Don't make me crush you.

Today I had the pleasure of spending 5 minutes believing that the former contents of my office had fallen into some sort of mystical black hole in my school. There's nothing quite like realizing that every overpriced textbook that you've purchased in the last 4 years knowing that they would somehow benefit you in the future (and by the future, I mean, today) is gone, and that there's little you could have done to prevent it, except for to not trust anyone. Ever. But I had trusted people, and as far as I knew, those people had chosen to drag my stuff through an area with known mystical black holes, allowed it to fall into one said hole and then decided to pretend that nothing happened. "What thousands of dollars worth of texts?" (That's not an actual quote, it's more an imagined quote, but I don't know how to use imaginary quotation marks).

Luckily, my books somehow managed to reappear as rapidly as they were lost, and I learned to appreciate their existence again, which may or may not have been their plan all along. My poor lonely textbooks just wanted attention. Actually, that's probably a good plot for a Pixar movie. An incredibly boring Pixar movie, that's a lot like Toy Story 3, but for people that had a really depressing childhood.

During the time spent believing that other's incompetence had somehow lost me so much in such a short time, I was reacquainted with a side of myself that I don't frequently get to meet: The part of me that believes that if I'm angry enough I can bring down whole corporations just with my mind. She's often come out when dealing with cell phone companies. I like to think the only reason that Telus is still around is because I managed calm down before anything really bad happened to them. I like to think I'm like the Hulk, but prettier, and less with the smashing.

Once in high school, I decided that I would write a birthday story for my friend Izy Kigs, because I liked to write and I'm bad at thinking of gifts people would actually want. I can't remember what the story was about, but I think it involved mathemagic and it was the most fantastically awesome bit of awesomeness that anyone has ever created. Or so I assume. Either way, no one will ever be able to challenge that assertion because it has been lost to the ages. You see, I saved it on a floppy disc, because that was what you did at the time, and, when I tried to open it to print it, I realized that the disc had done one of those annoying things that discs do and erased itself. I went through all the stages of grief.

Denial: "It's still there, it has to still be there. It's just hiding, that's all. These things don't just disappear."

Anger: "How could you do this to me? Why? You did this, you horrible disc. Why do you suck so much? I will destroy you." (This is the point where I crushed it with my bear hands...oh wait, not bear hands, bare hands. Although, it was a little like I had bear hands, with the destruction and such, but it also wasn't much like bear hands because I didn't have claws.)

Bargaining: "I'll tape you back together if you just give me back my story."

Depression: "I'm not sure I even want to live in a world without my story of awesome awesomeness."

Acceptance: "It's okay. The story is gone, but I can rebuild." (At which point I taped the mangled disc to a picture of Harry Potter and wrote the story of how I'd written a story that would have been a wonderful present if this disc hadn't thwarted my efforts, because it's evil, but she shouldn't worry, because I have destroyed it. I know the whole battle of good and evil is a little cliche, but it's what I had at that point.)

The moral of this post: When life gives you evil discs from hell, crush them and give them to your friend for their birthday. Chances are they'll be much too terrified to ever indicate anything but pleasure at the present, which, as far as you're concerned, means it's a good present.