“Or, How I Forcibly Ended My Vacation Early”
<<<<A Quick Note>>>>
I’m doing an in-person book signing for Climate: Our Changing World at Anderson’s Bookshop Downers Grove on August 16th, 2023 at 6pm! If you’re in the area, you can buy a ticket (which comes with a copy of my book) and hear me talk about the experience of writing this book. I’ll also sign it for you (that part’s free!).
Tickets are $24 each and include one hardcover copy of Climate: Our Changing World and entry to the event for up to two people. Tickets can be purchased here.
For more information on this book and free teacher’s resources, click here!
***A Further Addendum***
Another history essay of mine, published by the Three Rivers Park District, is now live on their blog archive! It’s about the history of my (sentimentally) favorite park in Minnesota, Silverwood Park in Saint Anthony. You can read it by clicking here, or read my other history blog (about ice harvesting) by clicking here.
<<<<Back to the Blog>>>>
When I was in London, just over two weeks ago, Nick and I were preparing to travel around the city and see the sights, visit Bath, take the train to Holyhead, a ferry to Dublin, and then round out our month-long European tour with an insider’s look at Dublin and the surrounding Irish countryside, thanks to a friend of mine who lives there. I was prepared to spend an extra week in Ireland by myself following Nick’s return to Chicago, renting a car and traveling the island by rubber. I was ready to be going mobile, as they say. None of this happened, as I alluded to last week.
The premature implosion of our Big Europe TripTM occurred for three (well, four, sort of) primary reasons, which I will discuss in further detail later. But for right now, all I really want to focus on is the last, and arguably most important, reason; while I was in London, my phone was stolen.
Obviously, this happens a lot. Especially in London. On average, a phone is stolen every six minutes in London alone, with the highest volume of theft reported in the Westminster district. That’s exactly where I was, too, so that tracks. Of the 90,000 phones that were stolen in 2022, only around 2,000 of them were recovered. Clearly this isn’t some anomaly, and I can bet I won’t be getting my phone back; these kinds of crimes can happen to anyone, especially starry-eyed tourists traveling alone (for the day) and taking lots of pictures without particularly paying attention to their surroundings.
I was standing in front of His Majesty’s Theatre (that’s “re,” not “er,” mind you; part of the reason I was taking the picture at all), and trying to get an artful shot of the theatre‘s sign from the curb. I had my phone above my head, pointed at the sky, and as I was taking the photo, someone on a bike rode directly behind me and grabbed it out of my hands. It was so sudden, and so forceful, that I barely had time to react. I chased the guy down, or tried to, anyway, but he was moving so fast and took a turn behind not one, not two, but three double-decker London buses parked in a row, blocking my line of sight, so I lost him again almost instantly. That was it. I was done, and my phone was gone.
There was nothing for me to do at that point besides try and figure out a way back to my hostel; Nick had slept in that morning, and I was out wandering on my own, so I now had no way to get in contact with anybody. Except I wasn’t even sure how to find my hostel again, since I, you know, didn’t have a phone with google maps on it or anything. Plus I had to report it to the police for insurance purposes. I’m not super keen on going to the police anywhere, especially in London because I know that they can’t/won’t do anything to help me. I’m lucky/forethoughtful (is that a word?) enough to have opted for theft protection insurance in my phone plan, so I knew I’d be able to get a new one at no charge when I got home. But I’d probably need a police report number, just to prove to the insurance company that I had done my due diligence. And on the off-chance I was in that lucky 2% to get my phone back, well… it couldn’t hurt to try, anyway.
Frankly (and this is going to sound like virtue signaling and self-flagellation, I’m sure), it’s not even like I would want to press charges if I could, because I do believe that the majority of crime (especially petty crime) is ultimately a systemic symptom of poverty and inequality. I’ve benefited from the inequalities of an exploitative system without suffering any consequences long enough that, you know, maybe this is some sort of karmic justice. But that’s a discussion for another time; I just want my phone back. And I still had to find a way home, so hopefully the police could help with that, too.
My first thought was, well, why not call the police? Maybe there’d be someone nearby who could take my statement (and maybe that guy on the bike would ride by again, and I could point him out, and… but no). So I went to a fancy restaurant to ask for a public phone, which they didn’t have, of course, but the maître d’ very helpfully pointed me to a phone booth outside where I could call 999. Like, a real working phone booth. You know, the big red ones that are on every souvenir gift set from London? Great, thanks. So I closed myself into one that had a working phone and only smelled a little bit like pee and rats, and rang the emergency number. “I want to report a theft,” I said. “Is this an active emergency?” they replied. “No, I guess not,” I said. “Then piss off,” was their (abridged) response, and they hung up. Alright, I get it. Bigger fish to fry and all that. The one upside here is that I can say I did legitimately get to use a London phone booth; that’s not something you see every day! But I was still lost.
Quick, if you’re lost in an unfamiliar city with no way of contacting anybody who can help you, what’s the first thing you need? If you said, “a stiff drink,” then, well, yeah. But after that. Hopefully you said “map,” because that was my next step in getting out of this pickle that had been thrust upon me. Luckily, I was right at Picadilly Circus, which is London’s equivalent of Times Square, and they had, thank the tourists, a Big Red Bus tour station. They send tourists all over the city on a crowded bus; they’ve got to have maps! Lucky for me, they had even more than that; they had helpful staff. The guys behind the counter gave me an (admittedly crude and cartoonish) map of the city and circled the area where the closest police station would be. Now I just needed to find it. Ok. I’m great at maps. How hard could that be?
Turns out they didn’t know the exact location of where the station was, and only knew the rough area. So once I managed to get to the roughly correct location, I realized, wait a minute, how the hell was I going to find this station now? Better ask for help again. I went to three different gift shops, figuring someone would know where the station was until I finally got a staff member who could point me in the right direction. As a matter of fact, the guy even walked me all the way to the police station, so I wouldn’t get lost getting there, which was a touch of kindness that almost made me tear up, in the emotional state that I was in. I even offered him cash as a thank you and he turned it down. Some days it helps to remember what a world we live in. I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
After that, it was frankly a pretty dull affair. The woman behind the police desk took my information, I filled out a statement with what had happened, where I was, that kind of thing, and then they had me step into a room so a friendly detective (a bobby? are they still called that?) could ask me a few more questions. After that, they gave me a police case number I could give to insurance, let me call Nick and tell them what was going on (“Hey, it’s Andy, I’m calling from the police station…” They didn’t answer. Oops.) showed me how to get to the nearest Apple store to try and deactivate my phone (which didn’t help because I had forgotten my Apple password. Oops.), and sent me on my merry way. After that, it was walk to the river, follow it east, and turn right at the London Bridge and I was back at my hostel. Fill Nick in, call Mom, call Dad, cry a little, decide what to do for the rest of the trip, book plane tickets home for the next day. Bing, bang, done. That’s the end of the trip.
Looking back, I did get some memorable moments (see: piss-scented phone booth) and comedy out of it. It’s a funny story now, of course. Or it hopefully is to you and will be to me in about two months. It may also be interesting to note, though, that it was in that cramped interview room at the Charing Cross police station, talking to this police woman through a thick sheet of glass and a microphone from the 90’s, that I had my only moment of an uncrossable cultural language barrier. Speaking to another person who spoke fluent English, as a first language, this was the only time that I met a communication roadblock that could not be overcome. She asked me to describe the guy, and I gave her the best description I could remember, and then she asked if he was wearing any headgear (so they could check the CCTV footage later), and I said that he was. “Was it a hat? Baseball cap? What did it look like?” I paused. I knew that whatever I called it, it wasn’t going to make any sense. “Well, in America we call them durags, but it’s kind of like…” “A what?” “A durag?” “A what?” “You know, it’s a loose fabric, kind of tied on the head?” Blank stares. Oh boy. We settled on a “fabric hat (no brim) that hangs over neck.” And I just can’t believe, that of all the countries I went to, covering six languages (Spanish, Catalan, French, Czech, German, English), the only place I had any communication issues was in the country where the national language is English and the woman I was talking to is a native English speaker. Go figure.
While the theft of my phone was enough to end my trip early (along with a compounding series of other factors to be discussed at a later date), it isn’t particularly notable or noteworthy in the grand scheme of things. It’s going to be barely a blip on my long-term radar, even just a few months into the future. Sure, it sucks. It really, really sucks. It would suck for anyone to lose their phone. I know other people who have lost their phones (fell in a river; several people, actually), and it really sucked for them and I wished there was some way I could help. But it’s not “traumatic,” in the way that, say, losing a family member or a limb would be. It’s a phone. You make calls on it, you text people, you sell feet pictures to strangers online. It’s a tool. It can be replaced. Hell, it’s not even financially traumatic for me; thanks to privilege and insurance, I got a new phone, for free, two days later. Same fancy model and everything. My luck and safety nets, ultimately, held out quite well. But, why, then, did I feel so lost without it? Like a part of me was missing?
I don’t want to be melodramatic here, or overblow this into something that it’s not. I was without my phone for two days. That’s it! People went without phones for hundreds of thousands of years. Hell, it’s not even the first time or the longest I’ve been without my phone! Remember Philmont? I would go for two weeks without using my phone. And yet over these recent two days, I constantly felt like something was missing. Like I was lost, adrift, and crucially, physically and mentally less than I was before.
And it wasn’t a communication thing, either, obviously. Or a homesickness thing. You know, just talking about Philmont and all. Been there, done that. And I had Nick with me, who was great company and could just as easily call or text anyone I needed to. But I didn’t need to call or text anyone. Phantom Vibration Syndrome, where you think your phone is ringing but it’s not, is a documented phenomenon, but that’s not what I had. Sure, maybe just regular phantom phone syndrome, where I’d reach for my phone by instinct but it wasn’t there. I did that a lot. And it was upsetting each time, remembering what I had lost. What had been taken.
I don’t want to make the easy analogy that losing my phone was like losing a limb, even though I’ve been alluding to that a little bit. I think that’s reductive and insensitive to people who have genuinely lost limbs, or were born with mobility issues. Losing my phone is not at all in the same category as that. But I will make another, perhaps also insensitive, analogy; losing my cell phone felt like I had been lobotomized. It felt like someone had ripped out a piece of my brain and removed a part of me from my body. They had reduced what I could do, what I could think, and everyone else was walking around now with abilities that were totally locked off to me. My capacity for activity compared to what I was used to had, in a very real way, been reduced.
And again, I don’t want to draw false comparisons or say that not having a phone is like having disabilities. I got my phone back. It is not the same. But consider this; for those two days without my phone, I lost a very real, very necessary tool in this modern world. Smart phones, cellular devices with internet access, even portable computers and tablets, have become so thoroughly entrenched in everyday life that maneuvering without them, especially if you haven’t had to, is both shocking and very nearly impossible at first. I have not developed the skillset to get around foreign cities or travel solo without my phone. In this day and age, almost no one has, really.
In losing my phone, I lost the ability to: access my flight information. Access my boarding passes. Change or update my flights. Access my EU rail pass. Access my ferry tickets. Purchase tickets to museums ahead of time. Check when places opened or closed. Use translation services. Take pictures. Write notes. Look up information online. Contact help if I got in an accident or something else happened. Contact my friend in Dublin that I was staying with. Map myself around places I have never been to. Hell, I didn’t even have a watch. I couldn’t even tell what time it was anymore. And sure, Nick could have done all of this for me. But Nick was leaving in three days; I still had a week to go. And sure, maybe I could have done some of these things on my shitty laptop, and struggled through the rest of the trip. But I didn’t want to. I wasn’t prepared to do that. It would have been needlessly difficult, and I would have been stressed out the whole rest of the trip. It would have still been fun for some parts, but in all the quiet moments in between, I would have been somewhere near miserable. I was in no state, emotionally, logistically, or literally, to travel alone. Everyone else could do all these things at the touch of a button. But not me. Not anymore.
Our cell phones are second brains in our pockets. These are tools that drastically and dramatically augment our abilities beyond human to something more. They are infinitely large notebooks, some of the highest-quality cameras ever built, they contain wallets, travel information, and health information all at the same time, they have access to the entire sum of human knowledge with the lowest barrier to entry ever conceived. We can use these tools to reach ourselves out to unimaginable places, and do things with ease that would have been utterly inconceivable to people even a hundred years ago. Could you imagine telling a travel agent in the 1920’s that, in the future, I could do her entire job from a thing that fits in my pocket, while eating donuts at a café? Could you imagine telling a medieval monk that I could read not just the entire biblical text but everything ever written about it? Could you imagine telling an 18th century doctor that I have a digital record of my entire medical history, and that I can give it to emergency responders at the touch of a button? And our society, at least the one I live in, revolves around the assumption that everyone has these abilities now. The inconveniences presented to you if you do not have a phone are not insurmountable by any means, but they sure are a drag.
I got my phone back. These abilities, these extensions of myself, this thing that had become so crucial to my societal functionality, was returned to me in just two days time. And it truly felt like getting a part of myself back; those two days were the longest time I’ve truly been without a phone since I got one. Even at Philmont I still had my phone on me, even if its point was mostly moot. But for me, it’s always been more than what the phone lets me do. I still really, really want my old phone back. Because there’s something bigger I’m still missing, and I can never get back.
But why do I even want my phone back so badly if I know I’ll get a new one at home? Why do I care if I can get it back or not? Why am I writing a whole blog post about it when I could have just included this story in the inevitable Photobomb of the trip? Well, it’s not really about the phone, even though the “lobotomy” stuff was a jarring experience in and of itself. It’s about one other simple reason. One other simple reason that, in my mind, blossoms into a very complicated, tangled mess of deep-seated emotional problems and negative feelings; I had thousands upon thousands of undownloaded, un-backed-up photos on my phone. Thousands upon thousands of photos that are now lost to me for all time. And, if you know me, hoo boy, is that just about my biggest nightmare.
I am someone who is obsessed with memory. And I mean that in the most literal sense of the word “obsession.” I have obsessive-compulsive disorder, a diagnosis that is marked by both obsessive thought patterns and compulsive behaviors. I have both of those things, no surprise to anyone who knows me well. It’s a minor form of OCD, and I’ve been medicated/in therapy long enough that it is under control and does not negatively impact my life. In some ways, it’s beneficial, keeping me deeply organized. But I am unhealthily obsessed with memory, and I have been for, well, as long as I can remember.
Journaling, the act of writing about my day and how I feel, is not a therapeutic tool. As my therapist has acknowledged, journaling for me is often an actively destructive coping mechanism for anxiety. I envy people who enjoy journaling. I hate it, but I can’t stop doing it, because it’s a compulsive behavior. And with that also comes taking photos. My obsessive need to record everything I do with a picture is part and parcel to my compulsive recording OCD behavior. And the idea of losing those photos, of that record, sends me into a panic. Losing my phone was just about the worst possible outcome for me, from an OCD perspective. All those pictures? All those records? Gone. Forever.
Why do I do it? Why does it matter? Well, I have a few theories. Let me tell you a deep dark secret of mine: I know what heaven looks like. Or, at least what it would look like to me. As a child, long before The Good Place was even a glimmer in Ted Danson’s eyes, I decided that Heaven, if it existed, was a place where you could a) be with your loved ones forever, b) ask any conceivable question and receive the true, accurate answer (hi, Janet), and most crucially, c) relive anything you did as it had happened. To me, Heaven was a built-in memory vault. God is a machine that records everything that happens. Everything that has happened, always has happened, and will always continue to exist, in Heaven.
These days, I don’t really believe that this is what Heaven would be like, or that Heaven even exists. I do believe that, at the end of our lives, there is nothing, and we become nothing, and enter a quiet, gentle darkness for all eternity, though we aren’t conscious for it, of course. I’m not afraid of this ending, and I haven’t been for a long time. Some days, I look forward to it, to a silence from my brain. But then why can’t I get the idea of permanent memory out of my head? Why am I still so obsessed with recording everything? Is it a subconscious response to a deeper fear of death I can’t acknowledge? Is it because, since I’m not relying on Heaven anymore, I have to do it myself? Or is it just OCD, directing me like a puppet? I don’t know.
I think part of it is because I am deeply, deeply terrified of dementia, of memory loss. I am not scared of death, or the dark, or ghosts or monsters or terrorists or disease. I am scared of climate change, in an existentialist end-of-the-world kind of way, but it’s not a personal fear. That’s an everyone fear. No. For the last decade now, the only thing I have ever truly been afraid of is losing my memory. The thought of turning into a shell, a husk of myself without my life or vibrancy or personality or memories that make me, me, that is my deepest, darkest fear. And as I’ve seen my grandmother go through this exact process for the last decade, and as my mother worries about the potential hereditary nature of it, I have a pretty frightening model to follow. I am terrified that my brain is only four decades away from permanent self-sabotage. It doesn’t matter how long I live. My memories are a time bomb.
So I am a digital hoarder, hoarding the physical storage of memories, not unlike my grandmother physically hoarding things as she began to deteriorate. I take notes, I write journals, I keep pictures as a way of offloading the need to remember from my brain, and storing it somewhere else. My phone is an extension of my body because it’s an extension of my brain; if I can keep photos there, memories there, to reference later, then I can’t really ever forget them. They’re always there. They always exist. Forever. To lose them is tantamount to losing myself. It’s like I never existed at all, and those things I did, those valuable experiences, never even happened.
It doesn’t help that I don’t have the kind of memory I would like to have. Sure, my memory is like a steel trap when it comes to information. I can tell you what I read in which textbook and on what page and where on that page and why it relates to you. But I have the hardest time remembering events, people, things, places, things that matter to me. I’ve always been like this; I didn’t have many people I considered friends in grade school because I just couldn’t remember their names or faces. And now, someone will bring up something like, “oh, don’t you remember that from that campout ten years ago?” and I just can’t remember it for the life of me. And I feel so guilty about it. It’s my fault for not remembering. Even things as recently as a year ago. I cannot remember them. And I hate that. I want a memory that remembers the people important to me, not useless facts. I want to remember experiences. And people. But I can’t. So I outsource it to my phone instead.
And so you hopefully see why losing my photos feels like one of the worst possible outcomes for me. I don’t care about the phone itself. I care about what’s on the phone. If I had lost these photos at another point in my life, maybe three or four years ago when I was less in control of my OCD, it might have been an event that spiraled my life back into severe depression. It might have triggered some switch deep inside me that I’m not sure I would have been able to unflip. I’m lucky I’m not that way anymore (thanks to supportive family and friends, medication, and hard work), and this whole episode is, at the end, only a minor roadblock. I’m also lucky that these fears and feelings are, for the most part, not entirely true. My OCD and anxiety always makes things seem worse than they really are, and I can recognize that logically, even if I can’t recognize it emotionally.
In the end, I can’t help feeling like it’s my fault. I blame myself for everything; it’s a problem I’m well aware of and am working on, but I can’t stop it quite yet. So every time I think of losing my phone, of the moment when I felt it slip from my hands, I’m back on that street in front of the theatre and I run the whole gamut of how it’s my fault. If I had been more aware of my surroundings, if I had held on to my phone more tightly, if I hadn’t been so close to the curb, if I had done something different, anything different, to put me in a different time and different place than that exact one at that exact moment, I wouldn’t have lost my phone. Wouldn’t have lost all my pictures from the trip, all those memories. My family, of course, saints that they are, assure me that there’s nothing I could have done and it’s not my fault. These things happen all the time. There’s probably a whole team of people on bikes combing the city for potential victims, people who sit at corners and scope out tourists who look particularly vulnerable or expensive, and they have people somewhere else who know how to take phones, even if they’re locked, and cash them in for something more valuable. It’s called organized crime for a reason. I’m just lucky that it wasn’t anything else. It could have been worse. It can always be worse.
The only thing I can really blame myself for is not backing up my data over WiFi or to the cloud or anything, a mistake I have since corrected by throwing money at Apple. If I hadn’t been too damn cheap to not buy iCloud, I wouldn’t be having half of the problems I’ve had since then because I’d still have 99% of my photos, instead of the 1% I’ve been able to recover thanks to gracious friends and family saving my texts. But, alas, I did not have that before. My pictures are gone. Forever.
Luckily, they were only pictures since about the end of May of this year. So that’s Greece, Appalachia, the trip to Europe, and anything in between. That’s a lot to lose, regardless, and it hurts to think about all the pictures of NIck and I together that are gone to dust. But I had already posted pictures for Greece and Appalachia, so my very very favorites were saved. I went with people on all the trips, so I can mooch off of everyone else’s cameras. I sent photos to people and kept some on Snapchat, so I could redownload a few. I journaled; I know what I did and where I went. And, of course, I have my memories. As gut-churningly, pants-shittingly terrified as I am of memory loss, I still have my memories of these trips. For now, at least. And no thief can take that from me.
As I have talked about to my therapist many times, I feel that if I don’t record something, it didn’t happen. So without these photos, my memories are junk. Useless. Uncorrelated, uncollated, unreferenced, unorganized, whatever. I have nothing to retrieve those memories with. Those photos, those notes, stored on my phone outside of my body and meant to serve as a bulwark against memory loss, as a way to keep something permanent of my memory, instead of something that can be biologically decayed, those photos are gone forever. And with them, my ability to recall what happened. But that’s not true. And I need to keep telling myself that, over and over and over forever if I have to. It did all happen. I did do all of that awesome, amazing, incredible stuff with Nick and my family and friends and people who care about me. People lived without cameras attached to their hands for hundreds of thousands of years, and they survived just fine. Even if I have to learn to just get over it and pretend that, for those two months, I also lived without the extra brain in my pocket, I’ll survive just fine, too.
I’m glad I have this blog/online journal/one-sided therapy session. It’s been letting me vent and wallow in self-pity for a little while longer, though I seem to have been doing that a lot recently. But I think it’s therapeutic to write about it too, and I think there’s something to that idea of being stripped of my computing power; that’s something more… interesting? intellectual? useful? that I wanted to share. This is a step in my very baby, very inconsequential healing process to the (also ultimately inconsequential) blow to my mental health that this event did cause. Even if no one reads this, it still helps. So if you are here now, thanks anyway. Thank you for reading, and for recollecting with me.
And remember to back up your photos.
❤️❤️❤️ everything else has already been said. 😘😘