Wallowing

Am still not feeling good. The mystery bug has turned out to be a recurrence of a tooth abscess. Home remedies that have worked before aren't working this time. My mood and energy levels have been soaring and plummeting like a swing on a rubber chain. I keep swinging between berating myself for not sticking to the plan and therefor proving myself uncommitted to my work and therefor unworthy of it etc etc and the opposite extreme of thinking 'give me a break I'm sick already what more to you want from me'.

One development on the backup front should be making me feel better but all I feel is confused and ambivalent. When my husband came home at noon on Tuesday because there wasn't enough work on the shipping docks, he wanted to take the opportunity to work together on our web site project. I then told him that I had been denying myself the 'right' or 'privilege' to work on that project until I got my files backed up. He suggested we go ahead and back up now and not wait until I finish getting the AOL emails transferred to text files. His theory was that since we were probably not going to have to reformat the hard drive, I could take my time getting the AOL stuff salvaged. Not that I should relax completely and let it slide or anything but that I could at least be assured that the ninety-some percent of my files that were ready to go were safely backed up. That would include all of my creative writing files, my web site files, my correspondence files and my daily journals. That was the majority of the irreplaceable stuff. Once the back up solution was in place It would, theoretically, be easy to keep everything backed up on a regular basis.

I agreed with him altho it was hard to let go of my check list but I realized that was inflexible thinking. But I also knew how easy it was for me to get off track once I let myself be flexible. But he made sense plus I hated to waste the rare opportunity of working together on the new project while he was home and still energetic. But the project of finding a place online to back up my files took the whole afternoon and the process was frustrating because it highlighted our two different working styles and made them seem too incompatible to overcome. I really started to wonder if I was a fool to think we could make a business plan work if we couldn't even get on the same page on this one simple task.

One of the major sticking points was his attitude toward file names and user names and passwords. He thinks of them as alplanumeric strings with no meaning. I need to feel emotionally connected to them. It helps me remember them for one thing. But in the case of my stories and essays, the naming of the file is as important as the naming of the piece--its title. I said that naming my files was the equivalent of naming my children. He was completely flummoxed by this. he doesn't get it. I can't switch to thinking his way. At least not all in one day. He says I can't expect to make it in a web site managing business or any computer dependent business if I'm going to spend five to fifteen minutes stewing over it every time the tasks of creating file names, user names or passwords arises.

I'm sure he is right. In fact I am so sure he is right, I am more than half way to convincing myself that I don't belong in this field and should get out before I invest more than I can afford to loose. But that is probably as much the bug I am fighting talking as it is anything resembling reason.

The result of yesterday's endeavor tho was to get the folders containing my original writing backed up. It is a stop gap measure as it isn't a matter of a few key strokes to keep them backed up regularly. My husband is going to keep looking for a better solution. But meanwhile I can relax to the extent that the majority of five years worth of my writing projects are safe. But I mustn't relax to the extent that I get complaisant and let things slide again. But I should give myself permission to work on creative projects again while maintaining some kind of regular schedule of working towards getting the rest of the files important to me backed up.