While I don’t really consider myself the World’s Most Irresponsible Person, I’ve misplaced things that make me look like the World’s Most Irresponsible Person.
I’m not talking about staggering amounts of money, or precious camera equipment. I’m talking about misplacing the little things you shouldn’t normally lose.
An example is my forgetting to pick up my change in restaurants or shops. I was perpetually doing this throughout college, while eating somewhere in Katipunan or Greenhouse between classes. My friend, obviously baffled at my repeated blunder, exasperatedly snorted that maybe I was trying to mimic Holden Caulfield, my numero uno fictional hero, since I was indeed going through my Catcher in the Rye phase then, which involved quoting paragraphs and conversations from the book in verbatim.
But I honestly wasn’t imitating Holden; I just forget to take my change after a meal that’s all.
It was good training though, and I proudly announce that I’ve kicked the habit, but another thing I keep losing are birthdays and phone numbers. I have a habit of writing a person’s phone number on a loose sheet of paper, which I tuck into a book or newspaper, promising myself to write it down on my phonebook later on. I never do. When I have my phone book, the paper is lost, and when I finally find the number, my goddam phone book is nowhere to be found. Birthdays, too, because I was never used to keeping track of dates much, yet similarly I’ve curbed this habit – but only after the embarrassing experience of forcing a friend to attend someone else’s birthday party wtih me… when it was her birthday, too!
For this, it should be in the Constitution that birthday celebrants wear a party hat on their heads to remind people.
But worse, I’ve misplaced things that make me cringe each time I remember them, like forgetting to buy a friend’s asthma medicine during my errand day (returning to find her unable to breathe, chokingly asking for her prescription, to my utter horror), or losing a roll of film of my China trip (all those memories, never to revived in its majestic glossy Kodak paper glory), or one whole bag of Christmas presents during whirlwind last-minute holiday hoopla panic shopping (in defense, how can you keep track of ten individual plastic bags in a Sea-of-People-Mall? You can’t!). Or what about the book I owned for a record-breaking 11 hours, purchased at an Abu Dhabi bookstore and left behind in godforsaken Qatar, lost even before reaching my destination?
Okay, you can accuse me of inattentiveness and carelessness, and maybe you’re right to an extent, I won’t deny it. But there are things which I personally feel are much more important than a date on the calendar or loose change, things I could never overlook or forget.
You can make huge mistakes in little things, but don’t you agree it’s more meaningful to remember the little things that make a huge difference…
(But if your change is more than fifty pesos, you really shouldn’t overlook this. In this day and age, fifty pesos is still fifty pesos)
