"What might have been lost?"

I was on an airplane for 10 hours last week on my way home from Scotland and I was really sick. I couldn't focus on reading or writing or anything other than just trying not to snot all over the poor guy next to me (who, incidentally, kept ordering orange juice, I think because he was terrified of my germs. Vitamin C, baby!). Anyway, I listened to this Bon Iver song on repeat for hours:



It was the only thing I could listen to that I could focus on as I drifted in and out of feverish sleep. So, I've been thinking about things lost. Or things that might've been lost. And what fills the void.

My old computer died the day I got back to the U.S. It has since been revived (thanks mac genius bar people!). Pre-miraculous-resurrection, I decided it was time for a new computer regardless of the outcome and went ahead and upgraded (three cheers for my new MacBook)! Anyway, while my old computer was under the knife, I went through the inevitable panic about what I might have lost if my hard-drive were never recovered. Luckily, I am smart enough to have backed up the two most important things in my digital life: my thesis work and my iTunes library. However, there are a million tiny things on one's computer that you don't think about and suddenly need when they're gone. Within 24 hours I'd remembered about 7 things I no longer had and would have sorely miss. They weren't necessarily all irretrievable. But it would have taken time and a little extra effort to obtain them. Searching, googling, emailing, downloading, etc. So basically, just time.

Which is the other thing I've been thinking about losing. Time, unlike Microsoft office and blog URLs is irretrievable. Lately I've been feeling an intense need to make up for some lost time. I tend to have a "no regrets" policy for myself in terms of life decisions and actions. If I make mistakes, I am usually content to chock them up to life experience. Some mistakes even manage to be good memories or at least amusing ones. But I realized recently I actually do have huge regret when it comes to missed opportunities. For a couple years of my life - college years mostly - I avoided many life experiences mainly out of fear. I lived carefully. And I regret that. So while I may not regret "bad" choices or experiences, I'm finding I do regret periods of my life in which there was a lack of experience. And I don't know what to do with that lost time. I'm not okay with it. It makes me angry at myself, or maybe at "God," or at the expectations of others for which I cared so greatly. I feel a need to learn something or make something of it so it will not have been a total waste. But what to learn or do and how? And if not, how can I let go of the regret and quit frantically trying to make up for it?

Another thing: Just before Christmas, my grandfather died. I didn't go to the funeral and I haven't even seen him in 8 years. His death does not affect me in any practical sense. Yet there is this weird way in which you still feel a sense of loss when someone dies. My grandfather was arrogant, unrepentant, cruel, and selfish. But despite that, my grandmother and my dad have lost someone -- someone who affected their lives directly and dramatically. It is hard to watch my dad try to come to terms with this loss.

This post is a bit brooding and morose. I guess that's what happens when you listen to Bon Iver on repeat for hours on end...

On the agenda for the rest of January: Less Bon Iver and more Beatles White Album (which always makes me smile and which, coincidentally, turned 40 in 2008). Oh, and a little hopeful thing called an inauguration!