How to Pack for a Trip

Getting Started

The first step to a great packing experience is to wait until the morning to pack and then accidentally sleep well past the alarm. You should be thinking something along the lines of oh my god, there is no way I'm going to make this flight or how am I such an idiot or why can't I get one thing right in my life. Once you've reached this point, lug your dusty ass suitcase out of storage and get started!

How to correctly store a shirt

Step 1. Randomly grab the first shirt you see. You should be so tired and sleep deprived that you really don't care about style or whether it's even clean or dirty. You don't have the time to worry.

Step 2. Fold one side over the other.

Step 3. Crumple it up into a ball. You want to make sure that your shirts looks like a chewed wad of gum pressed against the bottom of a school desk.

Step 4. Jam it in the suitcase. Keep doing this for a few minutes. Don't count how many shirts you're packing. Just keep going. Don't worry about space. You want them wrinkled. So wrinkled, in fact, that when you pull them out, they're creased enough to be considered cubism perspectives.

What to pack?

Often the hardest part of packing is to know what to include and what to leave out. Luckily, you've squandered so much time that you no longer have time to even consider this as an issue. Instead, you're stuck with whatever is within arm's reach. For a five day trip, your luggage should look something like this:

• 9 shirts (5 dirty)

• 0 underwear
• 1 knife from when your friend borrowed your bag for camping
  
• 1 soggy toothbrush
• Maybe a pair of pants? You really aren't too sure and you'll just have to find out once when you're getting dressed tomorrow
• 1 large, ambitious book that you will not touch
• 3 socks
• 1 shoe
• 1 bottle over 8 oz.
• 7 Game Boy cartridges that have been in your bag for years

And that's about all you have time for. Good luck. Pray that TSA is too lazy to search your bag, and don't forget to flip your underwear every few days.

– Ian "Salmon Season" Golding (@iggolding)