Rollercoaster

What a day. Earlier this week, my external hard drive stopped working. Today, after an unsuccessful attempt to recover my files with the help of the Clinton School’s wonderful Kari, I finally had to face the fact that it had crashed completely. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just my backup drive. It was my main repository for 4 years of photos, music, and archived things like college essays and parts of the film I made before graduating from Barnard. I’m crossing my fingers that I can find bits and pieces of this stuff on various computers back home. Otherwise, here’s to hoping Vimeo and Facebook never die.

By mid-afternoon I was starting to feel a little crazy. My head was buzzing, I was antsy, and I couldn’t seem to get any work done. So I went to the pool! It was great to be in the water again. Whenever my mind started to wander towards my disappointments, I just swam harder and focused on my stroke. I kept swimming until my severely out of shape body couldn’t drag another arm through the water, but it was enough to get my head screwed back on to my body and temporarily stop me from obsessing over things that are beyond my control.

But that wasn’t the end. When I got home, I realized that I had misplaced my swim suit somewhere between the office, the bus, and the walk from the bus stop.

While no doubt a let-down, I couldn’t care too much because I had seen something on the way home that made everything alright. For the first part of the ride, I had my eyes shut against the glaring sun shining directly in through the window. When I opened my eyes I noticed, in a spread of sheer winter cloud out to the side, a colorful little sun dog. Then, on the walk from the bus stop I admired the stringy bark hanging from the eucalyptus trees and the reddish tinge of the tall grass on Mount Taylor and I couldn’t have been happier.