I guess it was bound to happen eventually. My entire life is on my computer: all my writing, all my accounting, all my graduate school applications. So imagine my sheer panic yesterday when — 15 minutes before a grad school professor was supposed to call to chat about my future — the screen of my MacBook went white. Over the course of eight hours and at least one chill pill, my roommates and I were able to recover a lot of my data. I took the machine into the Apple store today, and they replaced the hard drive completely. Overall verdict: no fun at all.

Of course, I blame my computer hubris. I don’t travel often with my laptop. I don’t jump up and down while holding it. I even try to be especially nice to it at home. My one sin against the Apple gods is never — and I mean never — backing up. I know you’re supposed to, and trust me I’m going to start, but somehow I thought it couldn’t happen to me. Sitting on my sofa while my Mac engineer roomy struggled to recover my data, I felt like I contracted some horrible disease I still couldn’t fathom.

For the moment I’ve borrowed my fiancé’s old PowerBook, which felt slightly more like home once I plastered Pikachu’s enormous face on the desktop. Still, I’m learning what a crutch my computer is in general. Without my Firefox bookmarks, without my saved passwords, without my million sticky notes recording what articles I have assigned for whom and due when, I’m feeling pretty darn lost in my own work life. Who am I again? What am I supposed to be writing? It’s a bit like leaving home one afternoon only to return to discover someone has changed all the locks and rearranged all the furniture — and yet they expect you to carry out business as usual.

The one upside to having no computer this weekend: some downtime to take in Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2. More on those soon — when the digital universe and I are on slightly better terms…