Among the Lost

*Disclaimer: This isn't really funny, but I've been stuck on what to write about lately, so I just wrote what I was thinking about. Welcome to my multi-faceted, emotional brain everyone...

Have you ever lost something really important? Something that you find yourself looking for again and again, even though you know it’s gone? You can close your eyes and see it sitting there, as it always was, but when you open your eyes, as if by bitter magic, it has disappeared; lost to the world as if it had never existed within that space.

People lose keys, money, sunglasses, and wallets. While inconvenient, the void that swallows these items is forgiving in nature. In fact, it barely nicks the surface of our lives in the long run. We grumble and protest, but quickly scab over and replace the tiny knick knacks that have become embedded in our daily ways.

  On the other hand, some people lose jobs, houses, cars, lifestyles, and perceived identities. This type of loss is bigger, and therefore, carries with it a larger ripple across our existence. Having a pronounced piece of your worldly life taken away levels you to a different altitude, a lower, more humbling panoramic view of life. You are still human. You are still intact. But inwardly, you must build yourself back up again. This time, hopefully, with a foundation stronger in integrity and balance than what was used in your previous structure.  

Some days our lives are so chaotic, we feel as though we’re losing our minds. As if they have abandoned our bodies, and left us to manage the muddled uproar of life unattended. We can lose sleep worrying, about things we have no control over; about situations that will never be remedied at 3:00 a.m. by pacing a path of carpet and tile, carpet and tile, carpet and tile.

Less abstract could be the loss of a loved one. This feeling of losing someone can be hollowing, as if a giant hand has scooped out your insides and sewn you back up. You face your familiar world with strange eyes, unseeing, and the gravity that holds you to earth is a leaded weight, crumpling your empty shell of a form. Accompanying this can be a loss of hope. Losing an ideal for the way things ought to be and should have been and will never truly be, ever.

With most of these, there comes a time when the looker, stops looking; whatever the object, whatever the value, it will not or cannot be found within reason. Some things cannot be fixed, or replaced, and searching for the piece in its original state becomes painful, and unhealthy.   When this happens, the lost status, or memory, or relationship undergoes transformation. Curiously, it is no longer lost, but rather, transitions itself into something new; a solid, well-worn piece of the owner, a building block of their story, a lesson that was learned. Suddenly, the owner doesn’t see the symbol as missing but rather uncovered. It is given a new place, a new format, a new look, but represents everything that came before it.  

I feel as though I have lost many things, the importance in each piece increasing as I get older. As you enter the land of grown-ups, the world loses a touch of its shininess, and you realize that some things are destined to be lost in a tangled web of circumstances and complications. As I rack up all of my losses, adding them up in long columns, an idea tugs at me that I find hard to ignore. 

What if, instead of thinking of me as this solitary person who has lost their surroundings, what if it is my surroundings that have lost me? Somebody, somewhere, could be turning over rocks, calling into canyons, biting their lip, looking for me; because I’m lost. I am among the lost things. Among the treasures that are hiding under the bed, seeing your eyes scan across me but missing me entirely; floating from thing to thing, untethered by ownership, by home, by belonging. Whatever will happen to me? Who, in this world, will find me, hidden in a crevice, in that space between the mattress and the wall, dig me out, dust me off, and estimate my potential value? Many times, we blame others for what it is that we have lost. They took it, they used it, they had it, and now it’s not here. But at other times, we honestly cannot do that. And who can you blame, in the unfortunate business of losing yourself? The blame game is halted, the finger tapping aimlessly, with no one at which to point.

In the end, we are all the losers of such precious things, and the finders of unexpected treasures. Our lives catalogue the give and take between the roles, and our internal growth is marked by the absence or presence of these objects, these people, these ideals. Indeed though, we are all, inescapably, lost. Lost to ourselves, lost to each other, knowing our circumstances only by the fact that we recall a time when we were not so. And we wait for a time when we will no longer be so, for a hero that we cannot predict an image of, and for our surroundings to take notice that we are, in fact, no longer even there. It is the latter, which becomes the hardest to endure.  

Girl Scout Cookies are Evil, End of Discussion.

 Let me preface this by saying that Girl Scout cookies are evil. So evil, that they have directly resulted in me posting back-to-back blog posts, which I have never done before. However, this message is crucial, and simply couldn’t be delayed for a later date. So, here it is.

For the most part, I have been fortunate enough to avoid the Girl Scout cookie dilemma. I never had friends with kids that were members of the troop, and whenever I ran into one of the booths they have set up at the store, I’ve always been out of money. Therefore, this recent experience with them has left me blindsided. I realize that some of you have undergone this process before. I kneel before you in respect. After I kneel, I’ll also lay down for a little while. This is not meant to offend you, but rather to give my body a break from carrying around the freshly minted 10 pounds I’ve added since my cookie order arrived.

It began with a photo; a kindergarten photo of a little girl, with long curly hair and sparkling eyes. A photo that screamed, ‘I am the future! I am dazzling and pure, I run through flowered meadows, play with puppies, and say the alphabet all by myself.” When you see this photo being slid across the table towards you, you need to run. Run fast, run far, don’t worry about pushing and shoving, because, while you may not know it yet, you’re in the center of a bull’s eye and you’re in trouble. I didn’t run. I didn’t see it coming. All I saw was cuteness; A bundle of cuteness that wanted me to have cookies. Needless to say, I did my part in filling up her order form.

The next step involves waiting for the cookies. This step was probably the easiest for me to bear. I didn’t have to pay for the cookies until they arrived, so I wasn’t missing any money, and I sort of forgot they were coming. I knew that someday cookies would come, but I wasn’t really fixated on that fact. As I said, I hadn’t really been exposed to the allure of the cookies prior to this. Those of you that are cookie veterans might suffer this step quite a bit differently than I did.

Fast forward to today. Arrival day. The big one. Box after box of cookies set aside specifically for me. Somehow, the numbers I wrote down on the order form didn’t seem that big to me when I had initially wrote them. Now though, I could see the sum of all those numbers in their glory. Now that the cookies were available, so was the bill attached to them. The bill was also a number that seemed to have grown more eminent as time had gone by. I high tail it to the ATM. Slide the card, enter my pin, withdrawal, punch in numbers, come on come on, no no I wouldn’t like my receipt it will just make me feel guilty later, p r o c e s s i n g , p r o c e s s i n g, out comes the money, and I run back to claim my packages!

This is the moment of truth. Where you can still turn back, you can pawn off your boxes on someone else, you can hurry into a large crowd of people and offer to share, there are many many options at this point that can still save you. What you don’t want to do? You don’t want to open the boxes yourself, when you’re alone, with no witnesses. That’s bad.

These cookies, these angelic, beautiful cookies that are helping to send smiling children to Disneyland, have betrayed me. They are not my friend. But it was too late. I had already invited the enemy into my home with welcoming arms. I was so naive.

Here is a running record of my thoughts during the past hour:

Mmm, cookies! Don’t mind if I do!

Wow, that was good. I’ve only had one; it wouldn’t hurt to try this kind either.

Well, I might as well try one of each kind, that’s only fair. Plus, sampling them will allow me to better judge their quality and taste.

(At this point all of the packages have been opened, and are all still positioned in front of me.)

Okay, those are good. But, I need to stop eating for a minute.

(Pause a moment, feel free to mock my attempt at self-control as I walk away.)

I sure do wish I had brought one of those cookies over here with me. I mean, just to nibble on as I sit here.

Okay, I’ll go grab one.

(I go over, and grab two. Just in case. )

Those disappeared fast; I better just bring the box over here. Maybe that box too, so that I can have variety.

It was sometime after this last thought, where I must have given in to an intense. sugar induced, comatose state. I have fallen victim to the Girl Scout cookie campaign of 2011. I have said Yes-I-Do to Do-Si-Dos. I have turned Thin Mints into ‘I’m Not Getting Any Thinner’ Mints. I walked into this path, unknowing, and it has cost me dearly. I may never be the same.

If you find yourself staring at a curly haired, doll faced six year old, I worry about your fate. I know that you won’t refuse her pleas, because I couldn’t refuse them either. Trying to do so would be futile, and make you look like a Grinch. So, I merely suggest that you are more intelligent than I was in this position. Limit yourself, share with others, and wear sweatpants instead of jeans when you’re eating them. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to just lie here for a moment or two and catch my breath.

Now that's a great idea!

Whenever I'm given some sort of assignment to complete, I generally take a bit of artistic license in how I choose to complete it. I mean, brilliance, talent, success, it's all about your perspective. And believe me; I've got plenty of perspective. Currently I am working on a personal narrative. Well, to be completely honest, I actually "almost done" with it. "Almost done" is a code I came up with that translates to, "I have absolutely no idea what to do, and have no physical product to show for my hours spent racking my exhausted brain for something to write about". (It's a really efficient code.)

A personal narrative is supposed to capture a unique story about an individual; A captivating story about overcoming great odds, or a triumphant tale of exploring the world, or even something as basic as sharing your collection of 275 pieces of bellybutton lint that you've collected from strangers. But instead of a story, I have a problem. I don't see myself as overcoming any particularly unusual circumstances, and being broke impedes my ability to travel in a slew of exotic places, and I don't, I repeat don't,  collect bellybutton lint. That's just awkward, and I wouldn't have any good places to store it.  

My problem is that I have absolutely n o t h i n g. Nothing to write about. Nothing to share. Nothing of interest that sets me apart from the masses. I think it's beginning to give me a slight complex. Every situation I find myself in, I'm sampling the environment. Is THIS going to be my story? The harder I force it, the more pathetic my quest starts to look, and at this point, even I am worrying that my "almost done" code won't hold up when it's time to turn the damn thing in.

A major factor in my problem is that I keep wanting to write about things that aren't true. I'm not a liar; I just think that the stories in my head are way more exciting than anything I can come up with in reality. I've been wrestling with this issue for months, cramming my brain into the small space where truth and fact exist, and I've come up short, every, single, time. And I'm tired of it.

Therefore, I am granting myself permission to post my wonderful, hypothetical, outrageously false personal narrative ideas here. If anything, I'll be excited to just imagine I've done all of these crazy, beautiful things. Seriously though, if you can think of anything at all I can actually use as a springboard for my real project, I will give you something wonderful. Like a handful of chocolate chips. Mmmm...think it over as you witness my tragedy first hand.  

Idea #1: Forget world travel, say hello to the space age! This potential narrative highlights my trip to Mars, where I befriended local Martians and basically saved planet Earth from intergalactic warfare. 

Idea #2: Here, I will talk about my commitment to the community, and the importance of volunteer work. I focus in on me singing the Kit Kat jingle at a senior center.

Idea #3: What about a real tear jerker? In this plot, I am able to get hired for a job position, despite the fact that I have one major weakness: I care too much!

Idea #4: Choosing something really important to me is a snap when I use this story of when I traveled to a remote jungle. While I was there, I discovered the Unisauras! Wow, what a special day!

Pretty great, huh? If I could even develop ONE of these ideas into my personal narrative, I swear I would. I'd have it written, storyboarded, and outlined in glitter by the end of the week. I'd even put a bow on it. But no, it needs to be a grounded, detailed, emotionally transforming story about the real me. The real me that hasn't done any of those things. And the things I have been able to accomplish in real life, pale in comparison to the virtual playground my mind has built.

Therefore, I am enlisting your help, bribing you with delicious commodities, begging you to provide me with a viable person narrative topic, in order to prevent this:

Hi, my name is Nicklebee, and here is my personal narrative. (clears throat) I like to eat chicken nuggets sometimes. (cough) I eat other things too. Like bananas. (long pause) I am the creator of a multi-faceted code language. I would share it with you, but it isn't finished. Don't worry, it's "almost done". (Runs away fighting back tears of shame and failure.)

Remember: a handful of chocolate chips!