Packing

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Trip Start Aug 08, 2008 Trip End Oct 12, 2008 Next
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  Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Saturday, August 30, 2008

Somehow I knew it would come down to this: staying up until 3:30 a.m. packing, then writing about it because I'm too wired to sleep. I did the same thing when I left for college. Of course, when I was eighteen I could stay up packing all night and stay up all the next night yelling at the airlines for losing my luggage; now that I feel my twenty-fifth birthday breathing down my neck, I'm beginning to see why this sleep thing is so popular.

I've been trying to eat all the perishable food and drink all the perishable booze in my apartment before I leave. I've had better success with the latter. Yesterday I cleaned out my fridge of all the food I hadn't eaten that wouldn't last until October. The garbage bag split halfway down the stairs, and I had to crawl around picking up rotting vegetables and eventually made it down in two trips, after going back up to get more bags. Sometimes it sucks to live on the top floor.

Then, too, I've been shopping. Given that this trip was something of a compromise I made with myself, being too much of a wimp to commit two years to the Peace Corps (how would I survive without air conditioning? What would I do if I came back to a world where I didn't know how to operate the new cell phones? What would I do with all my stuff?) it's only fitting that it began with a rampant spree of consumerism. I cleaned out the clearance racks at R.E.I.; my mom sent me some work-appropriate-but-rain-friendly clothes, and...I can barely bring myself to type this...I bought a pair of Crocs.

Now, I am not a fashionable person in any sense. I listen to a lot of the same music as my parents, I discovered Law and Order about eight seasons after it stopped being cool, and I still own a few scrunchies, which I've carried from home to the dorms to apartment to apartment. (Shut up! They're comfortable! What I wear in the privacy of my home is my business! Even when I blog about it!) But I have taken a certain amount of pride in not succumbing to the atrocious trend of wearing shoes that look like a cross between a six-year-old-girl's dress-up collection and a sixty-year-old woman's gardening clogs. I don't care that they're comfortable. They're hideous.

So it was with a mixture of shame and sadness that I realized they were, unfortunately, perfect for my trip, and that I was going to have to get a pair. I need something closed-toed for my volunteer assignment, something waterproof for the rain forest in the rainy season (I hear it might be wet), and something comfortable with a decent tread on the bottom. Oh, and non-leather, because I picked a bad time to grow a conscience about these things.

After having no success finding my size in a neutral color anywhere else, I made a trip to the Crocs store in Faneuil Hall. This was a timely reminder of why I don't go to Faneuil Hall in the summer; if I want to dodge a bunch of slack-jawed tourists staring up at something besides what's in front of them while they swing their massive day bags like sledge hammers in some imaginary track and field event, I can just go to work. (Note to self: don't be one of those people.) The store was crowded, but at least they were adequately staffed, so I didn't have to wait long. I found a pair that looked almost like normal shoes, in a neutral brown, in my size. They only cost me thirty bucks, plus my last shred of fashion dignity.

And so it begins!

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