I'm glad you made a post about it! And nice twist on the idea.

Let's see . . . the best thing I ever stole . . . uh, how about we go into the first thing I was ever caught stealing? In second grade we had morning recess, lunch recess and afternoon recess and then we also had some kind of play time in the afternoons. Anyway, my teacher (Mrs. Gillespie) had some pretty awesome stuff to play with. Us boys were always playing with the building blocks, which had grooves and holes routed out of them so that we could build structures that marbles would roll through. My favorite thing of all though was the gigantic Lego collection.

For anyone that has never played with Lego, there are a great many pieces that come into and go out of fashion, so in digging through a box of Lego from the 1970's, you might find very different pieces than the one you are familiar with. You can of course, use these pieces with each other. I don't recall what it was that I stole, but I know that they were some very uncommon pieces. Now, as an adult I am against stealing, but as a kid, stealing was the greatest concept ever: someone has something you want, then you secretly take it. If they never know, then they never get hurt. And hell, I was pretty sure Mrs. Gillespie didn't play with Lego.

That said, there was another little boy who really loved Lego too. The thing was, he lived in a trailer and kids kind of looked down on him for being poor. Also, he was kind of annoying and spoke kind of weird and it didn't help him that when we were in 4th grade (ages 9-10) we found out his mom was only 27. Anyway. This kid was something of a goody-two shoes and always being nice to teachers and shit. Long story short, he saw me palming the goods and ratted me out. I of course, took the high road and used my own popularity to vouch for my innocence and used his unpopular status to cast doubt on his accusations (which were 100% correct). On reflection, I had a bunch of Lego at home and only wanted to build more awesome stuff with the pieces I stole, but the kid that ratted me out only got to play with Lego at school, so it was really in his best interest to make sure those pieces stayed there.

In any event, that led to this whole big leaning tower of lies that ultimately collapsed and I had to write an essay about why it's wrong to steal. In the end, no one awarded that kid any points for doing the right thing, though we probably should have.

As for the most heart-breaking thing: my photos from my study abroad were stolen when a shady realtor let some people into my apartment where they stole all our laptops and . . . some "candy" from my desk. That laptop also happened to contain disc 3 of the Nirvana box set I'd bought just a few days before, so I was extra bummin'. Getting a laptop stolen is the worst, especially if you haven't backed up your files lately. I lost 4 years of writing on that one though truth be told, most of it was probably garbage. I would have liked to have a copy of my application essay to my school, since it was done in the style of a nature documentary where the subject was the bewildering behaviors of white people.