Until Kate and I finish painting our house, I’m still living out of a loose conglomeration of boxes and duffel bags, and am ironing shirts blearily at 5:45 AM. Which I don’t mind, but there’s a pile of repeat-offender clothing I’m gonna burn when the rest of my wardrobe is out of storage and back on full rotation.

The setup has hampered my (already sketchy) organizational skills, apparently: I made it all the way to Trenton, New Jersey this morning before realizing that I left my wallet behind. A moment of panic ensued, but just a moment: I still had my Amtrak pass, my laptop, my Bluetooth phone and GPRS service, my wireless webcam, my iPaq, my rubberized messenger bag, and a solid pair of boots. In fact, the list of things that I could and could not do is a twenty-first century inversion of common human abilities:

STILL ABLE TO DO WHILE ON THE STREET IN NEW YORK WITH NO WALLET:

• Email or talk to almost anyone on the planet.
  
• Get a satellite photo of the train station.
  
• Change the items on the CBS Soaps In Depth website to anything I want.
  
• Order flowers, transfer my assets to Switzerland, send a low-bandwith streaming video of wherever I’m standing to anyone, anywhere.
  

NOT ABLE TO DO:

• Buy a cheeseburger.
  
• Open doors.
  

The last one was the one that hurt; I became the sheepish one in the hall, waiting for someone with a proximity pass to let me back from the bathroom. Will the survival guides of the 22nd century describe how to fabricate an EZ-Pass out of tinfoil and a cigarette box?