On Vanishing Objects

I have decided that I am no longer going to put things where I will obviously be able to find them later. This is because when I do so, I lose them and never see them again (or only find them again with great difficulty and swearing). From now on, I shall squirrel things away in illogical places where no sane person would put them.

Take, if you will, my watch. Since we moved into our current apartment, I have lost the ability to take my watch off and know where it is to put it back on later. I have no idea why. All through undergrad and law school, I wore the same watch--a Fossil metal banded watch with a hot pink, orange, and yellow swirly sort of face, which I was justifiably very proud of as I bought it with the very first money I ever made for speaking publicly (I believe I talked about ethics). I know for a fact that watch is somewhere in this apartment. I just have no earthly idea where it is.

Two other watches which I wore more rarely have suffered the same fate. They're here somewhere. I don't know exactly where. As my current work requires me to be rather more aware of the actual time than I've become accustomed to lately, I bought a cheap Timex at Target a few days ago. Two days ago, I took it off and VERY DELIBERATELY thought to myself "I should put this where I will be able to find it again because I really need it."

Do you think I can remember where that is? Nooooo. In my attempt to locate it yesterday, I knocked a jar of spaghetti sauce over from where my husband had put it on top of a shelving unit in the dining room (space is at something of a premium in the kitchen, the sad side effect of keeping kosher and needing therefore twice as much room to store dishes as everybody else). It shattered into a million gory pieces and spattered sauce all over my dining room floor, which caused me to go on a mad hunt for my dustpan and hand-broom to help sweep up the glass.

It took me FORTY MINUTES to find it, and by the time I did, I was so agitated that I had kicked a paper bag from the kitchen to the middle of our living room, yelled repeatedly at the gnomes to bring it back already (as I had just used it the day before, I was quite confident it was gnomes), and made myself late for my first appointment of the day (blessedly, the person I met with was ALSO running late and thus never noticed.) I found it underneath a pile of clothes I had set aside that require hand washing. How it got from the kitchen (where I used it for sweeping purposes the day before) to the bathroom under the pile for hand-washing, I have no idea (gnomes?).

I still haven't found my watch.

From now on, when I find one of them (there are like five of them scattered around the bloody apartment by now) I will store them in the stupidest place possible, like inside my running shoes, or wrapped around my dumbbells. Clearly this putting them in reasonable places thing fails miserably because my brain works so illogically I can't ever recall where this reasonable place is. It must be getting rather cluttered, I think, as it seems to be holding four watches and what remains of my sanity.

UPDATE: I found the pink and yellow faced Fossil! It was hiding behind some DVDs on our DVD shelf. I have no idea what it was doing there, besides hiding from me.