Details, details

As it gets down to the wire (five more days til takeoff!) I’m starting to realize how much getting ready to leave for a long trip is just a series of little details waiting to be taken care of.

Examples:
- Buying homestay gifts (that were not made in China!) and good airplane reading
- Obsessing over whether or not to bring my laptop (the verdict, finally, is not.)
- Obsessing over whether or not to bring my iPod (the verdict, tentatively, is yes - but I'm leaving it in a plastic bag and only using it in homesickness emergencies!)
- Paying my credit card bills so I don’t have to worry about making payments while I’m abroad
- Getting traveler's checks
- Collecting, and figuring out how to use, all the medical supplies my mom is sending with me (just in case). These include: syringes (just in case I need vaccines), Malarone (just in case of malaria), Tamiflu (just in case I’m worried that I have avian flu), Lunesta (just in case I can actually sleep on airplanes), Pepto & Immodium (OK, these transcend “just in case” and enter into the realm of “when”)
- Printing out family photos to show my host families... Zhe shi wo baba, wo mama, wo jiejie. Things in Chinese I actually know how to say!
- Putting a couple of crucial phone numbers into my international phone so when I’m crazy drunk at 2 PM US time I can tell people I love them from across the world

But mostly, I've been sitting around thinking up details and things I can obsess over. Like dumb things, though, because really this China trip is more or less completely taken care of. No, I'm thinking about things like whether I want my parents to get my room repainted while I'm away, and which ones of my many buttons I want to put on my backpack when I go back to Carleton, and whether I should bring the nice case that my insulated mug came in, and whether the people at security will get mad if I bring an empty water bottle in my carry-on, and whether the stewardesses would let me fill it up from the water they have on board the flight, and what the best strategy is for resetting my watch, given medications that have to be taken at 24-hour intervals...

What this all means, I think, that it's time for me to leave the country.