Tag: headache

the realized dangers of only having one archive

I was going to be sending postcards on Saturday to everyone I met at the conference, to be friendly, for fun, the better to keep in touch, but I have been neglecting those plans and nearly everything else this past weekend, (the hundred other things that I wanted to get done before being sucked into CanSec), caught up instead by a personal catastrophe – the partial erasure of my only photography archive.

The quick and dirty background: Everything has been on one drive. Because I am financially strapped, I’ve never been able to afford a back-up. Tony, in his wisdom, was kind enough to give me a 2 terabyte drive as a holiday present, destined to become the new archive when my 1 terabyte drive filled up, which happened this past week.

The quick and dirty events: I let a programmer friend help set up the transfer of my archive of over 110,000 files from the 1 terabyte to the new 2 terabyte. There was an error, so instead of merely copying what was left to copy, it cross-referenced the drives and deleted a great swath of files before I could shut it off.

The quick and dirty result: I’ve spent the majority of the past two days on data recovery, staying up late, getting up early, trying different programs. I believe that I have recovered as many of the files as I will ever get back, approximately 50% of what was erased. It is difficult to tell what is gone, but so far it seems I have lost my childhood photos, an entire wedding, a massive block of personal pictures from 2007, 2008, and 2009, three days of 2011, seven folders of client work, and every video I’ve taken in the past five years. I expect to discover more gaps as time goes on, but the damage seems negligible compared to what it could have been.

Everyone who knows about the tragedy has assumed that I would be livid or heart-broken or a mix of the two, but instead the loss seems to have struck a far deeper, nihilistic chord, more appropriate for death, thickly flavoured with the acceptance and understanding that at the heart of things, we are all, every one of us, completely doomed, so why care? Odd, maybe, but I believe it speaks well of me, that I am depression-immune to this disaster, still carrying the seed of happiness that was planted at the conference, the new, uncorrupted self that refuses to be cursed.

contacts!

Tried contact lenses for the first time today, and I think I’ll like them once I get over the AUGH-AUGH-OMGWTFBBQSAUCE-THERE-IS-SOMETHING-TOUCHING-MY-EYE. They apparently come free with the Image Optometry Eye Exam + Glasses package. Really it’s an Eye Exam + Glasses + Contacts Fitting + Contacts package. (All for $90! I should find out if I get future discounts for talking about how awesome they are. Seriously.) I thought I would have issues with them, always having been nervous with the idea, but the fellow at the shop was incredibly reassuring, treating the topic with such aplomb that I felt like a country mouse for doubting at all.

After half an hour of fumbling and learning how to properly poke my eye, (AUGH), I couldn’t master how to put them in, so the man at the optometrists put the first one in for me, which was quick, painless, and completely bizarre. It took, like, a millisecond.
Pow
and that was it.
I had a thing on my eye.
I didn’t even have time to react.

Wearing only one contact was very strange, as everything was both clear and not clear, and if it weren’t for the many, many drug sequences I’ve seen in movies, it would have played havoc with my sight. As it was, it looked, as far as I can tell, like mescaline, and I was fine. The second one was much easier, as then I could see what I was doing, (AUGH AUGH), a fact that blew my tiny mind a little bit all by itself, given I was still in elementary school the last time I saw myself clearly in a mirror.

Once they were in, I could barely stand, as the sheer amount of detail in the world was overwhelming. I had periphery! The carpet was polka-dot! There were individual raindrops outside! EVERYTHING HAD EDGES, NOT JUST THE MIDDLE OF WHERE I LOOKED. I tried walking around a bit and bumped into almost everything possible, because without the world warping effect of glasses, I wasn’t sure how far away anything was. The worst moment, however, was far more personal. Considering my face properly in a mirror for the first time since grade five almost broke my heart. I had hoped, when I was younger, to grow up to look like a far happier person.

Continuing onward, I was then supposed to learn how to take the contacts out. I say supposed to, because I just couldn’t figure it out. I was quick to learn how to touch my eyes and how to push the contacts around, (a terrible feeling), but actually lifting them up off the surface was a trick I did not master. Once again, the nice fellow working at the store helped me out, and popped them out for me as easy as blinking, as if I had not just spent fourty minutes struggling like a child with the top of a pickle jar.

The practice ones came home with me, and there they are, sitting accusingly on a shelf in my bedroom, as I muster up the courage to try again. (Probably tomorrow, once my eyes stop feeling bruised from how much I poked them today.) I’ve decided that I likely shouldn’t try to learn them outside of office hours, in case I need to pop out to a glasses store and ask someone behind the counter for help, but I’m pretty sure that once I catch the knack of reliably putting them in and taking them out again, I’ll be glad to have a pair. Really, no matter how steep the learning curve, I love the fact that once they are in, I CAN SEE THROUGH TIME.

saint street ell


read straight
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

We walked four hours, returned, and subjected ourselves and Michel to Guitar Wolf. My head is splitting, the result of a nasty accident between it and the fridge door. An explosively loud japanese rock god movie might not have been the most wise decision. Over my shoulder, James is in his bedroom reading a book I cannot see. Tomorrow he goes to work early and I am left alone in the city.

Tomorrow.

I will spend time discovering the schedules required between here and Toronto. (I promise, these words are a rudder for you as much as me.) The train takes five hours. Ryan North tells us that the Secret Swing is gone, torn from the chains, but I still want to go. I suspect I will leave early Tuesday morning. Jessie will be meeting me there, she flies to Halifax Wednesday evening, and I have a holiday present for Katie that still needs to be wrapped. (Darren has yet to get back to me.)

My eyes feel as if they have cracked.