The Beauty of Anorexia

So, listen, I don't consider myself to be poor by any means. On paper my salary looks fine, but when you add in living expenses it's just enough to make ends meet in this city (and take the occasional plane ride to wherever) — provided I stick to a reasonable budget.

But in the past three months, things have been a bit unreasonable. I'm lost without my camera, but my Sony decided it was time to leave me. So I got a new one.

I was under a time constraint to make a VERY expensive fix to my old, beaten up car that literally wasn't worth the cost to fix it. So I stressed about it for weeks, weighed the pros and cons of all my options... and finally got a new one just in time to avoid a pink slip (and a huge fine).

And then almost immediately thereafter, my computer showed gross signs of distress. I tried to make it last as long as I could, waiting for my savings to recover from the amount lost for the down payment of my car. I spent the interim researching laptops (mine was five years old), in search of the best proverbial bang for my buck.

But I realized early on that I couldn't wait for long — my computer was getting worse and worse, so I ordered a new one, finally.... only to have the old one officially give up (taking all of my files with it) two days before my new one arrived.

I still haven't figured out if my files are retrievable — been working too late to even try, except to note that the new cord does indeed work, and my old machine will stay on for however long I care to look at the blue screen of death. Believe it or not, that's a good sign as it means my hard drive isn't necessarily fried (though maybe it is) — it probably was a matter of the recurring electrical shorts making it very, very unhappy until it eventually gave in altogether.

Last night I purchased an enclosure for my laptop hard drive, and will try accessing my files that way... I'm told (thanks AJP and Washington) that even though an operating system is installed on my hard drive, when you convert an internal drive to an external drive, a new computer will treat the old drive like a storage disk, from which you can pull data.

My hope is that I can pull data. Cause if not, there's no other option but dropping my drive off with an expert.

And I hear that's not cheap.

So, anyway, in honor of all these expenses — coupled with the fact that I've only worked out twice in the last three weeks — I've decided to stop eating.

Or, rather, to eat significantly less.

Not only will I save BIG, but I'll look smaller.

Everybody wins.