two reinstalls later, (mantra: back up your data, back up your data!) i have a working laptop again. this time i did have access to my documents (they having been backed up onto the harvard servers a year ago.) but also i was thinking that compared to the first time any of us loses data, we're probably much more resigned to loss now - still some sinking feeling, some distress, a squawk perhaps, but perhaps not even then, you complain to fewer people than you used to, and they reply not unsympathetically but not excessively either. as the years go by you become accustomed to losing data, through accidental clicks of the mouse, a key hit too soon, an untimely power failure, like in that elizabeth bishop poem, we master the art of losing data.