Loster than you

With one week left to go in the 2006-2007 austral summer season I can really feel the toll Antractica has taken on me and my possessions. Half my clothes are destroyed, my headphones are smashed, my tripod is totaly trashed and I lost my camera yesterday. Plus judging from my last few blogs my brain is smashed, trashed, and lost too. I just need to hang in there for one more week! Can it be done? THINGS DON'T LOOK TOO GOOD FOR OUR HERO.

It's a pretty stupid story how I lost my camera yesterday but in the end I found the guy who discovered it on top of the gas pump, buried in an inch of snow. The guy wasn't on top of the gas pump buried in an inch of snow, my camera was. He just found it. So I just happen to run into him and he recognized me from the pictures on it, all 500 of which were me of course. Usually I think it's odd how I take so many pictures of myself doing the most mundane things like pumping gas, but in this instance it saved me. Yay for photo masturbation.

This got me thinking about how McMurdo is the only place I've ever lived where so much stuff gets lost so frequently. There are tons of flyers posted during the course of the season in every high traffic public area possible. People lose all sorts of things-iPods, cameras, jackets, backpacks, memory sticks, eyeglasses, etc. Lots of it is expensive stuff or it has tons of sentimental value. The latest and most heartbreaking story is the girl who stuck her palm sized 40 gig hard drive in someone else's jacket at the jacket hanging place thinking it was her own. What sucks about that is she had all of the pictures she took during this season on it! As someone who takes a lot of pictures and recently lost their own camera, I really sympathize with her. Plus to make it worse she was leaving the next day. I can't imagine the sense of loss and the thoughts in her head on the long plane rides back. Hopefully she knows how to draw really good so she can somewhat approximate her experiences in crayon for her grandkids in 20 years. Mostly her grandkids will think she's crazy.

I don't know how all the stories turn out. All I see are the flyers. iPods seem to be the thing most often lost down here. I know one girl who lost her iPod and got it back after a furious flyer campaign that ran across the doors of multiple buildings and outhouses. I also know people who never got their stuff back. What is it about Antarctica that makes it the Bermuda Triangle of iPods? I really feel bad for the people that lose all their music and whatever else they store on their iPods. Sometimes music and pictures are the most important things a person can have down here. Music helps the time go by and the pictures are the best way to share their experiences of this place. Unless of course you spend your time getting drunk all day and streaking around town like lots of people do here. Then I don't think photographic evidence is something you want. OR MAYBE IT IS.

I'll bet there have been people who never recovered their photos after losing their iPods or cameras and have only memories to help them relive their short time on the ice. It sucks because it's possible to do some crazy things down here like build igloos and hang out with penguins and stuff. I'll bet they're at the bar now telling thier drunk friends about how they hung out with penguins in Antarctica and nobody believes them without pictures. Then they have to tell the story of how they lost all their pictures when they left their camera in the igloo they built on the ice. Who's gonna believe that? Thier friends probably call them Antarctica Jack and they laugh but it kills Jack a little inside everytime they do that because he can't help but think there's a penguin somewhere taking some damn good pictures with his digital camera. Oh god I hope Jack's killed himself already.

Last season I left a CD with a complete archive of my webcomic on it in one of the computers at the public computer kiosk here. At first I was pissed because it was the only backup I brought with me but then I thought maybe whoever it was that found it might have been looking at my cartoons. Looking and liking. (Most likely they were looking and WTFing.) I think 'losing' items like that could be a sort of marketing campaign, but if they're dumb the people who found such CDs will probably tell their friends to check out E://index.html. It's the best website ever!

Don't lose your crap!