  So I took my computer in to be fixed. The verdict: My hard drive is as dead as Rush Limbaugh's third marriage. Fortunately, I was in the habit of regularly backing up the stuff on my hard drive. Unfortunately, I just discovered that my most "recent" backup was in October. (I SWEAR I backed stuff up like around April, but apparently I was wrong. Kinda like Rush Limbaugh about the "sanctity" of marriage.
) Now I'm just making a mental inventory of the things that are lost. There's nothing whose absence will create a black hole in my life, but I'm a little anxious about the loss of the BILLIONS of carefully catalogued songs in my iTunes. I still have most of the CDs, but I'll never get back the hours and hours and hours I spent organizing them into various playlists. And then there's my obsessive little need to save every picture of a hot guy I've encountered on the Web.
I never looked at the pictures once I downloaded them, but for some reason it was comforting to know I had my own little cache of cute-guy porn at the ready in case I got an emergency call from ... um ... Michael Jackson. Or the Pope. Anyway, I decided to extend this newfound freedom from cyber crap to real-life crap last night, and I took a four-foot stack of unread magazines to the Dumpster. Literally. It extended from my fingertip knuckles all the way to my armpits ... all the way down a painfully s-l-o-w elevator ride from the 24th floor to the back alley. What's even more embarrassing to admit is that a lot of those magazines came with me to Chicago from Iowa four years ago. There were Peoples featuring long-forgotten TV shows, Advocates featuring long-forgotten political battles, and endless issues of Men's Health, Out and Genre that just had hot guys on the covers. But I'd PAID for these magazines, my inner self rationalized, so I was still going to find the time to READ them, damnit.
(I did save a two-foot stack of unread New Yorkers and Smithsonians and Historic Preservations, though. Baby steps. ) The next frontier: About 50 VHS tapes with ... um ... adult content. I haven't looked at them in two or three years. Hell, I haven't even had a working VCR for most of 2004. And then my shopping bag collection. And then the 5-foot stack of neatly folded jeans I haven't worn since the Clinton administration.
And then the shoe situation. And then those thick piles of quarterly statements from my various investments. (Jesus -- do they expect you to KEEP all that paperwork? ) But first, I must go through the proper stages of grief for a crashed hard drive. And I have the PERFECT shoes for the occasion. If I can just remember which pile I hid them in ... 
