Monday, January 30, 2012

Ava, this is Houston. Are you there?

Sometimes I am a space cadet, and not in a good way. I mean, I don’t work for NASA, nor have they ever asked me to travel to outer space for my country. No, no. I am a space cadet in the Where-am-I-going?…What-was-I-doing-again?…or…Who-am-I-today?…kind of way. Not the best thing to say about one’s self, but in addition to being a space cadet, I’m truthful to a fault, and I’m also a pragmatist. So there you are.

I don’t know about you, but I lose everything. I mean EVERYTHING. My keys. My bank card. My phone.

That’s right…



MY PHONE!

I did *that* this week. Monday, to be exact. And losing my iPhone really means losing all of my contacts, my email, Twitter, and Facebook accounts… Needless to say I get the shakes when I can’t put my hand on my phone. (Which you would think would make me keep up with it better. But… Well, you saw the first paragraph about me being a space cadet, right…?) Everything I have is in my phone. I don’t remember anyone’s numbers, and it’s a good thing I don’t usually have to because… see paragraph one again.

Strangely enough, I can tell you every last detail about every character I’ve ever written. Not sure what that means, but I didn’t want everyone to get the impression that I’m a complete dingbat. Just about things happening in the real world in real time.

Anyway, I retraced my steps, figured out where I’d had my cell phone last and that was… the post office. Really?! The post office?! Where a million people come and go every day? That’s where I left my phone? Uh, yeah, it was. And, of course, by the time I realized I didn’t have my phone, the post office was closed for the day.

Yeah, the shakes set in. But not as bad as I had expected. Whether or not my phone was still at the post office, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it until Tuesday morning at 9am when I found out for sure. I was rather calm, actually. I went back over conversations I’ve had with various friends recently about people being inherently good or evil. I have friends in both camps, and I’m… Well, I *am* a pragmatist. I don’t think people are either inherently good or evil. I think some people are good and some people are evil. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt, until I’m proven wrong – but that’s the subject for a whole other blog.

I figured my phone would either be at the post office or it wouldn’t. It would all depend on who found it and what sort of person that person was. And no amount of worrying on my part was going to change the situation one way or the other. Whatever had happened had already happened, and I just had to wait until the next morning to find out which way it went.

I am happy to report that some honest soul turned my phone in and I had it back in my hot little hands at 9am the next morning. And so I would like to send out a big “Thank you” to the nameless person who discovered my phone. I would also like to say that I will no longer be a space cadet and I’ll keep up with my possessions better, but I *am* honest and I know myself too well to make that kind of statement, even though I would love for it to be true.

Are you like me? Do you lose things constantly? And what do you lose most? (Mine are my keys. I have to have several copies at various places so I can always get to where I need to be.) Or do you always know where everything is all the time? If so – do you have any tips for the rest of us? ... Nice tips that is. Don't tell me to get my head out of the clouds, because that's probably not going to happen.

*Originially posted January 27, 2012 at LadyScribes