Work In Progress

Wow. I moved 50 of my CD's onto my hard drive. It was a big undertaking and took a while. To add to the complication, as I copied the files over, some of the CD's were scratched or damaged and wouldn't transfer. So, I was stuck with a partially copied CD and I wasn't sure which files I'd copied, which I hadn't, and which were corrupt and couldn't be copied.

It took literally all night, sixteen hours straight.

The CD's yielded 56,000 files in 732 folders. It was like a trip down memory lane seeing some of these; I had burned them years ago, and since the outsides of the CD's generally remained blank so as not to give away their contents, it had always been a crapshoot trying one CD after another in an attempt to find a certain file. I found some movies I had been worried I'd lost somehow, for example, one that stars the painfully cute Olivia Saint and another starring the wonderfully small-breasted filipina Leannie Lei. There were also a fair amount of duplicates of things I had downloaded again, after burning the CD to get them off my full hard drive. Sometimes the files would be named something slightly different so after moving them into their proper folder, I'd have to check and identify the duplicate files, and delete one. Of course, I'm not done yet. I sorted maybe 2,000 files. 54,000 to go. And I have another 100,000 or so on CD's.

Even that 2,000 was nervewracking: what if I deleted a perfectly-functioning duplicate and the remaining movie got flawed somehow in the file transfer, and won't work?

For years, thinking about this moment of having all my porn in one place, I had figured I'd keep the CD's as backups. God forbid my hard drive fail and I'd lose 10 years' worth of work!

But I realized that was a mistake. Those CD's have always been dragging me down, a dark secret in the back of a drawer, bringing nothing but guilt and worry about someone finding them, and guilt and worry about them getting scratched.

I decided to cut the umbilical cord. I broke each of the CD's one by one. It was scary but liberating. There was no going back. But I decided I had to be a grownup about it and just do it. Ironic, since I feel so immature for permitting myself to act out this way in the first place.