So.

Yesterday was supposed to be a really good day. My last project would be completed by then and I would have officially survived my first, rocky semester at the University of Michigan. I was looking forward to relaxing and doing not much of anything and giving my mind and emotions a rest before diving (happily) into my post-finals to-do list.

At about 4:00 on Wednesday it still looked like I had a happy Thursday ahead of me. That's when I finally finished my quantitative methods paper (not my best work ever, but I was so tired of that class that I was past caring) and dashed upstairs to the computer lab to print it out. When I got there I found that the lab was closed until six for a staff meeting. No big deal. I certainly wasn't going to stick around until six, but I had to be on campus the next day for a meeting anyway so I thought I'd just print it and turn it in then. I headed home practically singing, I was so relieved to have finally reached the moment of completion that I'd been anticipating for weeks (and sort of since the beginning of the semester). I was in such a good mood when I walked in my apartment door that I pulled out my laptop and began composing a blog entry that I tentively titled "10 Reasons to Be Happy" - finishing the semester intact was a big one, and I was pretty sure I could think of nine others without much trouble.

And then, on number six, the screen on my trusty little iBook, which had served me so well all the way up to a few weeks past its warranty expiration, suddenly went blank and the computer shut down.

I stared at the black screen for just a minute in shock, then frantically pressed the power button, pressed the power button again, checked the battery, plugged in the power adaptor, tried the power button once more, and finally accepted that something was dreadfully wrong.

I hadn't realized until then just how attached I am to my computer. I thought of all the school documents, the journal that I kept on my computer for nearly a year, the recipes I've been compiling for several years, the half-written stories, the miscellaneous lists and letters and personal projects, the iTunes music (much of which I hadn't yet gotten around to backing up) and the thought of losing all that made me feel sick to my stomach. But it wasn't just the files - it was everything I needed my computer to do. I use my computer for an awful lot - internet access (which is pretty essential), schoolwork, almost any non-school writing that I do, music, keeping in touch with people, downloading articles from class websites, and even watching movies on rare occasions (I don't do this that often, but to be honest I was really, really looking forward to renting a couple of DVDs now that the semester is over).

Without my computer, and not knowing when (or even if) I would have it back, I suddenly felt...lost. Part of me was bothered that I could be so upset by the loss of an inanimate object. But most of me was too upset by the loss to be bothered with pondering the impact of technology on my emotional well-being.

Fortunately (relatively speaking, at least), I was finally able to get my laptop running long enough to back up my most important documents on my key drive. But it stubbornly persisted in shutting down after five or ten minutes each time I got it going again. And this is not the end of the story. The next morning, still upset, I made my way to campus to print out my paper and attend my meeting. I got to the computer lab, stuck my key drive into the computer, and opened up my "Final Paper" document. To my horror, the document that appeared on my screen was not the nice, APA formatted, 12-page final paper but an old (old, old) version that was little more than my research questions and a sentence or two of how I might go about my analysis. When I had backed up the files on my computer, I had accidentally overwritten the version of my final paper that I'd been saving on my key drive for easy transfer to the computer lab computers. I wanted to cry. The paper was do at five o'clock and I had to write the whole thing over again. And I had a project meeting that afternoon. And I had just opened an email reminding me about another meeting that I had completely forgotten.

I tried to compose myself. I reminded myself that I had printed out all the SPSS tables I had used in my analysis (though not the new tables that I had spent a good two or three hours putting together in order to organize the data for ease of analysis and for presentation in my paper), and that the second write ought not to take nearly as long as the first because I could remember more or less what I had said. But I had been done yesterday, and suddenly I was very much not done, and that was a horrible, horrible feeling.

I worked feverishly for an hour or so and then went down to my project meeting, where we'd been told we were to explain to the group what we had done this semester. But no one was there, and someone said that there was a colloquium and we wouldn't be meeting today, and in relief I went back up to the computer lab and finished my paper, which was of even lower quality than the first try but by now I really didn't care anymore.

Then I went back downstairs and discovered that the meeting was going on after all, and that I was over half an hour late (not good). I took my place and watched as other team members presented Power Point presentations of their work over the semester and realized that we weren't just talking about what we'd done - this was supposed to be a formal presentation. I didn't have a formal presentation. (To my credit, I had no way of knowing that this was expected of us - everyone else had been on the project for at least two semesters prior to my arrival and they knew the ropes. But the fact that I didn't have a presentation was, again, not a good thing.)

And then the meeting ran much longer than I'd anticipated and before they even got around to me I had to excuse myself for the second meeting I was supposed to attend. I didn't realize that this would upset my advisor the way it did. "Why didn't you tell me you had another meeting?" he asked. (Because I didn't realize the two meetings were going to overlap.) "When am I going to hear about your work?" And then he sighed and shook his head and told me to come see him after I finished with my other meeting, and so of course I was unable to concentrate for the entire second meeting because I was fretting about what I was going to say when I met with my advisor.

Mostly I just wanted to go home and crawl under my covers so that if anything else went wrong I wouldn't have to know about it.

But I'm feeling better today. The meeting with my advisor went just fine - I keep forgetting that he really does want to help me be socialized into the research group and the school of education and he really does have my best interests in mind. And he also told me where to go to get my computer fixed. I took it there this morning and shelled out $79 just to have them diagnose the problem, and then it will be another $80 an hour for them to fix it if it's fixable.

I have been trying to tell myself that if my computer was going to go at all, it's a blessing that it waited until the end of finals. But the truth is, this is not a good time, no matter how I look at it. The warranty just barely expired. I needed to spend this week catching up on my work for the research project and I can't use the computer lab for that. A hefty chunk of my post-finals to-do list involved using my computer. And this month is the tightest month financially that I've had or will have for a long time. This was almost the worst time my computer could have chosen to die on me.

But you know, I've been thinking lately about just how resilient humans can be. Yesterday I felt like I was standing at the end of the world, and today I feel perfectly happy. Stressed, yes - far more so than I expected to be two days into my break. But upset and worried. But overall I know I'll be okay, that this will pass, and that now I have a much better story than I would have had if I had spent the last couple days just sitting back and relaxing.