past presents

An incomplete list of meaningful/expensive gifts that I have lost or are otherwise gone from my possession somehow:

- A fawn-colored leather diary with my initials monogrammed onto the corner. I used it from my junior year of high school to my freshman year of college. My first serious boyfriend gave it to me. I even mention it on my very first Must List, made when I was seventeen. I have no idea where the fuck it could be. I like thinking that someone stole it and intends to use it to blackmail me later in life. Exciting!

- An antique pocketknife with an opalescent handle that my parents bought me in an antique store when I was eight or nine. The blade was really rusty. I love pocketknives, although I always lose the tiny scissors and gross toothpick, neither of which really work anyway. I have a tiny bubblegum-pink Swiss Army knife now, which, come to think of it, I haven't seen recently and may have lost as well. It, too, is from my dad.



- A pin from K Records headquarters in Seattle given to me by my fiancee. You can probably see why I thought this gift ruled in some other entries from high school. My feelings haven't changed since then! Well, not about K, anyway. (That kind of looks like I mean my feelings about ketamine, but I've never had any feelings about it besides that it's peculiar that you can basically only make it if you're a dog pharmacist. "Drug-dealing veterinarian" seems to be a character type too niche for people to ever have to worry about ketamine being too prevalent in our schoolz. It's got to be such a small group of people producing it.)

- Anyway! A ton of expensive jewelry. Maybe every single piece of expensive jewelry ever given to me. I don't even remember what any of it looked like. Some of it had blue stones? My lost collection is mostly made up of rings. I got some from family and some from old boyfriends. A teacher in my middle school gave me a Claddagh ring for strength, I think she said, but they're also traditionally used as wedding rings in Ireland...which, in retrospect, is completely fucked and funny, coming from a seventh-grade history teacher to her student. Needless to say, it's gone. Obviously, I'm no good with jewelry and I don't think it's too good with me either because my skin hates it and when I think of hypoallergenic jewelry I think of Claire's and The Icing:



Not happening, nickel free jewelry. You're terrible.

- A baseball signed by Derek Jeter from one of my dad's old clients. I remember sticking it in a closet in a special case made out of thick, clear plastic. Neither my two sisters nor I ever especially liked the Yankees or even baseball in general besides in the backyard, but it seemed awesome to have it at the time because I was young and thought Derek Jeter was a babe and had a Tiger Beat poster of him on my wall, even. Last week my dad sent me a text message that said "Jeter ball worth 6 hun min hold onto it" and these were my thoughts in the order that they happened:

- "why abbreviate 'six hundred dollars' as '6 hun' instead of '$600' or even '600'
- "i hope my mom has it somewhere"
- "i want to sell it right away and blow at least 1 hun on makeup alone. i need new foundation and lipstick"

which are not very constructive, nor are they at all close to the reactions my dad probably anticipated I would have. Seriously, though, I want to turn this



into this in Sand and some Internet bill money ASAP. I guess Jeter just doesn't have the same effect on me as he did in my J-14 days anymore, you know?