Over-Packing

After years of bumming around the world, moving from apartment to apartment and thanking friends profusely for the use of their garages to store my things it still baffles me that I am completely incompetent at packing a bag. Certainly I’ve made advances over the years (thank god for e-books) but often when I return home I find that I’ve used pretty much nothing that I brought along.

There’s no reason to take along your full make-up kit. When it’s forty-some degrees in Thailand every day all you’re going to accomplish is sweating everything off into your cleavage by noon. The same goes for curling irons, in that sort of humidity you’ll be more concerned about blacking out in the back of a Song Tao with strangers than you will with the state of your hair. It’s usually by the end of the trip that I end up looking like something that belongs in the jungle anyway, cleanliness falls by the wayside and I’ll realize there’s a thin dreadlock snaking down the back of my neck. It’s not a good look, but it doesn’t take any time at all.

Now, when I think back to bags that I’ve hauled, walking across the border into Vietnam in the dawn and pulling out of busses as they jostled buckets that were literally filled with live squawking ducks, I wonder just who I’d been trying to impress in the first place. I think to motorcycle rides I took, trying to hold my bag steady as I whipped through the streets of Hoi Anne with a stranger, wondering about why I’d thought it so important to hang onto that clearly badly photocopied edition of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

While I was in Laos I’d met a guy who’d lost everything. His bag had been loaded up with everyone else’s on the bus but the luggage compartment had opened somewhere on the journey and he’d been left with the clothes on his back. By the time I’d met him he’d been carting along a rice bag that someone had given him and in it was a single change of clothes and his toothbrush. It was, if nothing else, an argument for minimalism. Something that seemed to go right over my head.

Now when I travel the one luxury I’m thinking of doing away with is a single somewhat fancy dress. I’ll take it out at every lengthy stop, smoothing it out and letting it hang somewhere in the room. But now it just kind of makes me sad to have such things with me, as if the dress is the date that no one is going to take anywhere, as I slip past it without even a glance, smoothing my dirty hair back from my bare face, pulling on the same pair of jeans, readying for another night in a place that I don’t yet know.