It's all about to happen

Feeling very what makes you think you can up and drive to Mississippi. It's 2200 miles away, your car has 150K-ish miles on it, you're alone, you don't have a clear picture of what you'll be doing there, you're being pretty self-indulgent, and you really should be begging and pleading with people here to give you a full-time job. Then I remember that my aunt -- the one who died last year -- did the reverse trip maybe 20 years ago, when she was well into her 60s. In fact, if I remember right, her immediate family tried to get her to see how risky it was for a lone elderly housewife in a not-new American car to be tooling across the U.S.A., which for this particular aunt had the effect of a turbo charge. Also, she was coming to visit our family despite the fact that, when I was in utero, my parents had deliberately moved as far away from Mississippi as was possible to do while remaining within the continental U.S. Plus she knew part of her itinerary upon arrival involved staying with me and my lesbian roommates in San Francisco, a trans-cultural adventure that might be analogous to me stopping over at the home of a New Guinean shaman or some such (do I take off my shoes? my clothes? offer myself up for trepanning?). So for her, reservations like mine would be to laugh. At least by going I don't have to be ashamed that I took cover behind an excuse that doesn't even fool me, all to avoid living with a bit of uncertainty.

Re the comprehension-defying task of packing for a six-week trip I can say only one word: Target. The consequence of forgetting something is the modest expense of its identical twin replacement.