The whole “back your shit up” spiel given by my external hard drive manual upon purchase in a language quite foreign and unimportant to me at the time makes a lot more sense now — in fact, it haunts my existence with a blinding logic I once didn’t bother to acknowledge, thus ruining life as I knew it.

Don’t withdraw your pity just yet: I’m not the girl pressing the monitor’s logo instead of the power button, or losing my 12-page essay because I was too stupid to press save; in fact, I would consider myself rather computer savvy. But that doesn’t save me from an average chronic laziness and general putting-off of things that should never be put off — say, backing up the 100+ GB of music I’ve spent my life amassing, organizing and thriving off.

The sinking sack of nausea that marked the first error message I received regarding my newly “unrecognizable” drive was at least met with a universe of possible solutions.

Try another computer: No. Life still sucks. Ex-boyfriend: Good at fixing things and says that even if drive is stomped on, data will still be recoverable. Wrong. Now shows up as empty. iPod (at least 40 GB are safely stored in my trusty porta-buddy, ready to be seamlessly extracted via semi-illegal, instantly downloadable application): Whirring noise. Like a car engine almost catching a few times, and instead of that satisfying roar of success, a dying whine. iPod is officially dead.

Of all times! I don’t know if you understand the surreal ache of losing every possession you ever cared about (sorry if your house burned down or something — I’m a self-absorbed, naive young thing) in a matter of seconds. Though upon further recall, it was probably a process worn by time, as I don’t exactly handle my equipment as gracefully as I might. Okay, you can have your pity back.

Every bleary new day following that awful discovery would bring back the innocence of pre-tragedy routine: Open iTunes, pick out something really groovy I can bang in my sleep-sharpened ears, double click the little devil and — a fucking exclamation point encircled in a gray the shade of my darkest nightmares appears where the blaring speaker icon should be.

“The song could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?” No thanks, iTunes, but as you so kindly just reminded me, that file is gone forever into the black hole of my once snazzy Seagate, imprisoned in a state of compressed micro-data I cannot even begin to understand.

I suppose my brain has adjusted to the loss of an all-music-I-could-ever-want-at-my-fingertips lifestyle, because now upon waking my first instinct is to pull out that dusted-off stereo that’s outlived every electronic I’ve trustingly leaned my life upon, pop the lid and start from track one. It’s a pleasantly simple existence, really, one I sometimes try to tell myself I could learn to love. But Lord knows I don’t physically own every CD in my electronic archives, and sometimes when you’ve got to have the entire Beatles discography at your beck and call, there’s just no other road to happiness.

Now that I’ve ripped open the unhealed gashes of my shriveled heart and you’ve neared the end of this irrelevant sob story, I’d like to make some sort of point — aside from the one about me being 99 percent stupid, unappreciative, flawed human matter.

The point, I believe (though I’d rather not bother with it for long), deals with the effect music’s newly invisible form has on way we perceive and treat our collections. It was as if some higher being (whom I’ve discovered was just a flawed, extremely mortal, fancy-looking box) held my most precious half in imperishable safety — as if since I could not see or feel it, the music was in a much better place.

Sometimes, when I want to really revel in my newfound state of permanent depression, I think about sending a dumpster full of 2,000 jewel-cased compact discs plunging down a jagged cliff to crash into a million tiny rainbow slivers at the bottom. To stab extra deep, I occasionally imagine them as richly musty, ebony-black records breaking with resonating cracks. Because this is, in essence, what I have done. I guess those horizontal song strips on my screen just don’t strike me in the same way, seeming neither delicately valuable nor needing to be preserved.

I’ll keep on trudging along, picking up new music and some old stuff I didn’t notice before. And, as much as I still don’t want to accept that the mistake has reached a state of completion so fully that it should now be learned from, these CDs probably won’t find themselves strewn across the mud mats of my car and the freshly imported mp3s on my computer may just end up burned onto backup DVDs.

On the other hand, maybe I’ll convince my parents that a few thousand hard-earned dollars is nothing compared to the restoration of my possession-starved soul (I’ve heard any drive can be restored if the pay is high enough). That way, I can go on living my wrecking-ball lifestyle and avoiding logical manuals and other such complicated conveniences that clutter an otherwise carefree horizon.