I’ve been enjoying all the great, deep discussion that has been going on around here lately. Unfortunately, my brain has not been up to deep discussion much recently. So I decided I needed to add a nice, fluffy post for myself, and for others whose brain power might be a little lacking at the moment.
It occured to me today that the thing I lose the most is not your typical keys, wallet, phone, etc. No, the thing I lose the most is … whatever book I happen to be reading.
I can generally keep track of most anything. I even find things for my husband on a regular basis. It’s because I know where I use things, and where I think to set things down. There is an order to this, so there is a limited number of places that most things might be. I’ve also gotten pretty good at following where my husband is likely to put particular things (this is a survival technique, as he generally forgets). But no matter what, I can’t seem to keep track of my book. I think the problem is that it goes everywhere with me, so there’s no particular place I would have set it down. It could be in just about any room of the house, and could have been set down in strange places (like on the high chair because I set it there while I got a bottle for the toddler or inside the crib because I put it down to pick up the baby). I tend to lose it at least once a day, and sometimes it takes me quite a long time to find it. Of course, one of the ironic things is that if I do lose my keys or my phone (usually with help from the toddler) I generally give up on looking after not too long, and I can live without them for days. My book, on the other hand, gets searched for until I find it.
So, having rambled for more than long enough, I ask, “What is it that you lose most often (and why)?”
There is a direct correlation between my stress level and my ability to find my keys. Lose them more than twice in a week and it’s a neon message that I’m overloaded.
So, having rambled for more than long enough, I ask, “What is it that you lose most often (and why)?”
So that I can make a lighthearted comment:
MY MIND! 🙂 (Seriously.)
It used to be car keys, then I made a big ole contraption with tons of keychains and keytags and one of those clippy things that mountain climbers use–I clip the thing to my waistband when I don’t have a (big) pocket or purse with me.
Then it was my glasses, but I got Lasik surgery (best money I EVER spent on myself!)
Now it’s library books. The fees are mounting.
Binky’s. for the baby.
more important than car keys or my mind.
Baby’s binky = quiet.
I cannot for the life of me manage to keep a pen around. I buy pens on a monthly basis, and I lose them all.
Whenever you can’t find a pen, buy two or three dozen, or maybe five dozen. Eventually the air in the house will become supersaturated with pens and they will start precipitating out on horizontal surfaces.
Hehehe. Unfortunately, I think I lose many of them in my office, in the classrooms where I teach, in my car…
Guitar picks. For the longest time I just couldn’t imagine where they were all going. I figured my kids were eating them or stockpiling them somewhere. I usually put the picks in the very front right corner of a certain drawer and when I get the guitar out again after a day or two there’s no pick in sight. Well, a few weeks ago I cleaned out that drawer and found in the back right corner at least two dozen picks. Apparently they migrated there under cover of the mess as the drawer was repeatedly opened and closed. Finding that treasure trove of picks was one of the happiest moments of my life.
Perhaps for reasons similar to why Vada loses books, I’m constantly losing bookmarks. I pick up a book that I’m reading and take out the bookmark, set it down somewhere random, and then have no idea where it went. I have a variety of fun ones (Aragorn, Julian Bashir from DS9, Obi-Wan, etc.), but I nonetheless usually end up marking my books with whatever random paper happens to be lying around.
I also have Seraphine’s problem with pens. And unfortunately, I’m kind of picky about pens–I like to write with fairly nice ones, which means that I really hate losing them.
I lose my nail clippers, which I use quite often. I misplace my books, too! Because I carry them around with me all day long. Sometimes I find them in the bathroom, sometimes downstairs in the laundry room.
Oh, and I lose my phone all the time. Sometimes I push the wrong button and it doesn’t hang up, so it’s busy all day and we can’t find it. It turns up when I change the sheets.
I lose everything constantly. When I was living at home, and before my older sister went off to college, I would just ask her. She has an eidectic memory. She would tell me where my stuff was. Even after she left for college (2 years ahead of me) I could call her and ask her where were my tennis shoes or keys or something and she would know. =)
Since I’ve been on my own, I cope by having duplicates of most important stuff. The comment about pens precipitating out of the air is perfectly true! Other stuff I just wait until it turns up. Most of the time if I try to look for something, I don’t ever find it, no matter how long I look, but much later (when I don’t need it particularly anymore) it will just reappear.
I have a theory about certain minds and quantum tunnelling. Roger Penrose thinks the human mind is a quantum mechanical device, and he might be right. I think things in the vicinity of my brain tend to pop into alternate realities via some sort of quantum tunnelling effect, and reappear later on (perhaps when some mind with the same property in the alternate universe approaches them. Oftentimes, I will have looked 10 times in a certain spot for something without finding it, and later on it’s sitting right there. My sister’s mind must have the effect of collapsing the wave function, and causing things to exist in this spacetime continuum again. I live with 3 cats and no humans right now, so Occam’s Razor leads me to put credence in this theory. =)
If I actually stopped and searched for everything I can’t find, I would do practically nothing else. I have ceased to feel any embarrassment or discomfort over this fact. It’s just a property of my mind, which has a lot of properties for good and ill. When I get married, I’ll rely on my husband to find things for me, unless he’s worse than me at it, in which case we’ll muddle through just fine, I’m sure. =) Maybe one of our kids will get my sisters’ gene for finding things.
I tend to lose whatever thing I have handled most recently. For example, following the example of annegb, I’ll pull out some clippers to clip my kids’ nails (or “claws of death” as my wife calls them when they’ve been let go too long). Then I’ll get distracted for a moment, likely by the boys whining that they don’t want their nails clipped, and put the clippers down somewhere. Then I will never find them again, because I always put them down in a completely random place where you would never think to go looking for nail clippers.
Unfortunately, this happens to me even when I consciously try to avoid it. I’ll be holding some important object and need to put it down to do something else, and I’ll think, I must put this down somewhere easy to remember so that I can find it again later. But however logical I think I’m being in picking a place, I always find myself later remembering only my vow to put the thing in an easy-to-remember place, rather than remembering where the place actually was.
Bruce H. my dear brother, how thrilling to see you commenting here.
I lose the book I am reading several times a day. I am usually reading two, or three, or four at a time for that very reason, so I can usually find one of them.
Annegb (hello!) I buy dozens of nail clippers like Bruce buys pens.