We arrived in Shanghai on a dark and frenzied night. Well, maybe it wasn't that dark and maybe it was just me that was in a frenzy, but it's my story and that's how I remember it.

Using sign language and a picture of Chinese characters on my phone, the five of us split up into 2 taxis and hoped we'd all make it to the same place.

After an hour of riding blind and listening to the driver talk angrily to himself in Chinese we were relieved to finally arrive. Hastily we jumped out, grabbed our packs and watched as he quickly disappeared into a swarm of identical-looking cars. When we looked up we saw an amazing apartment complex, wahoo! The Airbnb description didn't do this place justice, it was awesome.

We were mesmerized that first night, gazing out of our 8th floor picture window at the "Tomorrowland" like skyline of this stunning city. It wasn't until the next morning when we needed to print our Visa's for entry into India that we made our shocking discovery.

"Where is that awkward, overpriced little printer we've been hauling along for months? Oh $&@! It's in the cab."

I went into fix-it mode:

1. Search the Internet (ha! ever tried to do that in communist China?).
2. Download a VPN and set up a virtual private network to "pretend" I'm in Singapore, then search & read travel blog horror stories of losing things in cabs. Not looking good, not helpful.
3. Try to contact all of the 50 cab companies, all of whom are strictly Chinese.
4. Go sightseeing anyway, but obsessively stare at every taxi 'cause, well, I'm nuts.
5. Get the brilliant idea to find an electronics market to replace it with a "same same, but different" HP knockoff. Found the market, but no such luck.
6. Swear, and give up.
7. Enter misery mode.

Honestly, if I think about it rationally, the printer was in a little black bag, in a black trunk, on a black night--it simply got missed. It's not like it was all of our passports, life saving medicine, a child, or our credit card (we already did that in a Manila restaurant 😳). But nonetheless, this simple mistake drove me to distraction. I spent days looping over in my mind what went wrong; asking myself "How could we have been so careless?" Then I descended into my misery mode: "If this could happen, what next?" The more disastrous my imaginings, the better. I couldn't stop playing this foolish head-game with myself. I got grouchy. I got distracted. I was no fun. Here we were in this great place, but I wasn't fully present. Re-living the past seemed like a reasonable way to correct it.

Why do I do this? Because it has worked before? Not. Because it makes me feel better? Not. Because I like being grouchy, maybe a little, but no one else seems to appreciate my theatrics--go figure. Unfortunately, I do not live with coddlers. They tend to not even notice all of my inner turmoil. So why do I do this? Simple, I'm ridiculous.

To make matters worse, I'm married to a radically left-brained guy. One of his favourite go-to phrases is the annoyingly accurate:

"It is what it is."

Please don't tell him I said this, but he's dead right. Can't change what is. The printer was gone, forever. If I'm being really honest now, I can tell you that the printer was a pain in the ass anyway. We packed light, yet it was a burden. Handy yes, but we all kinda hated it. Nonetheless, I obsessed. Maybe because it cost money, maybe because there was some glimmer of hope that Cohen might actually use it for school, mostly because I was being ridiculous..