How do you say "RESCUE DATA"

I was surfing the net last night when my computer made an awful grinding noise and promptly went black. Attempts to restart were met with an empty blue screen. This morning in the computer lab, Taro was able to back up my data files (thank God) to the Mac in the lab. The office staff then pointed me in the direction of the nearest Apple service center which just happened to be across the street from the stationary store that I had spent an hour trying to find this morning. Such an ordeal to buy pencils and an eraser to mark up a text. When you actually know where you're going, it's about a 10 minute walk. Problem with maps here, the English/pinyin spelling for the streets on the map do not actually match reality. So you have "Chungshan" on the map, which equals ZhongXian in real life. And I am a little slow on the draw in terms of matching equivalents. A nice kid named Dave, recently out of college with a knee injury, helped me out at the Mac store. But he did not back up my contacts or stickies or email. Man alive. But hopefully they will be on the computer here at TAV. The whole thing would have cost me 1500 NT (about $45), but Dave felt so seriously bad that he sent me on my way. I suppose it didn't help that his animated co-worker, a girl who asked me if I liked the new Kelly Clarkson CD, was smacking Dave in disbelief. The stickies and gmail are not the end of the world, but the address book loss does suck.

I had a very Buddhist moment last night of my data files flashing before my eyes - the lesson plans from UTD and SMU, my wedding photos, I very quickly cycled from disbelief and desperation to a well that's life phase. It would have made writing interesting, back to the old-fashioned paper and pen, which after this experience, I think I will do just that. Though the majority of my files have been restored, much of the information is in Chinese - i.e. error messages times and dates. Bugger.

While I waited the two hours in K Mall for Dave to get the job done, I had a chilled apple juice in the Starbuck's and people watched. Sleeping in public, seems perfectly common and respectable. A mother and teenage daughter plopped down next to me after visiting the cosmetics department and transferred their tubes of lotions and emollients into clear plastic containers which they then relabeled. This was the weirdest thing I have ever seen at Starbuck's, domestically or abroad. The older woman squeezed lotion out of the tube into the new container and when dissatisfied with the speed she was accomplishing her task, she took a pair of scissors from her purse and cut the back of the tube and squeezed from the opposite end. She then used what I can only describe as a plastic gelato tasting spoon, to get the rest out, all the while banging the new plastic container against the table where my apple juice sat, trying to get the lotion to resettle.

I now have a huge headache, my shower is still not fixed, I am dehydrated, it is raining, and tomorrow I have a radio interview and an open studio.

Man alive.