Things We Lost In The Cab.
I guess it’s just how I was raised but I only recently realized that it’s kind of weird to use Ziploc bags for storing anything other than food and liquids under 100 mls when flying. Maybe I should write to the Ziploc company and their advertising department should send me a check for a million dollars because I’ve come up with hundreds more uses.
It was my Important Documents Ziploc (it’s marked as such in Sharpie) that I left in the back of the cab that took me from Union Station to my new home in Columbia Heights. Here is a sampling of what was inside:
- My passport
- My check book
- My social security card
- My Moleskine
- Some other stuff that I guess wasn’t that important cause I don’t remember what it was
There are varying reasons that I kind of need the first four things right now—I have to pay rent today, I have to fill out an I9 and a W4 tomorrow, that Moleskine was my only Christmas present—but it’s the passport that is tearing my heart out. I had intended to unpack and do some laundry when I got here, but because of that passport I instead spent an hour wandering around Target in a daze and then drank myself to sleep via some wine purchased in those aisles.
Not to be a total douchebag about it, but if you insist: That passport has extra pages taped in at the London Embassy because I found out, as I was about to board a flight to Cape Town from Heathrow’s Terminal 4, that I did not have an entire blank page left for a South African visa. I have residency visas in there from Jordan, the UK, and Sri Lanka. Syrian entry stamps written entirely in Arabic. A hologrammed Zimbabwean visa.
And, perhaps most importantly, it’s from 2004 so it isn’t fucking dripping with eagles and amber waves of grain like those horrible new passports I may have to get.
