Living in the Land of the Lost

Occasionally, I lose things. Some of you might think I've lost my will to blog or blawg. But this is in fact not the case at all. I have lost the time to blog/blawg, but I will persevere.

But really, when I say I lose things, I refer mostly to things like the debit card I lost on my birthday, or that I'm constantly losing things inside my own house, or the fact that I cannot hold onto a tube of Burt's Bees to save my life. Hell, I even lost my cat once. (This one not technically my fault, as he fell through the window screen and subsequently hid under the nearest shrub until he was found. No seriously, that happened.)

Anyway, because I would not like to lose the Earth and would like to lose weight, I'm pretty much trying to walk everywhere. Well, within reason. Reasonable= walking a mile to Kroger. Unreasonable= walking to visit my grandma in Cincinnati. Surprisingly, the thing about walking is not that no one respects crosswalks. (This just in: it's bad to hit pedestrians.) But rather the thing that amazes me is the volume of lost items that I see on sidewalks.

I always wonder: how does one lose just one shoe? I'm guessing that probably it doesn't go like, you're walking along and you decide that instead you'd rather hop on one foot. And it's unlikely that you just don't realize you lost your shoe. I imagine it's probably more likely that lost shoes are because of one or more of these scenarios:

1. While being chased by a large animal, possibly a moose, you are running so quickly your shoe falls off and you are unable to retrieve it, due to mortal peril.
2. That girl from the Michael Phelps commercial is in such a frantic race to hear the "hilarious stories about how much he loves Chinese food" that she doesn't have time to go back for her shoe.
3. It's Christmastime and Dutch children came through and got confused about where to leave their shoes to be filled by Sinterklaas.
4. While running late for a class, for example, Criminal Procedure (I hear sometimes people have trouble getting there on time), a biker was too weighed down by trivial things like shoes and was forced to throw them off to increase his or her speed.
5. You were hungry and threw it in an unsuccessful attempt to get the pizza delivery man ahead of you to stop and "loan" you a pizza.

Random lost shoes aside (and underwear! who loses their underwear!), there are a number of things in our lives that are very easily lost:
1. keys
2. socks (Seriously, where do they go?!?!?!)
3. virginity (See entry: Tequila Law)
4. mind
5. way
6. boys (See work of fiction: Peter Pan)
7. umbrella (See: my life)
8. marbles
9. sponsors (See every plotline of the short-lived post-West Wing semi-autobiographical Aaron Sorkin series Studio 60. That's right. Six people got that joke.)
10. sunglasses (Though, always the nice ones. The cheap ones from the Rite-Aid stick with you forever.)

There are a few things though that we should try really hard to lose:
Bad Attitude. Now, I am a wholly positive person and never have a bad attitude about anything. But I have noticed that some people might at times be crabby or cranky. Today when I was walking at the Arboretum, I kept passing the same woman who never once said hello, smiled at me or even looked at me. I was outraged! Our collective bad attitude is weighing us down, giving us eye circles, probably causing global warming, and, of course, forcing us to stress eat, and that is, in a word, abominable. Some ways to lose your bad attitude: play with a puppy, download the iPhone application that compliments you, watch Big Brother (you'll feel so much better about yourself!), watch something with Kermit the Frog (it is undeniably impossible to not be happy while watching The Muppets), or for some of you, watch a Fox News Special on Sarah Palin (I hear anyone can be president if they want it badly enough!)

Unspeakably Awful Christmas or Birthday Gifts. Last year for Christmas my dear sweet grandmother gave me a giant pillow made almost entirely of awkward denim patches. With a pocket. With a bandana in it. And I love my grandma, but that is just... well, in a word, abominable. Some gifts are easier to lose than others though, which presents a degree of difficulty for the losing. For example, how does one lose a pillow? I tried to leave it in my old apartment when last I moved, but fortunately my mom was looking out for me. Way to go, Mom! Some things are easier to lose than others: ugly sweaters can be "left" at the gym, terrible bags can be "left" on vacation, and remember: sometimes things get broken. Accidentally of course.

And there are some things you should try really hard not to lose:
Your Driver's License. It's just a huge hassle. I mean, you have to go all the way downtown, find a place to park. Then you have to go to the DMV, where they yell at you that they only take cash the second you walk in the door. As if the 40,000 signs posted around the room weren't enough to tip you off. Then you have to go to like 8 windows. All of which are inhabited by people who yell at you to go to the next window. However, at the DMV in Fayette County, there's a guy who looks like Elvis. So there's that.

The Remote. Why would you want to walk all the way to the tv? Picture this: you've sat down with your jumbo popcorn and pint of Ben and Jerrys to watch The Biggest Loser and BAM no remote. I mean, why even bother to watch tv if you have to manually change the channels? Might as well go work out if you're going to do that. Wait... nah.

Touch With Reality. This is probably the most important. Because no one wants to be served burgers by a guy who thinks he's on Entourage, a hairdresser who thinks she's America's Next Top Model, or a lawyer who thinks he's God. And there are a lot of those. I mean burger flippers that dream of Ari Gold's life, of course.