I am so pissed and sad! I even heard it fall out of it’s pocket and hit the door of the taxi as I was getting in, but at the time I thought it was just my backpack hitting the door. I realized it was missing like 1 minute later because I had just been reading a book on it and wanted to get back to it. I looked everywhere in the taxi, and when I got to my hostel and couldn’t find it, I asked the taxi driver to take me back to the train station and he wouldn’t! I was shocked! So I had to track down another taxi, but when I got there it wasn’t on the ground. I found a police officer and went through the process of getting someone who spoke English on the phone, walking around trying to find the police station and filing a report. Hopefully whoever picked it up will contact me by the email address that is on the wallpaper, but I made it decorative, and I’m afraid the amount of English might intimidate someone and they won’t see the email address. I don’t know.
I used that thing a million times every day, for reading books and playing games, taking notes that are now gone, using the map app to find my way around and, of course, my entire music collection. My laptop doesn’t have the music on it, either- it’s only on the hard drive with my friend in Boston. and i just downloaded robot unicorn attack on it, too! :P
hopefully my travel insurance will reimburse me, but as it was essentially my fault, I’m not sure.
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After thinking about why this has affected me so much, I realized that the itouch was the only consistent thing that I interacted with every day, and shared my experiences with, really. In a sense, I think it was a surrogate friend to me in that it was the object that I sent my attention toward in each event each day. Without my itouch to ‘talk to’, sudden loneliness came over me as the shield of knowing my distance from my loved ones dissolved. Knowing this, I am feeling a lot better about the loss- at least I understand why I was kicking myself so hard for losing it. Perhaps it was anger at myself for choosing to leave my loved ones behind for this journey, which I still probably haven’t properly mourned. My social life has always been somewhat of a paradox, having been used to isolation as a child and yet still loving human intimacy so much. Being alone in Japan without my close friends is going to be harder on me than I realized. As I start to let in not seeing them for so long, the dream of living internationally starts to lose its lustre a bit. I’ve only been away for two months so far. It’s not always a longing for them, an emotion of missing them… rather it is like a hole in myself, and I can feel along the boundaries that something is missing, those little moments of fellowship that filled my days in Boston. I hadn’t known how much those would mean to me, especially as I was used to be alone for so long during my foundational years. During that time, I had my dog, Ginger, who was my best friend and, although brilliant for a dog, was simple enough to project my companionship needs on to. I did a similar thing with my baby siblings, too. Did I do something similar with my PDA? It makes me laugh to think so, and yet being without it there is a semblance of that same loss.
Well, at least it gives me an excuse to get the new iPhone when I buy a cell phone for Japan!