The more I travel on in this world, the more I become convinced that the universe uses me as its toilet. I arrived home from Cancun at 11pm Sunday night, opened up my suitcase, and found an empty camera bag. No D80. No lenses. No good.

My mother was surprised at how well I handled it – namely, without any reaction at all – but later on, after the reality of the situation sunk in, I got on the express train to Bell Jar with a layover at Self Loathing. I KNEW I shouldn’t have checked the camera, but I was more concerned about my bag being lost than I was about items being stolen, and I thought, hey, I’ve had a hard weekend. Why not make things easy on myself for once? Playa del Carmen was gorgeous, but it took me 15 hours to get there and I spent the bulk of my vacation fending off anxiety attacks about shooting the wedding. Combine my stress-based fatigue with a 4.5 hour layover in Miami, add in 1300 wedding pictures and a job well done, and I felt like I deserved to not drag the camera back to Boston on my back.

Now we know what happens when we don’t punish ourselves. The universe does it for us. I hate my life.

Wedding pictures on Flickr, updated between bouts of weeping.