Kristyn's Wedding in Oregon, USA

During the first weekend of November I took a weekend trip to the US to go to my cousin Kristyn's wedding. Getting from Switzerland to the east coast is not so bad, but when you have to travel to the west coast it's a much longer flight and the time changes totally messes you up. I flew from Geneva to Amsterdam to Portland, Oregon, on a Friday morning, which was a remarkably straightforward flight pattern, and I nearly flew over the Arctic Circle. Once I arrived in Oregon I only had about 36 hours to be with my family before I had to get on a flight back to Switzerland Sunday morning to arrive in time for classes Monday afternoon.

I'm very glad I went, because I don't have brothers or sisters, so my cousins are the closest thing I have, and I wasn't going to miss her wedding for the world.

Flying over Greenland.

The bride and bridesmaids!

With dad.

With the cousins. People always think we're all sisters, but there are three distinct families represented in this photo.

 Trying to get a family portrait with everyone smiling is not easy.

Wedding party.

Living in a Digital Age

While visiting friends in Munich for Oktoberfest I became careless and lost my Iphone. Although I quite pride myself on not forming attachments to material objects and living a minimalist life, the loss of my Iphone devastated my psyche. I experienced all the symptoms of grief including denial, anger, pain, and acceptance, but even two weeks later I was still feeling the hole left behind.

More than the money annoyance, which was thankfully not an issue, was the feeling that I'd lost a part of myself. I had poured my life into that phone, recording not only my friends' phone numbers and my weekly calendar, but my real thoughts, emotions, and plans for the future. As a scatterbrained writer I constantly have to dictate notes to myself as they occur to me, because if they are not captured atthe moment I will forget them.  Before the Iphone I had no easy way to do that because it was unbelievably frustrating to carry pen and paper every place I went and because I was constantly misplacing the notes I had taken. The Iphone, through its notes section, fulfilled the exact need I had had. Pages and pages of my life experiences were lost when I lost the phone.

I also missed the easy distraction provided by Internet and email access, and especially facebook. Many times after that fateful day I found myself reaching for it to update my status with something funny that had just occurred and being unable to do so. I also missed being able to play music on cue

I had become completely addicted to the various eases the phone offered me.

But it is one feature of the digital age in which I now live. Many of us in the MBA program had interviews for senior positions conducted by skype. We are given USB sticks as gifts at all the company presentations. I now carry two USB sticks on my keychain at all times, which once led to me getting all the way home without my keys because the USB stick was plugged in to the computer at school.


It took me weeks to get used to not having the phone anymore, and even after I was accustomed to it again I still thought of it fondly as a memory.