miss adventures

Wear It Out (You're Gonna Have to Eventually Anyway)

I did a precious lot this weekend. I would have preferred otherwise. I had to do a precious lot, because a precious lot was also taken from me right from the get-go on Saturday morning. It is becoming clearer and clearer everyday that it is simply too much to expect that any situation is necessarily safe. Reyna said that bad things happen in threes. Last year may have been the year of auto body damage for me -- I experienced that thrice. This year, I hope I have just had my third and final run-in with identity theft.

It made me realize the importance of being accountable to yourself and others. Being accountable to yourself means that you will never engage in those types of petty crimes that upset a person's peace of mind much more than his or her pocketbook. Being accountable to others means that, when you truly are in a state of crisis, the value of having them there to help you is the relief and reward more invaluable than anything stolen. I was never as grateful to have the things swiped from my purse than the support of my friends, in the form of a ride here or there, a drop-off or spot of cash, an extra key held for that very event.

I have run such a dialogue in my head of what I would say if I confronted that thief. Take all these pretty items, these things so small and sleek I hoped especially I could keep them all together in my purse, never expecting that one day their compact mobility would spell a certain facility for your theft. If you would like cash, I'll give that to you too, in an amount just a few bucks shy of what it is costing me now to replace everything you've taken -- so that it is profitable for us both -- because it would be just as hefty and more useful to you than walking off right now with all those items, as they are. But please, leave me those items that it is just a pain to replace for me, that you can make absolutely no use of. You won't use those keys because you don't have the wherewithal to try a thousand or more locks in this city in hopes of striking gold. And did you think I was so stupid that I wouldn't have had them all changed already, anyway. You won't use the little trinkets of jewelry that were cheap and small affectations of others' friendship to me. And there's just no way you can appreciate what lengths I went to, to find the white Marc Jacobs summer hobo with the teal suede interior, of which the acquisition was a magic moment of kismet for me at Neiman's First Call this year. Maybe I can eBay it back after you've posted it. Even if you made that opportunity available to me, I'd be a bit more hopeful than I am right now.

Yeah, all this is meaningless in the grand scheme of things happening on the Gulf Coast. And the tsunami and Iraq and 9/11 and slavery and the Cultural Revolution and the Holocaust. But I'm not here to talk about my particular brand of deprivation that really isn't deprivation at all. It's all replaceable. I'm just saying, please be accountable to yourself and others. You may not go to heaven for it. But you'll be able to look at yourself in the mirror every morning with some small modicum of integrity. This will go a much longer way than you think.

posted by Lucy Sloan @ 4:49 PM