Stupid mistakes, disaster, and birthdays...

Has anyone out there ever gotten to the point in their life where they become tired of learning hard lessons, of making stupid mistakes? While I'm there. At the present moment, I feel as a college freshman who has just pulled the plug on his desktop computer and lost an entire afternoon's worth of work on some stupid assignment. Although on a much grander scale.

When I got the virus a few weeks ago, I laughed and said, well at least my files are backed up. And before checking to be absolutely certain that nothing had gone wrong with this marvelous new concept of backing up all my files online to avoid disaster, I wiped my fucking (excuse my French but I'm really pissed off right now) hard drive clear and clean and reinstalled my operating system thinking la-di-da and whoop-dee-fricking-doo, aren't I clever?! Let me just go and download my entire life's work from some distant hard drive over the internet.

Well, Mozy.com has a great system set up, don't get me wrong. A set it and forget it interface that lets you just go about your effing business free and clear, not having to worry about viruses or a fire. But, my advice is, if you are ever going to use it, please be sure to select all your folders and not use their "backup sets." With the latter, you are telling it to find certain types of files on your computer and back them up no matter where they are. This sounds like a great idea, in case you've missed something but it's useless if the system itself is going to miss something. My notation program opens .sib files, my sequencers open Reason and Fruity Loops files, my audio editing program opens Vegas project files. None of these are picked up by the backup sets. I can't recall if I chose this option back when I set up the initial backup but it makes sense to me that I probably did do something stupid like that. And if it didn't just come around to bite me in the ass. Tonight I just sat down to really get a feel for the scope of the thing and I'm feeling pretty horrible.

Now, my music still exists, obviously. It's not totally gone. If not only in my head as unfinished ideas, it certainly still exists as .wav files and .mp3 files of different versions and .pdf files of finished scores that I've printed and sent off. Those files did back up, thank God. But I'm a little angry that I had all of these files that I could still open an edit a few weeks ago, that are gone. If I want to rehash these pieces at all in any way, I may have to start from scratch, and in some cases, totally from memory! While all of it may seem totally fetchable from the void, it is quite disheartening to think that some of my ideas are just gone.

I'm trying to stay positive about this though. Maybe I wasn't so attached to those ideas anyway. Maybe I was stuck on some of the pieces. God knows there was an entire cycle of piano pieces that I started two years ago before stopping to prepare for my recital that I've been tinkering with for almost two years now and only ever finished one maybe (and let's face it, what composer ever thinks a piece of his or hers is finished).

Maybe this whole thing will lead to some kind of renaissance and I'll just start completely fresh. I guess I'll just have to see this whole thing through. I have a lot of work ahead of me though and a head cold to boot. It's cold again in New York City and I find myself looking forward to next month because not only will it be warmer hopefully, it will also be mine and my cousin's 29th birthday and I have weekends off from work all month long. I sense a party or two.

That having been said, I think I'm still going to go mourn the loss of some good and some bad ideas that I once had. Here's to stupid mistakes.