IT'S ALL GONE!!!! Yes... it is.

Last Sunday night, after an afternoon of running errands on Market street, I excitedly pulled into a parking space right in front of my apartment. I popped the trunk to retrieve my laptop and the new router I had just bought. As I lifted the lid to the trunk I saw... the floor of my trunk. The receipt for the router was there, but my laptop, the bag it was in, and the new router... were gone.
I opened the back seat door, hoping I had just forgotten that I had put the laptop in the back seat. It was empty. I looked in the front seat, it was empty too. I closed the door and walked into my apartment. I checked to see if my room mate was home, but couldn't tell if he was or not. I walked into my room and thought, "It's gone. It's all gone. My memory stick was in that bag with my laptop. All my writing is gone."
And here's where it got weird. As I stood there in my room,  I didn't try to fix it. I didn't cry. I didn't rationalize it or see it as a punishment or a lesson to be learned. I didn't do anything. I didn't feel anything.
And then I was kind of bummed. I thought to myself, "This is a pretty devastating loss, and this is how I respond to it? With, like, nothing? I mean, how am I going to respond to something great happening? I don't want to be that flat person. I mean, I guess it's okay to not be devastated right now but I'd like to be feeling something." It was weird, and I still don't understand it.
I walked back out to my car, and looked again, with a flashlight this time. Believe me, my laptop, the pretty bag it was in, and the $80 new router are NOT there.
I walked back in to my apartment and my room mate was standing in the hallway. I told him all about it and he said "But all your blog writing is saved on your blog, right?" And he's right, it is, but there's other writing that I did that didn't really apply to everyone so I just kept it in a diary, on my laptop, and that's gone.
And then he pointed out that I had only had this laptop since March and so a lot of my writing was still on my old computer. And that made me feel better because it meant that all of the lessons and curriculum I had designed throughout my teaching career weren't totally gone either.
And then we went to the kitchen and I ate chocolate ice cream from a really big tub. I had chips and salsa for dinner and chocolate pudding for dessert. Then he went out and I went to my room.
I called my brother and my dad. My brother offered me his old laptop and suggested I file a claim with my credit card company to recuperate my loss. After I hung up with them, I happily realized that the laptop had been in my laptop bag, not my school bag as I had thought, so I  still had my lesson plan book, the cards I had written for the kids, and the keys to my classroom.
Then I thought about some of the writing I had lost and, it just seemed, unimportant. Not that the writing was unimportant, it was really important, it captured some big things that had happened in my life over the past year, but that was gone. Those moments in my life, were done. The writing I had done in reflection of those experiences, those moments of processing what was going on with me, the insights I had gained in to myself, those were then and they were important then but they weren't affecting me now.
I wonder if this will hit me later, if I ever try to recreate the writing I lost. I also wonder if this is easy to deal with because my brother has loaned me his laptop, I was able to buy a new router the next day, and because most of my writing is still on my old computer or on the blog. But I also know that my initial reaction (before all of this relief about most of my writing still existing elsewhere) was just... honestly, I can't describe it because it wasn't. It wasn't acceptance, it wasn't a deep breath, it wasn't even acknowledgement. I don't know what it was, it was nothing. And I can't say that I like it and I can't say that I don't like it. I don't know what to think. I guess I'll just see what happens next time, because honestly, at the rate I'm going, I really do feel like I'm just kind of a sucker for theft lately.