material items that i have lost

i am really good at losing and finding my wallet. 2008 was the first year i lived in melbourne, i moved here for university and one night when i went to an 'end of semester' uni party i was being silly and drunk and romping around a suburb called malvern. i lost my wallet at some point during this trip and thought i would never see it again but what actually happened was that it started the pattern of me losing my wallet and finding it again. i went back to the suburb a few days later and tried to look for it to no avail. i went to the police station to see if it had been handed in. it hadn't. i filed a police report. the police report was signed by someone with the surname 'simpson'. a few days later my mum called me and said that somebody from a commonwealth bank on high street malvern called her saying they had found my wallet. they found my horsham address from my driver's license and called mum from it somehow. when i went to collect it i was listening to 'a river ain't too much to love' by smog; i remember it being lush and green and slightly wet that day and smog seems inextricably bound up with that sort of weather for me now.

in october 2009 i was in newcastle, nsw, australia at 'this is not art' festival. i was having dinner with some friends and i didn't remember putting my wallet on this lil shelf underneath the circular table that we were sitting at. we were about to head out to the festival after dinner and i realised i didn't have my wallet. i looked for it furiously and could not find it. somebody suggested that i may have left it at the venue where we had eaten. i found it. i found it.

in december 2009 flying to england i left my ipod in the bathroom of singapore changi international airport. i was real tired and toting a lot of things around. i had just finished listening to alopecia by WHY? and thought i would go to the bathroom on the ground one more time before i had to spend the next 12 hrs on a plane. i was so tired i left my ipod on the shelf in the toilet cubicle. i realised i left it there when i had gone into the departure lounge. i ran back and tried to ask a cleaning lady if she had seen it but she didn't understand english and then she tried to get somebody who did. i thought 'ipod' and 'mp3' were pretty well recognised terms, like 'nike' or 'coke' and also that english is one of the official languages of singapore. but i didn't have time to tell them that and i decided that getting my flight was probably more important than my ipod. i think once i got on the plane i cried about it a little. [seems like i cry on planes a lot?]



i bought this during that trip to england. i get real obsessed with lip balm. felt real cool, kinda 'old school' taking this around with me. it once came in handy acting as a bottle opener. somebody chastised me for essentially putting petrol on my lips and i made the switch to



when i got it for my birthday last year (from the person who reprimanded me about petroleum derived lip balms of course). i think i lost this a couple of months ago, probably left it in my friend fraser's car. lip balms/lip gloss don't tend to have a very long life when they fall into my hands.

another material item that is a sort of convoluted loss was a 'cuff' type bracelet with some sort of tibetan script around it. i wore it pretty much every day, in much the same fashion as i now wear the owl ring that probably most people who have met me in real life or tinychatted with me have seen me wearing, somewhat obsessively. i left this bracelet at my cousin's place in liverpool and asked him to send it back to me. for one reason or another, i didn't get around to telling him i was moving, and i suspect that the people who moved to 2/21 munro street, hawthorn east received a small package featuring my beloved cuff. i made one attempt to go to the local postal centre to retrieve it, to no avail. similar to lip balm, i very easily become attached to small jewellery items of no particular significance.

just before i moved to abbotsford (where i currently reside) i gave a giant 'homeless bag' (synthetic tartan bag commonly seen with people who appear to be homeless or those who are moving) full of what i thought were unwanted items of mine to the salvation army. the bag contained things i hadn't worn in a long time and with it i put stuff like a working vcr i found on the side of the road that i never used but thought would be pretty awesome to have, along with some vhs tapes purchased probably from the very salvo's i was donating to. i think that in this bag i had put, by accident, my only bath mat. this bath mat i had purchased when buying things to move away from home. i bought it from kmart and it was so soft before i had used it that i referred to it as my 'replacement cat' because i had to leave my cat behind at my mum's house.

um on the weekend i lost this scarf that i really love (that is the reason i am writing this post). i started knitting it when i was in year eleven or twelve, so probably five years ago. it was a blueish purple shade, in fact it sort of faded from blue-purple throughout the duration of the scarf and had little bits of other coloured wool in it every now and then, but just demure little bits of green or orange that you could barely notice unless you looked at it closely. it was not knitted in any sort of pattern, just plain knit, but it was very long indeed and i liked to wear it twice around my neck for ultimate warmth. i am really missing it today because usually i wear the scarf with the outfit that i am wearing and i do not have any other scarves. i went to lincraft today to buy new wool so i could knit another one, and this wool fades, it goes from grey to darker grey and it is made from wool and soy bean and it cost me a lot of money, i probably could have bought a new scarf for that much money but knitting is great. it's really great.