want to do it. It’s all really kind of exciting, when I think about it this way. Everything new. It is spring, after all, and I did just get married. In that context it’s very appropriate for everything else to reset, as well. Thanks so much for stealing my computer!