The Unbelievable Hattrick

What happens when the name of a place matters to you enough to make you want to dedicate seven months of your life to writing a paper on it? You are torn apart, ravaged by love for it, but you are happy.

Whenever Sonu, Sharan and I have reached the tipping point of beginning to research or write our previous papers, we have always had a blinding, extremely unsettling and frightful dilemma. It goes a bit like this:

Oh, my god.
Are we truly, madly, deeply insane?

What the hell are we doing?
Why the hell are we doing this?
How the hell are we doing this?

Why?!

***

In the end, it has always worked out, somehow, someway. We've been scratched, bruised, heavily bandaged - but we're still alive! This time we're probably throwing ourselves for more than we can possibly handle, and

"Christ, you know it ain't easy
You know how hard it can be
The way things are going
You're gonna crucify me!"

but hell, we're in. For good now, so

"She's got a ticket to ride
And she don't care!"

Because some day

"It's been a hard day's night
And I've been working like a dog.
It's been a hard day's night
I should be sleeping like a log!"

Behind Blue Tiles

Tom Petty - Freefaller
Elvis Presley - Bee-bap-loola
The Steve Miller Band - Joker
Aerosmith - Dude Looks Like A Lady
Beatles - Yellow Submarine, Help!, Can't Buy Me Love, I Want To Hold Your Hand, Come Together, Hey Jude
Low Millions - Eleanor
Lynnyrd Skynnyrd - the guitar solo at .36 and then again at 4.56 of Freebird
Matt Monro - Born Free
Bob Dylan - Tambourine Man

What is your favourite song to sing in the bathroom?

Shift+Del and a five second brain strike

"Cup-per!"
"What a perfect idiot."
"I mean.. come on!"
"Did you.. really.. do that?"
"That's pathetic. I mean really, pathetic."

And the classic,
"You're just really stupid."

I've been called so much and much more in praise. And many times, I've forcefully rebelled against any slurs on my mental abilities (despite knowing deep down that the only person I can never beat hollow in a test for Forgetfulness and Absentmindedness Quotient is myself). But today, I'm going to personally accept every scathing remark that Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain and P. G. Wodehouse ever made on Forgetfulness and Absentmindedness. Gracefully.

What happens, I mean, what can happen when you have to shift the entire contents of your computer to another one? It's not very different from moving houses; you discover some incredible memories, really, really old, forgotten things tucked away in boxes and boxes locked with time. But if you have neurons that scatter like millions of ping-pong balls down the Niagara Falls, disappearing forever into the depths of uselessness whenever you are faced with a suspiciously simple task: Ctrl+A, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V and then Ctrl+Del, you're very close to letting loose your bungee jumping cord.

Because if you're me, you'll copy the shortcuts and permanently delete the root directories, thinking they've already been copied.

And when Windows mocks you by popping a message on your screen saying, "I'm searching for your directory called 'Stuff'. And if you want to locate it yourself, be my guest. Or click Browse. Any which way, you're screwed, baby." You see Windows cruelly rotating a faux torch all around the message box, as if to tell you how hard it's trying. Yeah, you know you're screwed.

You feel shock dropping its anchors down deep inside you, when the entirety of what you've lost hits you. It's at these times when your heart doesn't seem to matter as an organ, because the full force of everything is taken by.. yes, your stomach. It just really, really hits you.

Then you listen to godforsaken, teenybopper songs like So Yesterday by Hilary Duff (yeah, I know) and feel worse when she sings, "I'm just a bird that's already flown away.."

This has happened to me before. I've lost data because I haven't made back-ups, and you'd think I learnt something. I thought I'd learnt something. Apparently, "At least not today, not today, not today.."

I've lost some really beautiful, heart-breaking, lovely things today. These two things helped me to a fair extent, and I'd like to share them with you. I'm positive you won't be as incredibly dense as me, but these will be helpful if your anchor drops too.

Recuva - helps recover (some) deleted files, even if they're not in the Recycle Bin any longer.
Xmarks - saves your internet bookmarks to an online profile.

Take care.