I love my computer. I love it so much that the mere thought of not having it causes my stomach to knot up into ten thousand tiny balls of brokenhearted butterflies. Watching other students hand-writing rough drafts of 20-page research papers bewilders me; I know that my own handwriting is disintegrating. Even in class I can't help but wish for a laptop to type the lecture notes. And the thought of researching in the library, using real books and journals instead of the Internet, seems so unimaginably primitive.
     I fall asleep every night thinking of my computer. And I'm certain I dream about it because I usually wake up with something technological on my mind. Some days, it's my computer alone that drives me out of bed. I'll stir for a moment, register that I'm awake and alive, and then jump out of bed to check my three e-mail accounts. Now if the phone rings, forget it; I wouldn't crawl out of bed for the world. But if I'm half asleep and hear that special little chime signifying that I have new e-mail, I'll pounce at my keyboard faster than you can count to three.
      When I sleep someplace other than my own room, I am not accustomed to that dead of silence made possible by the absence of a whirring tower fan. Even at my parents' house, where the computer sleeps in a room down the hall from me, turning on a fan is absolutely necessary in order to fall asleep. I need to hear that humming. I need to feel that pulse of electricity breathing in the room.
      My computer has unconditional love for me, and the same in reverse. From the very first day that it sat on my parents' dining room table, I knew that I was in love. It was absolutely perfect: a Comtrade 200 MMX Pentium with 32 megs of RAM, 24X CD-ROM, zip drive, four gigabytes of harddrive, and a 17" monitor. I remember spending the first 48 hours after its delivery customizing it until we both collapsed from exhaustion. Every icon, color, shortcut and preference had to be exactly suited to my tastes. There was to be nothing on the Start Menu that I wouldn't use, the folders had to be organized exactly as I needed, and I wanted the largest collection of fonts that ever existed. I was overwhelmed with pride that such a thing could belong entirely to me, and be customized to my every desire without even an ounce of complaint.
     Within the first two years of our relationship, I gave my little Comtrade a significant amount of upgrading. Within no time, it was the proud owner of 96 megs of RAM, a scroll mouse, ergonomic keyboard, 48X CD-ROM, a CD Recordable/Rewritable drive, and a copy of every decent multimedia and graphics program that existed. And with the help of my delightful little PC, my web-designing skills had skyrocketed, my writing became more frequent, and overall, there never seemed to be a minute of boredom in my life.
     Yet now, a vacation cannot come fast enough for me to escape my computer's unavoidable grip. I've sadly discovered that a vacation to a place where there are no computers is really the only way I can get away from them. My days of continuous computer obsession are exhausting; my eyes are tired and my wrist is aching. It isn't unusual for me to spend up to 12 hours a day in a 24-bit color digital world. For one thing, I spend 15 hours a week working in the Interactive Multimedia lab on my campus. And lately, it's impossible to sign onto ICQ or AOL without at least 5-10 people pummeling me with messages. It's typical for me to be running at least 10 programs at a time. How am I supposed to chat on ICQ without updating a webpage, downloading Nintendo games, and writing a paper at the same time?
     There are nights when I am physically unable to pull myself away from the computer until I have conquered the Intermediate level of Minesweeper one more time, or until I achieve a spot on my virtually unachievable Tetris High Score list, which I've succeeded to max out so the scores have turned negative. And on a night where I decide to completely redesign one of my webpages, three hours of sleep is a blessing from heaven.
     Once, I cried for two hours while my friend was removing a virus through DOS; my computer had stopped recognizing my zip and CD-ROM drives. The nausea in my stomach that night was so unbearable, and I had become so feverish, my only sanctity was the one track from the Miss Saigon soundtrack where Kim commits suicide, on repeat for the entire two hours. It was downright unbearable.
     And that virus was nothing compared to what happened earlier this year. I was installing Norton AntiVirus, my computer crashed halfway through the installation, and refused to boot back up. Invalid system disk. Invalid system disk. That's all it would say to me, over and over and over. I was at a breaking point where all I wanted to do was pound it to death with my bare fists. Invalid system disk. Windows refused to boot and the DOS responses were telling me that the directory "c:\windows" did not exist and that my harddrive was only 1 gig instead of 4.
     Devastated, there was absolutely no alternative other than to reformat my baby. I had done it before, but with all my files backed up. This time, I lost absolutely everything. Three years worth of schoolwork, 900+ fonts, hundreds of icons, dozens of programs; and to put the icing on the cake, I had deleted my entire web account days before in an attempt to motivate me to redesign it. Obviously, I had assumed that deleting them would be safe since the files would all still be on my harddrive. Well my assumption turned out to be dead wrong after the guts of my PC chewed up and swallowed all of my files, none of which were ever to be recovered. And to put even more icing on that cake, my CD with backups of at least half of my files broke, that very same morning that my computer died. Now how often does a CD break? Exactly.
     So I lost everything. It was, in a way, refreshing to lose some of that junk. I had hundreds of e-mails saved for no reason, scanned-in photos that I didn't need, and folders full of files that needed to be weeded. But I will never forgive my computer for bailing out on me at a time when I had nothing backed up. This essay, for example, is a remodeled version of the original which was lost during The Crash.
     Everything is basically rebuilt now though, with the exception of my lost schoolwork. I had hardcopies saved of some papers, but most I had thrown away, foolishly believing that I would always have everything backed up on my harddrive. In a way, the loss of my papers has been inspiration for me to spend more time writing, which is fortunate. I have also learned a valuable lesson: to keep printouts of everything I write. But it's hard to go back and put 100% faith in my computer again. It's difficult to trust this machine that is capable of making my life so miserable.
     Still, I can't help but love it to pieces. Even though these new 1000 mhz celeron processors with 30 gigs of harddrive sound like paradise, they're still machines capable of crashing and destroying me. I think I'd rather just keep fighting with the one that I have, upgrading it if necessary. The connection that we have is simply irreplaceable and I wouldn't want it any other way