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I'm on hold with the US State Department, calling to report my lost passport. I'd been trying to stay optimistic, but it's been a week, and I haven't heard back from the airline, and I guess it's now time to give up the ghost.
I'm trying to tell myself that it was destined to happen--I forgot my passport at home on the way to the airport on the first leg of the trip, and it is only luck and the fact that I was two hours early for my flight that got me home and back to pick it up in time to catch the plane. The passport didn't want to be with me, I'm telling myself, it kept trying to slip away last week until it finally did so in a grand and glorious way, left in the seat pocket of my plane seat off to Denver and infinity.
I'm trying to remind myself of the positives--my new passport will have no Israeli stamps, so I can go back to the UAE if I want to! And it would be nice to have a passport where I'm a bit less wide-eyed than in my current passport (although the odds of getting a decent passport photo are quite low, I'm well aware).
But... that passport. There are years of my life in that passport, hallmarks of all the traveling I've done as an adult. That was the tangible reminder I had of Dubai, of Dublin, of London, of Tel Aviv. It was a cheery marker of my ability to go tearing off to another part of the world on a whim. To lose it, to leave it in the seat pocket in front of me like an *idiot* on the way from LaGuardia to Minneapolis, is devastating.
And besides, there are the new logistical complications in my life. That was the only valid state-issued ID I've had since my California ID expired in 2008. Now that it's been reported lost (because I paused halfway through this post when I got off hold) I'm going to need to take a valid photo id with me in the process to get a new one. The DMV is only open on weekdays, 8am-4:30pm, and is really shitty to reach on public transit. The Post Office that serves as the nearest Acceptance Office is also only open on weekdays, 8am-1pm. So basically to fix this I'm going to have to arrange my life around this on two separate days. I'm kind of freaking out a little. I was so calm the whole time I was in Madison, figuring out how the fuck I was even going to get onto a plane to get home without any valid id, still in problem solving mode, but now that I'm actually home and faced with the reality of things...
Shit.
I'm trying to tell myself that it was destined to happen--I forgot my passport at home on the way to the airport on the first leg of the trip, and it is only luck and the fact that I was two hours early for my flight that got me home and back to pick it up in time to catch the plane. The passport didn't want to be with me, I'm telling myself, it kept trying to slip away last week until it finally did so in a grand and glorious way, left in the seat pocket of my plane seat off to Denver and infinity.
I'm trying to remind myself of the positives--my new passport will have no Israeli stamps, so I can go back to the UAE if I want to! And it would be nice to have a passport where I'm a bit less wide-eyed than in my current passport (although the odds of getting a decent passport photo are quite low, I'm well aware).
But... that passport. There are years of my life in that passport, hallmarks of all the traveling I've done as an adult. That was the tangible reminder I had of Dubai, of Dublin, of London, of Tel Aviv. It was a cheery marker of my ability to go tearing off to another part of the world on a whim. To lose it, to leave it in the seat pocket in front of me like an *idiot* on the way from LaGuardia to Minneapolis, is devastating.
And besides, there are the new logistical complications in my life. That was the only valid state-issued ID I've had since my California ID expired in 2008. Now that it's been reported lost (because I paused halfway through this post when I got off hold) I'm going to need to take a valid photo id with me in the process to get a new one. The DMV is only open on weekdays, 8am-4:30pm, and is really shitty to reach on public transit. The Post Office that serves as the nearest Acceptance Office is also only open on weekdays, 8am-1pm. So basically to fix this I'm going to have to arrange my life around this on two separate days. I'm kind of freaking out a little. I was so calm the whole time I was in Madison, figuring out how the fuck I was even going to get onto a plane to get home without any valid id, still in problem solving mode, but now that I'm actually home and faced with the reality of things...
Shit.
