I'm posting now because the other day I lost my wallet, and I told myself that I would write a post about why it was meaningful to me (I don't quite remember why I made this resolution). I ended up finding my wallet, but in the spirit of keeping promises I'm going to write this blog post anyways.
A couple of days ago, a few friends and I had some drinks (mostly beers, but a couple of shots), and after sitting around for a little bit we realized that the alcohol made us all really hungry. So the one friend who was sober agreed to drive us to get food, and we ended up going to Jack in the Box, Taco Bell, and Happy Donuts (yes, all three). When I got back to my room, I realized I didn't have my wallet anymore. I had paid for JitB but not the other two places, and so I lost it either in my friend's car, Taco Bell, or Happy Donuts. The next morning, I went back to look in my friends car, and since we couldn't find the wallet, we went on a dude-where's-my-car-esque adventure, retracing our steps to try and find it. Turns out, I dropped it outside of Taco Bell, and someone was awesome enough to turn it in.
Now, as to why the wallet is important to me. I realized after I lost it that I didn't care at all about the money. It only had one or two dollars in it, but even if it had had forty or fifty I wouldn't have cared that much. I cared much more about the other pieces of paper, as well as the plastic. Had I lost my wallet, I would have had to replace two credit cards, which are tied to my father's account, so he would have had to cancel his too, and one debit card, which is tied to my own account. I would have had to pay for a new student ID, and in the meantime a vast variety of services would be unavailable to me. And I would have had to get a new driver's license, kind of difficult considering that I'm all the way in California, and one cannot fly without government issued ID.
And although replacing cards and IDs would have been a lot of unnecessary time and effort, I wouldn't have felt like I lost something that I could never get back. In a special part of my wallet, I have some pieces of paper that, while worth nothing to cashiers and tellers, are worth a fair amount to me. Most of them are tickets to events that I've gone to: currently I have Avenue Q at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts, The Princess and the Frog at Fairfax Corner, and Up at Tysons Corner. These tickets come and go as I do events and inevitably lose older tickets, but they're still good memory triggers to have. However, they're not as important as two small slips of paper sitting right in the front of my wallet. One of these two small slips is a picture of a panda, drawn for me when I was rather stressed out and needed some encouragement. It makes me smile every time I see it, so I keep it around. The other is my TJ senior prom ticket, which has been in my wallet for probably well over 18 months. Senior prom was just a lot of fun, and prom is a milestone in the life of any high schooler, so keeping it reminds me of all of the memories that I made at TJ, and in particular one amazing night.
So yeah, hopefully I'll post again in the next five months. We'll see.
