Damn.  I can’t find my coat.  I didn’t just figure this out, I realized that I didn’t have it this morning, before I went to class.  It’s terribly annoying, and not just because I was substantially colder and wetter than I would have been had I worn it on my way to class (though that certainly doesn’t help the situation).  It’s annoying because the search is frustrating, but I’ll touch on that later.  I had my jacket yesterday, I was, in fact, wearing it.  I even retraced my steps, in an effort to figure out where it went, and decided that the only possible place it could be would be the campus bookstore.  Today I called them, but they told me that no jacket had been left there, at least that they knew of (of course it could be a fabrication because some employee really liked my jacket, but that’s just paranoid, so I won’t entertain that thought any longer). 

As I said, the search is frustrating.  The problem is this: I live in a small area.  My room can’t be more than thirty foot by thirty foot, and I think even that is being generous.  Granted I have very high ceilings, but I seriously doubt I could misplace anything in the air, so it’s safe to say that anything I lose only goes as high as two feet at most.  Then there is all the furniture in the room; beds, desks, and closets.  What I am getting at is this: in the house I live in when I’m not at college, there are 4 levels of the house, including a basement, and it’s of a good sized girth.  I say this not to brag about how big my house is, but rather to explain the amount of space that there was there.  If I lost something at home, I could easily assume that it is just at some other part of the house, and resolve myself to looking in other places, confident that it will turn up in some part of the vastness of the house.  In my dorm, however, which, we’ve established, cannot have more than 1800 cubic feet of potential space – a) this is not as impressive as it may sound, and b) we have also established that much of that space is taken up by furniture – there are only so many places I can look.  I can cover the whole of the room, including the nooks and crannies that would otherwise go unnoticed in less than five minutes.  I do this, and I find nothing.  Frustrated, I look again.  Even though I should expect the exact same thing I found moments ago, because I know I didn’t move anything, when I see that my jacket is still not there, I get even more frustrated, and want to look again.  Such is the cycle.  Well now I’m troubled.  My jacket isn’t in the store, the only place I could potentially have left it, because I called and checked, and it isn’t in my room, the only place I keep it, because I’ve scoured the terrain several times over.  So where the hell is my goddamn jacket?  I am, at present, forced to resign myself to assuming that it will turn up, just as I do when I am in my house, except with more skepticism and hostility apropos the situation.  I do hope I find it soon.  It’s getting cold.