We left the church after the service and walked slowly through the rain to our car which was parked in a side lot a bit removed from the main parking because my grandmother said there would be more spots available. That decision seemed increasingly misguided as we awkwardly dodged puddles and cracking in the stepping stones, trying to keep the same pace as Nana who relies heavily on a cane. When I opened the car door I didn’t even register that it was unlocked, I was just so happy to escape from the weather. It wasn’t until I looked over at the seat next to me and saw my new leather jacket in my dad’s tote bag rather than in my duffel where I had packed it earlier that morning.

I do a lot of my writing a little bit ahead of time. Non-time sensitive blog posts are generally written a week or two before they are published. In addition, I keep a list of ideas for posts on a “sticky note” on my desktop. So, you can imagine my frustration when my computer was stolen while I was visiting Ithaca the weekend before New Years.

I lost photos, videos, manuscripts, and every piece I wrote in the Non-Fiction Writing Workshop I took at Columbia last summer. While a lot of it is backed up to an external hard drive, I am that person that never got around to hooking her computer up to the Cloud, so some of it is just lost.

I thought I would be a lot more upset then I am. Am I frustrated? Yes. Am I sad that I lost all that work? Most definitely. But if you’d asked me the night before what would happen if I lost/broke my computer I would have given you a lecture that my life would end which would, in all likelihood, neighbor on the apocalyptic. In many ways my life revolves around technology. I spend 9+ hours per day on the computer. Add to that time on my phone, kindle, and ipad and it becomes daunting if not outright worrying.

So when I found my computer was gone and I didn’t cry, yell, or throw a tantrum I was rather perplexed. This piece of my life that I thought mattered so much really didn’t. It’s disappointing to lose writing but, in the months since each piece had been written, I hadn’t opened or shared any of those files. Hopefully most of my photos can be recovered between my external hard drive and camera, but I rarely looked at them anyway. The things that I lost, the things that I thought that I was tied to and that had so much value, really don’t.

I am going to need to get a new computer soon and, hopefully, i’ll be smarter this time and back everything up. However, it’s nice to know that when my tech dies, I don’t die with it.