The Kid Loses the Picture

Is it better to have taken a picture and lost it than to have never taken it at all?

This evening, as I was hunting for the memory card with my Olympics pictures on it, I realized where it was: In the zippered pocket of a handbag I threw in the garbage at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong Sunday morning.

This would never have happened with a roll of film.

Sigh.

This is what I get for (a) having a flat disorganized enough that I can’t find the cable to download my camera pictures promptly, (b) having a life disorganized enough that I can’t find the time to find the cable to download my camera pictures promptly, (c) trying to be a good friend and therefore cramming everything into the one suitcase I brought so my friend could have the extra (empty) bag I’d packed in said suitcase for the loot I knew I’d pick up in Vietnam, and (d) being a little lazy (see previous about one bag). Oh, yeah – and for throwing out a perfectly decent-if-not-my-taste handbag given to me as a birthday gift last year. (In my defense, most of the beading had come off.)

All of the rest of the pictures I’ve taken in my 3.5 years in Europe – with the exception of the ones from the first 3 months – are sitting in plastic yellow Snappy Snaps bags in the corner of my flat. I’m not even sure what some of them are of any more. I debated tossing some of them last week, when staying in nice hotels and prowling trendy Hong Kong homewares shops made me consider a minimalist existence for about the millionth time.

But the memory card I lost has the sort of pictures I’d be able to identify even years from now: the crazy media centers, the late night dinners with fellow reporters who felt like longtime friends after two weeks – even pictures of myself (something I usually refuse to have taken) on the job. I guess all the better reason to be glad I have at least the blog as a record of my time there…

Speaking of which, I spent two weeks completely offline (I didn’t even succumb when the friend I travelled was dragging me around looking for places to check her e-mail) and it’s taking me a little while to readjust to blogging. It’s funny how I look at my life differently when I blog. It’s not like I go out and do things to blog about them or anything. It’s more like sometimes I can feel myself turning events into anecdotes while they’re happening – something, frankly, I’ve been guilty of long before I ever started blogging.

Anyway, it was nice to live completely in the present for two weeks – but it’s also nice to be back.

PS Photo from the market at Hoi An in Vietnam, and of a spring roll appetizer served to my friend and I at yet another garnish-mad restaurant (the spring rolls are on the toothpicks)... more pictures TK. As soon as I rotate some of the vertical ones. Or figure out how. Assuming it doesn't require extra equipment. Ridiculous proportion of sentence fragments implying past bedtime. Or jetlag. Or both.