Styling My Retro Hair With Bangs : VIDEO

 Fun with hair. Sometimes something silly is needed, after all.

Well, this has been a hell of a week you guys. I know the axiom that people get dramatic haircuts after a breakup or big life change has always held true in my own habits, and here I seem to have preemptively gone in for the chop before I fell off the proverbial wagon of productivity.

While my laptop has spent the last week broken, corrupted, frozen and stalled-- so have I. Perhaps I took my forced pause from my work, and both the stresses and fulfillment it provides, as an excuse for a break. Perhaps I just allowed it all to get me down. Perhaps I just really needed a reset. Perhaps I just wanted bangs. Does anyone ever truly want bangs, or do they just want a change?

Which is it? It's hard to say from where I sit (oh all right, lay. Recline if you will) here typing on a borrowed laptop that feels so indescribably foreign to me. Whether it is a sad truth or just a plain fact, I live on my computer 98% of the time. It is where I feel at home, and my home is currently still blue screening somewhere in a tech repair place miles away. They called today to tell me my hard drive was/is indeed corrupted and all my data lost. Why does that feel like a very watered down (but listen, still painful aight?) version of a call from the vet telling me I have lost a furry friend? They just couldn't save the drive, it was too far gone. Am I grieving a hard drive? What millennial cliche is this?

They're not real possessions, just files. It's not a real place see, my computer, but it is still where I live. Those files were still books on the shelves around me like a cozy familiar room, and now I'll be redecorating again. Some of the books I can get new copies of, many I have duplicates for already waiting, and some I will never remember I even had-- in ways both good and bad. I can't rethink up random ideas for dialog I jotted down last Saturday before the crash, but I can re-download the music I've bought off Amazon over the years. I still have some of the same decorations backed up on other drives, but the refurbished place will smell of fresh paint, and there will be several things missing--whether I can place exactly which ghosts are haunting me or not.

Alas, I can turn anything into a melodrama it seems. Perhaps my emo phase is just arriving twelve years too late. I cut bangs back then too, indeed that was the last time I had them. I'm fifteen again, and I still haven't learned to backup my files.

Now I've got another burned out drive for the pile of them out in the garage gathering dust for an imagined affluent future when I'll pay for a fancy service to decode and revive them all and have a good laugh at the aged contents. Like putting things in cryogenic sleep. 'Maybe one day they'll invent a way to save you' my hoarding tendencies whisper into the forgotten box out there in the garage.

Wipe down the desk, burn some sage (or don't, I've heard it's endangered or something?), fix the old (beloved) but now empty machine or find a new one out of necessity. The ghosts of files past will haunt me this holiday season. But I've still got my book, and you know what? My book has got me.

But lord knows I'll be backing that shit up more than ever before. I'll be hiding copies on usb slicks all over the damn house like Easter eggs.

Which reminds me, dear, sweet, summer children, GO BACK UP YOUR FECKING FILES.

This has been a PSA, thank you for coming to my TED talk.