Losin' It ... No, not that

I lose things.

Oh, I know, everybody says they lose things, everbody claims to be scatterbrained and disorganized. Tell someone you have ADD, and they’ll claim “I Think I have that too.” And about that, if you do that, unless you have a medical diagnosis (thus requiring you remove the “I think” from that statement), stop that! It’s annoying to people who actually have the condition. If someone said “I have a brain tumor” you wouldn’t say, “Oh, I think I have one too.

But really. I lose things. I also can’t seem to close cabinet doors, which seems a big enough issue to my wife that it should probably be its own entry. But I lose things. All kinds of things. It is amazing to me that I have not lost one of the children. Permanently.
Anyway, it started, as most things did, in my childhood. I still wonder what happened to my Sallah and Marion Ravenwood figures from my Indiana Jones action set. I looked for those two for weeks. I eventually found the puffy pantaloons Marion wore, which makes me suspect foul play (or fun play!) from Sallah, but I never found either of them. Indy is still in mourning. He and Belloqu have been alone, waiting for their friends for about 22 years now.

I could never keep track of my homework, when I remembered I had homework in the first place. I know all kids have black-hole backpack syndrome, but I think I had the most extreme case. I eventually got used to doing all my work in class because seriously, if it went into my bag, it wasn’t coming out. I would blame gremlins, but I lost all of those as well.

To this day, paperwork is my kryptonite. I cannot hold onto it. Anything in pulped wood form? It is doomed. Checks, money, tickets, important pieces of paper that I ABSOLUTELY CANNOT LOSE such as CLAD test results needed for my credentialing…doesn’t matter what I do with it, what system I put in place, it will be gone.

Car keys? HAH! In addition to the keys themselves, I have lost hours of my life. My wife lives in horror of the groundhog-day-like frequency with which the last conversation we have before one of us leaves is “Have you seen my cars keys?” I’ve started building the time into my day. And yes, I know I need to put things in the same place every time. Can’t do it. Seriously, ask my doctor. I have a note. The Americans with Disabilities Act covers people like me.

The problem has intensified ever since cell phones became the one device we were absolutely, positively never to leave home without. I got through the first 25 years of my life without it, but now … well, If I don’t have it I am officially in trouble, and we all know what that means. And this thing, I swear, I’ve spent more time in the past eight years looking for one of my various phones than I had in the previous 25 searching for keys. Despite the fact that I can call it and have it ring. I have found my cell phone in the following places: between the car seats, in the little organizer, under my seat, under the bed, under the couch, behind the fish tank, in my wife’s purse, on a shelf in the closet, in the freezer (the hell?), and behind a bookshelf.

My daughter, fortunately, is good at helping me find things. She totally saved my ass one time by finding a $3000 check from my school which was meant to pay for a field trip and which I had, or course, put in the chaos blender that is my life. My son? NO help at all. I think he may have been the one who put the cell phone in the freezer. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

The upside? While looking for lost stuff I often find a lot of other cool stuff I had lost before, or had not realized I had lost before. In fact, I’ve found the best way to find something is to lose something else and then look for it.

But if anyone knows where our original DVD player remote is, let me know. And don’t worry, my ipod had a clip. The children, sadly, don’t.