pillage/the/village

But I don’t have my own internet yet.

Right now, I’m in Ambositra, borrowing my friend’s Danish laptop.

It can do cool things, like this Æ, this ø, and this å.

Two. more. weeks.

And finally, what everyone thinks of when I tell them where I’m going.  Apparently, it’s crackalackin.

More jumping Sifaka lemurs!

And now, for some lemurs!  These lemurs hop across the ground because they’ve forgotten how to walk.

but life has been pretty crazy lately.  I’m a quarter-century old now and I’m going to Madagascar in 2 days.

New (to me) camera!  And it’s purple!

The internet is a wonderful thing.  Unlike all the generations before me, I have almost instant access to knowledge.  I can find things out as fast as I can type it into Google—and if that weren’t fast enough, Google now tries to guess what I’m looking for before I even finish typing.

So, at first, I wasn’t worried about the task of tracking down my box.  I simply typed the tracking number into the first tracking website I could find and began my search.  It branched off into two directions: either search for the package on Korea’s postal website or the destination country’s website.  Thanks to tabbed browsing, I chose both.

The Korean website was certainly harder to navigate, being in Korean, but I managed to determine that it had at least made it to Busan harbor.  The USPS website was down that night, so with a small amount of rising panic, I postponed the search to another day.

Eventually, the USPS website revealed that the box was in America, last seen on January 24 at a sort facility in Jersey City, NJ.  That was all.  And so, the search continued.

*I’m not apologizing about the lame pun in the title.

I have a lot of stuff.  As first-world problems go, I think this is pretty average.  It’s mind-blowing when I think about how much space it takes up, how much energy it would take to move it anywhere.  And I haven’t even gotten to the big stuff yet.  I can still fit most of it in my bedroom, but I already have enough junk for 4 separate lives.

One thing about me and my stuff: I rarely lose things.  I’m a bit OCD about keeping track of stuff.  I always check for my keys whenever I walk out my front door, I’ll randomly look through my purse to see if my phone is still there, and though it looks like a disaster zone, I can find pretty much anything that’s in my room. 

However, lately I’ve lost something really big.

I left Korea last December.  In the course of a year, my two suitcases of stuff had somehow mushroomed to fill four additional large shipping boxes.  This is not even counting the stuff I gave away.

I mailed each box home by ship.  The price difference between air and surface was so great that I couldn’t justify paying $100 more to send them by air.  Two of them arrived in a timely manner.  The third one looked like the box had been shredded and held together with cellophane.  Ok, whatever, the stuff inside was still fine. 

But the fourth box never came.

It’s been 3 months now since I sent it.  It haunts me.  Blame it on a compulsion to hold onto everything I own, but the fact that something I own is out there is profoundly unsettling.  A part of me is floating around in the universe: flotsam and jetsam without its proper context, without me.  But I refuse to accept that it is lost forever.  I will do everything I can to get it back.

To be continued…

thedailywhat:

Lights Out: Free Electricity For The Rest Of Your Life: The video Big Energy doesn’t want you to see!!! 

[reddit.]

what kind of sorcery is this??

I found these pictures in a stack of really old photos that are almost completely buried on my desk.  They were taken at my grandparents’ house in Maryland in June 1989.  This was my best friend.  Or rather, he’s the first friend I can remember.  I was 2.  He looks like he’s about 5. 

At that time, we lived in a small rental house in my grandparents’ back yard.  All the neighbors in their little neighborhood have lived there for years, and we know them all pretty well. His grandmother lived down the street, so he came to visit a lot.  We’d play in my yard and ride tricycles down the hill behind my house.

Eventually, we moved to Richmond and he stopped coming around after his grandmother passed away.  I have no idea what happened to him.  If it weren’t for these pictures, I probably would have forgotten him by now.

I wonder about him, though.  Does he remember me?  And, of course, could I find him through the vast social networks on the Internet?  I wonder if I’d recognize him if I saw him now.  Maybe we could be friends again…or maybe we’ve completely outgrown each other, like how I outgrew my sandals, or that bowl cut.  I’ll never know.

I miss how easy it was to be friends with someone without second-guessing my intentions, or his.  Why do relationships ever have to get more complicated than this?