Part 1 of ridiculously long blog that I broke into pieces.

“I’m gonna pack light.”

This is one of the few lies I tell, and tell often, to myself and to others. It happens each and every time I decide to go on some sort of trip. “Yeah, I’m just gonna pack light. I’ll end up wearing the same pair of jeans every day anyway,” I say with confidence, feeling as though I am the coolest twenty-something year old girl to have ever walked the planet. I hold my head high, proud to be above such superficialities as reliance on material possessions. Yet somehow, when it gets down to the wire and I’m standing in line at La Guardia or JFK, I always seem to be paying an oversized luggage fee.
When going somewhere for a period of three to seven days, I am actually an accomplished light packer. I take only my favorite brown suede duffel bag that I believe was my mother’s before I borrowed it from her once and purposefully never returned it to her. My stepdad says that it’s actually his, but I won’t relinquish it. There’s something so wonderful about the amount of things you can fit into it, and how easily it can be placed in an overhead compartment. Plus it’s soft and round. Anyway, packing light for a short period of time is easily done, because I can clearly visualize in my head the amount of clothing that I’ll need to wear. I’m packing enough for a week, I tell myself, and then I’ll be home. One day more than seven and I utterly fall apart. Two weeks, forget about it. I can’t picture how many individual outfits I’ll need so I get overwhelmed, then I think about how much I hate doing laundry in other people’s laundry machines, and inevitably I end up packing my entire wardrobe into this huge green duffel bag of mine that weighs roughly double what I do.

Yesterday I had to pack for my stay in Costa Rica---a four month stint in a pseudo tropical environment where its warm during the day but can turn cold at night. A stay during which I plan on adventuring to various terrain, in a country where I don’t know that they’ll have the specific toiletries I like, and where my only option for getting my laundry done is by someone else washing my clothes for a small fee. Now, if any of you know me (which you must, because why would people who didn’t know and love me have any interest in continuing to read this?), you also know that I have germ issues, as well as control issues, and above all else a compulsive need to do my laundry. So the idea of having someone else wash and fold my clothing is pretty much horrifying to me. I don’t want some stranger touching my underwear.
So returning to the point, I packed SO MUCH STUFF to come to Costa Rica, in the hopes of never experiencing an unprepared moment, and maybe, just maybe, getting through the entire time here without once having allowed someone I don’t know to touch my dirty clothes. Honestly, looking now at all the stuff I’ve managed to stack onto the shelves in my room, and thinking about the other half of them that I couldn’t fit which are living in the green duffel bag below my bed right now, I’d say there’s a distinct possibility that I just might accomplish this goal.