Phones and Scones

Today, I made scones.  For those of you who know me, you know this is far from an unusual occurrence.  Baking in general is a love of mine, and scones in particular make frequent appearances in my kitchen.  In fact, my roommate and I talk sometimes about starting a Tea and Scone food truck.  This is a joke, obviously.  Except for around finals time.  Then I'm super serious about it.

But today I was making scones with a special purpose.  They were "thank you scones" for one of my roommates, who somehow managed to understand my techno-illiterate instructions and log on to my laptop while I was out in CA and track down a mysterious non-serial-number serial number that allowed me to replace my stolen iPhone.  And all of this work just because I sent an email and asked.  Clearly he deserved many, many scones.

So two thoughts about this whole experience, from stolen phones to scones.

1. I am eternally grateful to my mother for being obsessive about cleaning before leaving on long trips.  I remember the day before we would leave for months-long vacations to Zimbabwe, I knew I was going to spend all my time cleaning my room and making sure the rest of the house was spotless.  In general, my mom is no neat freak, but for some reason, some sort of pre-travel adrenaline would always kick in and she would go on a tear.

Turns out, she knew what she was doing.  When I got the email from my roommate that he had gone in my room and gotten the number for me, all I could think about was how many piles of clothes he had had to step over, or whether or not I had left make-up spread out all over my dresser or possibly just part of it.  I cannot describe the joy that swept over me when I arrived home on Monday to find that, apparently, my mother had trained me well and my room had been cleaned prior to my departure.  Like, my bed was made and everything.  Apart from that pre-travel surge of cleanliness, this is never true.  For the most part, I have stopped apologizing for this - I am not a neat person, and I am ok with that.  I have better things to do than make sure all my laundry is in a basket.  However, I am going to steal my mom's trick of cleaning before vacations.  Clearly it's worth it.

2. I think I am okay with things being stolen from me.  I have had two major things ever stolen: a camera when I was in France during middle school, and this cell phone.  I had the same reaction both times: "But...but...it was mine.  Someone just looked at this thing that didn't belong to him or her and took it?  But...how?"  I realize that by now, after living in Brooklyn and working in Newark and living in Sketchville SW DC, I should maybe start wrapping my mind around these things.  And stop owning bags without zippers.

However, the whole time I worked in Newark, I never had a single thing taken from me.  I mean, besides pencils, which somehow managed to leave my classroom in droves on a daily basis.  I don't even know what the kids were doing with all those pencils.  Certainly not their homework.

I maybe should have gone in with the mentality that a lot of these kids had been raised with a sort of "finders keepers" mentality, and so I needed to have my guard up a little more than usual.  Or to put it even more generously, that the socioeconomic conditions of the neighborhood meant that they could probably justify taking whatever they wanted from my purse - they needed it a lot more than I did.  But I didn't.  It wasn't until a year later that I really realized it was maybe dangerous to walk from my school to Newark Penn by myself after dark.  Or that I shouldn't have left my purse anywhere in sight in my classroom.  But I'm glad I didn't think those things at the time.  It left me open to new perspectives on the city and on the people in my school and neighborhood.

So basically what I'm saying is, I'd rather pay for the new phone and keep my faith in people, all things considered.

However, I may invest in a purse with a zipper.