:: gasping for breath ::

life can feel like this enormous ice bath sometimes. have you ever tried swimming in late september, or in lake michigan on a cool summer day? it's so cold you gasp for breath, but if you're diving underwater, you can't breathe in and a lot of times you end up choking and thrashing-- and standing up and feeling all tingly and then you get used to it and it's all good, but it's bad until you stand up out of the water.

right now, life is like that ice bath and I cannot stand up if my life depended on it, which in light of my little allegory there, it does.

many of you know, my mac crashed saturday before last and I didn't have the information backed up, so I lost two years of my life. all my design assignments and projects and portfolio; all my pictures, all my music, my creative suite; my current resume, my old school assignments, my completed and ready-to-be-printed school assignments, and my in-progress school assignments.

I lost a lot.

unfortunately, many people like to respond, "well, you can redo your portfolio--make it better!" and I nod and smile and run away and cry because

NO. no, it doesn't work like that.
1. I had hundreds of documents on my computer. I don't remember them all even if I wanted to recreate them.
2. I could remake them better, but then they wouldn't be the same, would they?
3. it's the history of me that I lost. I can't get it back: not my first endeavors in illustrator or my little pine tree logo or my typography haikus. it's not that I need the content as much as I want to see the progress.
4. DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY HUNDREDS OF HOURS THAT WOULD TAKE. seriously, I might as well make brand-new stuff than remake old, tired, bad ideas that weren't worth much in the first place (I'm not kidding myself. I just had warm fuzzies, that's all).

so I'm in a really discouraged place right now. I have 3.5 weeks of the semester left, which is not a lot in which to complete all the projects I couldn't do last week (and whose progress I lost on top). I'm super thankful to be nearing a rest, but the hurdles I have to jump to get there are daunting to me.

also I applied to an incredible travel program to Italy over winter break and didn't get accepted :(

OH WELL. oh well. I have so much to be thankful for. the computer was not my life, and my life is still rich and good (PUMPKIN BREAD AND ENGLISH MUFFINS). school will end and my work will get done. I have learned a lesson; the weather has been beautiful; I get a winter break. and I have no finals :D

anyway, that's what's been up with me and why I've been absent. I'm planning on being absent until christmastime, too, because time is a commodity I am woefully short on. (...on which I am woefully short?)