Infinite Digression

Lost Something

modified:Mar 06, 20253 min read

created 2025-03-05, & modified, =this.modified

tags:y2025lost

rel: Survey of Being Lost

Earlier today I dropped my phone.1 The screen was completely unresponsive and Difficult Devices-like. However, luckily I discovered the screen still responded to touches from the small stylus that I seldom used. It so so fortunate that I discovered this, and the reason I discovered it was because of my niece who loves to draw on it.2

So with this discovery that the stylus worked, I had a bit more time on my hands but was presuming at some point the display would fail completely. When time allowed I went out to purchase a replacement phone.

Unfortunately, when I returned home, ready to start transferring the data from the broken phone to the new one, I realized that I had misplaced the tiny stylus that I had never once lost in all of the years of having the phone. All of the prompts on the screen necessary to begin to process, were impossibly distant and unclickable. It was such a tremendous fumble, and so close to the end.

Here comes the reason for my writing this. I began retracing my steps. I knew I had used the stylus in the car to control my music. So I systematically scanned every inch of my clothing (many pockets in winter, bending fabric to ensure it did not slide into a seam.)

Then I looked outside in the path to my car. I was immediately aware of how my actions looked distinctly like someone who had lost something (looking down, scanning cracks, retracing paths). I also thought this felt different that being lost. I knew I had just used it, so the answer was that it was somewhere nearby.

Thus far I’ve not found the stylus. I managed to transfer all of the files, but one notable thing seems lost in the transfer. All of the notes from my niece that she created with the stylus. Ever since she was a baby she’s been drawing in it, and so you can see the her little doodles develop.

EDIT: I’ve since managed to extract Eva’s drawings from the phone. It took an agonizing hour, all the while saying to myself “you should not be so sentimental”. But I would not allow them to be lost. You can see her first digital drawings there. You can see the bits where the character of the lines changed because I helped her, or where we both were drawing on the same page.

I kept on correcting myself. I want to call them drawings and not scribbles. When she is older, and still magnificent, maybe we’ll look at these. They are not lost.

Footnotes

  1. It’s amazing how even though I try not to be phone-connected and in fact generally dislike phone use, I was so “lost” without it. The food I intended to purchase for lunch, I could not. My MFA, locked out. Texts, lost. Etc. This dependency was immediately noticed and I disliked it. ↩

  2. This whole process of gaining functionality of a crippled device would have been a more enjoyable exercise had I not been pressed with work. What I mean was that the main interface for “communicating” with the device was lost, so I had to immediately run through different actions and problem-solving to discover a way to use it again correctly. Things like:

    • Can I use voice commands?
    • How do I unlock the screen?
    • Can I remotely connect via my computer?

    Even discovering that the stylus worked was a result of workarounds. ↩

Backlinks