The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

I'm a little concerned: I can't seem to find my passport. This is a problem, because I would like to use my passport in the near future. Plus I really like my passport. It has five more years of validity, it doesn't have an RFID chip in it, and it's got all sorts of neat stamps in it from all my recent travels. Those stamps currently include at least six different alphabets in it: Latin, Cyrillic, Thai, Cambodian, Hebrew, Japanese. So not only do I not want to have to go through the aggravation of replacing it, but I'll miss not having it as a souvenir of my life. (I even just got new pages for it and everything…)

What really bugs me, though, is that I shouldn't have lost it. My room may be a chaotic disaster, mostly because I have more stuff crammed into it than can be effectively organized, but one of the things that WAS organized was my passport. In other words, while I don't always have places to put things away, the passport DID have a place to be put away. It lived in a certain drawer. It's lived in that drawer for several years. I never have had to tear apart my room looking for it, because it has always been right there in that drawer. Except right now it's not, and I don't have the slightest idea why (or where it's gone to instead).

The bigger problem, however, is that all of a sudden I generally can't seem to keep track of my stuff. This bothers me, not just because I don't like losing my stuff, but because I'm not a flake and normally I'm really good at keeping track of my stuff. But my life situation keeps straining my ability to do so. Think about it: there have been times in recent months when I've had my possessions in at least three states and two countries! (Or sometimes two states and three countries...) Anway, who can keep track of THAT??? I've got things at my mom's, things at my dad's… Plus all this traveling… It's all really interfering with my ability to take a mental snapshot of where I am and what I'm doing when I put things down. And as a result I can't find things the next time I need them, since I lack any recollection of where I was when I last saw them.

Meanwhile, it's not just the passport I can't find. I also can't find a sleeping bag (It's huge! How can I lose THAT?) and a jacket. I THOUGHT I had both of them here with me at my mom's. But they are nowhere to be found. Instead I'm starting to fear that there's a vortex in my room somewhere, swallowing up all my things. Unfortunately it is the only theory that can really explain where they might have gone. I'm really at a loss to come up with any other alternative. Which is too bad, because if I could, I could probably also find them. But I can't…

Edit 3/1: I FOUND THE PASSPORT!!!! Yay! It had wandered off and parked itself under a bin on a shelf. WHY it decided to do that, I may never know. But upon retrieval I spanked it soundly and sent it to bed without dinner in punishment for its intransigence, and it is now back in its correct spot.