January 24, 2006 1:48 AM

I'm not sure if it's for better or worse that all my personal artifacts -- audio recordings, weird photos, past websites and juvenile writing -- are all computer files. Yeah, there's no generational loss when duplicating them, but I wish I could cherish something more than a poorly-encoded JPG or MP3. A brittle photograph or a hissy cassette just seems so much more satisfying. I should get around to properly cataloging all this junk, and make double-redundant copies of all of it, so I never accidentally lose it. It's amazing how much of my past selfs is contained within those files, and I'd hate to not have it around to look back on.