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Upon first walking out of band practice last Tuesday night, slipping into the rental car and noticing the broken glass, I laughed a little. My ’98 Volvo had been totaled two weeks earlier—a blessing, since New Orleans’s terrible potholes had shaken loose the brains and bones of an otherwise strong car. I was just about to spend $600 on new tie rods for the $2,700 beast, when the insurance company swooped in, cut me a check for $5,000, and loaned us a free white Kia SUV. We didn’t have the rental car long enough to fill it with more than a baby seat, a giant striped hula hoop, and my daughter Cleopatra’s metal Flyer wagon. So sitting among the shards, I chuckled, assuming the rental’s shininess and Illinois plates had attracted the thieves who’d, in the end, gotten nothing. Haha, dumb assholes. I began joking to our drummer about how I planned to lie to the cops and claim I'd lost my laptop. I kept on laughing, adding a camera to that imaginary list, and an iPod. Then I realized: No, wait. Oh no. No. No.I care not about my seven-year-old yellowed-white Macbook. I'd once tipped a beer into it, and it came back to life. My daughter dumped orange juice across the keys, and it came back from that too (albeit, with inoperable up and down keys). Another time it slipped from my car into a mud puddle so deep I couldn't see it; I removed some screws and propped it over the heating vent, and in five days, it came back on, with the up and down keys working again. All this to say: it was time for a new computer. I’d backed up most of my own important work—though only 20 percent of the kids’ writing had been digitized. The rest of their work lived in those red and yellow folders, which now presumably lie in the city dump.
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