20140803.0512

I travel quite a bit, anymore, particularly to conferences. This year has been particularly active in that regard. As a result, I have had occasion to think about how I get ready for trips, and on mornings like this that see me awake early enough to enjoy the quiet of the pre-dawn hours, I have occasion to put some of those musings in a form that works well on the blog.

When I pack for travel, I pack light. If I am taking a five-day trip, for instance, I pack five full changes of clothes, perhaps six. (I see the value in having a spare, just in case.) If I know there will be some kind of fancy thing to do, I pack a good change of clothes, as well, but it is usually t-shirts and jeans, or sweaters and the like if the weather is cooler. Nothing fancy, nothing special.

From what I have heard from others, I am not unusual among men in doing so. I know men who are clothes-horses, of course; I lived in The City for several years, and even outside it, there are many who remember ZZ Top's dictum. But I know many others who will happily wear the same clothes day after day, and who have many iterations of the same outfit as a compromise between doing so and wearing clean clothes each day. I think I am closer to being the latter than the former.

I usually pack for a trip the night before I make it, and where I leave my suitcase (why do I call it that when I never use it for a suit?) for the night does say something about me. ("There's that liberal arts and academic humanities thing again, picking things apart for meaning that really don't have any meaning in them," says an annoying voice within me that I hear too often from outside myself, as well.) It tends to sit in front of my main bookcase in the living room, whether at Bedfordside Garden in the Best of the Boroughs or at Sherwood Cottage where the wind comes sweeping down the plain. There is an old idea that leaving what needs to be taken in a prominent place ensures that it will not be forgotten. (It also increases the likelihood of it being tripped over in the dark.)  If I am following that in my placement, it says that my bookcases form a prominent place for me--which I suppose is sensible enough, given what I do. It is yet another way in which I orient my life around my reading that I do such a thing.

I do not think, though, that I can make so neat and safe an assertion about how others I know pack. My wife, for instance, cannot be said to be bound up nearly so neatly in where she leaves her stuff before leaving as I am. I have to wonder about my (lack of) complexity as a person, then, that so much of my action speaks to a single focus. And insofar as the kind of reading I do serves as a means to understand the self, it is something that other people ought to do.