felix the cat, the wonderful wonderful cat - whenever he gets in a fix, he reaches into his bag of tricks.

on the way here i passed through a county that had posted one of those generic green-with-white-letters highway signs that stated it is a "certified clean county". huh. clean as in vacuumed or clean as in devoid of crack houses? clean & sober? clean as a whistle? clean broke? and then, who does the certifying, what are the criteria, is there a committee carrying clipboards holding forms filled with check boxes? does every certified clean county get a sign, and if so, why haven't i ever seen another one? are all the other counties between my house and elvis's dirty?

anyway.

as previously stated, the packing required for a short trip is not proportionately smaller than the packing for a long trip. that is, going off for a couple days requires a lot of the same stuff as you'd take for a couple weeks. that is why i have brought like three bags on this four day trip.


another thing about packing is that there are sort of two ways to go about it. okay, there are probably a million ways, but i am going to discuss this dichotomy: organization versus chaos. organization is when you know where you are going, what you will do when you get there, what the weather will be, and you take all this information and turn it into a planned outfit for each day. you might even consolidate some outfits so that you'll be wearing the red shirt on tuesday with the jeans and on friday with the shorts which you wore on wednesday with the blue shirt. you know, garanamalizing your wardrobe.

the other method of packing, chaos, can either be an extension of your personality or an outcome of the trip planning. not that your trip has to be completely chaotic, but maybe you don't know for sure what you are going to be doing every damn minute. you could go for the minimum and wear the same thing every day or you could do what i do and just lop some of everything into the bag, which results in a bulging bag of lop. a bulging bag of lop in which there is nothing suitable to wear.