This afternoon, iTunes on my smaller laptop decided to crap out, and reset itself to an older version, complete with an older library. I lost several hundred dollars worth of music and tv shows I'd downloaded since the end of August. That alone would be annoying enough, except that now when I look at my music history, it has "Last Played" dates for no later than August 25. It's hard to describe how that feels. I see all these old dates now, when I was back at Clarion - iTunes is a musical time capsule for all I was going through, showing me every song I played at every moment in those six weeks during the summer. All the music I played while I revised stories, while I wrote "The Unattainable" and the outlines for my novella and novel, is gone. It's creeping me out.

So, while I was futzing around with my crippled iTunes, I came up with two new story ideas. Both dark science fiction, one set on a labyrinthine STL generational ship, and the other--? I'm ashamed to say that five minutes after coming up with what I'm certain was a great idea and thinking "wow, that's a really great story idea", I got distracted (probably by a slice of cheese) and promptly forgot it. My brain is obviously operating on shitty iTunes software. I'm not too upset, I'm sure I'll remember it. However, I think I'm going to invest in a few Moleskin notebooks, and have them around so I can jot things down right when they come to me. I keep forgetting that I'm getting old, and probably need all the memory help I can get. Well, I keep forgetting that I'm forgetting, because I'm getting old, and... Yeah. Circle of life, baby.

EDIT: I momentarily lost this post - and Alex Wilson's comment - so I had to recreate it. Not unlike my iTunes library... Thanks to Alex, who pointed out the obvious to me. The library database file is an older one, but everything I bought since August 25th is still on my computer, in a folder called "iTunes Music". I've already re-imported them. Yay!