Party: Picaro, Elixir, Flickr, more pictures to come in the next few days. Plus good times, tapas, two big plates of seafood paella, and pitchers and pitchers of sangria, despite the rain.

[Currently playing on iTunes: Velocity Girl's "I Can't Stop Smiling."]

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Today I turn another year older, but instead of thinking about the year ahead, I’m dwelling more on the last few years or so. Disaster has befallen me again — not dental, and not automotive — but this time it’s computer-related.

For some reason or other my “My Documents” folder has completely disappeared — something to do with a “corrupted local profile” — but I know it’s still there because my disk space is still the same. No amount of system restores, logging off and on, etc. could get back what is now a completely empty and spotless “My Documents” folder.

This means everything — my lectures, some videos, 7 gigabytes worth of music, wallpaper, my dissertation, students’ grades, my master’s thesis, bookmarks, pdf files, PowerPoint presentations, every single e-mail message that isn’t on Gmail, passwords, every picture I’ve ever taken including those of Izzy — is gone. To have the past simply wiped out like this is astonishing; it’s clearly a statement against the kind of dependence we (or rather, I) have on our computers to narrate our lives, as it were.

Kind of makes you sit back and take stock of things. Yesterday Izzy finally came back from the hospital and is doing great. The puking / coughing session I had written about as a comment on the V-Monster’s blog was apparently her very first asthma attack — she hadn’t been diagnosed before — and it was serious enough to mean a trip to the ER and two nights of observation. She is, however, all happy and rested now, but this means she’ll be joining the legions of Ventolin-toting tots from now on.

I told her about my computer woes, including losing my photographs of her. She said (I’m not making this up to make her sound cute), “Daddy, that means you can take even more beautiful photographs of me.”

[Update: J-Lu's "IT geek" friend R. is bravely volunteering, despite my protests against it (I don't think I can find her a 1:1 scale model of Gackt though), to roll up her sleeves and mess with the computer tonight.]

[Update #2: I managed to recover all of my e-mail -- thank goodness I use Thunderbird -- but everything else is still gone. My 100 or so student papers have returned from the land of the dead; now to spend the next few days returning them to where they came!]

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So I’ve been realizing that I have big gaps in my “genre” reading, especially after reading Ktrion’s post (and I know that Gladys is a total sci-fi / fantasy junkie as well). It’s something of a surprise to me, considering that I love watching the stuff as film and reading it as graphic novels.

I’ve read very little from the “fantasy” genre (more if you count Borges, Kafka and Lovecraft). Not including comic books, here’s the woefully short list:

- Crowley’s Little, Big
- Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia
- Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
- and not much else (the first four Rowlings, Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books)

Science Fiction:

- Butler’s Kindred
- Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Delany’s Dhalgren
- Gibson’s Necromancer (I actually didn’t care very much for this one)
- Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine
- Stephenson’s Snow Crash
- Some of Bradbury’s short stories (though I did watch Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451)
- a handful of Dick (A Scanner Darkly / Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? / Valis)

And that’s it. (There might be more, but I just can’t remember them.)

Any recommendations for the winter break will be happily accepted. I really want to read Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon — and those of you who have read it will know the Filipino connection — but it’s just too heavy to place in my handcarried bag with my laptop. I heard a paper at the anthropology conference on Alex Shakar’s The Savage Girl, which sounded fascinating as well.

p.s. 1: My students are always shocked when I tell them that I have never seen a single episode of Star Trek in any of its incarnations (though I more or less know the names of the actors and the people they play). (I also saw the first Star Trek movie on the big screen when it opened.)

p.s. 2: My fondness for Japanese music and film hasn’t extended to anime: other than most of Studio Ghibli’s output (which doesn’t really count) and random robot cartoon episodes, I’ve seen Akira and Ghost in the Shell and, amazingly, there the list ends.

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What you missed: an excellent dinner at Foreign Cinema, Pelle the Conqueror, the Poeta‘s Writers With Drinks reading at the Make-Out Room, non-genitally centered sexuality and missed connections on Craigslist, at least three bottles of sangria at Papa Toby’s Revolution Cafe, an aborted Popeye’s run, a late-night taqueria snack, and a cast of 11 in order of appearance (Ver, Barb, Marianne, Jean, Wayne, Gladys, Joanne, Oscar, Anthem, Irene and me), now all on Flickr.

[Update: More coverage of the party at Getaway, and at V-Monster's Nesting Ground. I'm swiping that first picture for my Flickr account and tagging it with "Jealous?"]

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Because I have no shame!

Then:

Now:

Just so it’s clear: any and all blame must be placed at my mother’s feet. But not even she would have worn red boots.

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