Moving out of my apartment and heading off to Morocco meant more time with one of my most despised activities: packing. I’m sure I have blogged about my hatred of packing a lot before. Or, at least, I am sure that I have thought to myself, “I should blog that,” many times while mentally drafting lengthy diatribes against packing. I have probably only committed like five percent of those rants to actual blog posts because that’s just what I do. That’s kind of a universal blogger problem.

Any-pointless-way.

Part of why packing is a struggle is that I am kind of an all or nothing person, and my preparedness is no different. Sometimes I will say, “Fuck it,” and go with whatever is in my pockets, which I try to do more out of sheer laziness than actually being so whimsical and cool that I just don’t care. However, given the opportunity or the obligation (interpretation varies, but errs on the side of the latter) to pack, I go insane. It gets very MUST PACK ALL OF THE THINGS because I am convinced that I will need everything. More importantly, I know that whatever it is that I choose not to bring will be the thing that I TOTALLY NEEDED at some crucial moment.

The one thing that I will never, ever skimp on? Underwear. I go on a vacation and I pretty much empty my underwear drawer out into my suitcase.

When I was five years old the Northridge earthquake hit. I was in kindergarten and my family was living in Northridge at that time. If you’re not from LA, you don’t know where Northridge is, but anyone who was at least ten and living in southern California in 1994 knows Northridge as, “Oh, the earthquake!”

Or, at least this used to be the case. I don’t think I have had that conversation in about ten years, so maybe that reference point has reached the end of its shelf life.

I remember the earthquake itself chiefly as a weird dream, because it happened in the middle of the night. In my dream a tow truck was picking up my house. Then my mom came to get me from my bed; having the room adjacent to my parents meant that I was retrieved first, and this knowledge has been a secret source of comfort and internal gloating for years.

We were rounded up in the car and I remember all sorts of random details, like the car my dad drove at the time (it was brown and probably a Taurus, but I don’t really know cars) or the portable radios my parents grabbed. I remember seeing the china cabinet tipped over, and all the other miscellaneous aftermath damage.

The family story of the earthquake is my dad walking through with my little brother, who had just turned two and was a thoroughly destructive little boy. He had gotten so used to being reprimanded for destroying shit, that I think he just assumed that he had really lost control, like some methed-up toddler-monster. At some point during my dad’s carrying him around the house to see what happened, Derrik looked at my father all wide-eyed and horrified and asked, “Did Derrik do that?”

I’m getting side-tracked here, as per usual. While that is the family story of the earthquake, my personal story is amusing only because it was also slightly traumatizing.

My entire neighborhood loaded their families into their cars and drove down the hill to the parking lot of the Alpha Beta grocery store at the bottom of the hill. I dimly recall wearing my older brother’s little league football jersey as pajamas, but I might be making that part up (conflating this detail with another from later in this story). Anyway, not long after getting to this parking lot, as is typical of small children, I had to pee.

I complained to my father, who took me over to a bush.

This shouldn’t surprise you, but my family doesn’t really camp or anything like that. It’s not necessarily being opposed to the outdoors, but we only do outdoors with a purpose. My family will do cool adventure shit and then go back to a hotel at night. Sleeping in a tent and peeing in bushes is just not a thing that I was introduced to as a child, and I’m mostly thankful to my parents for this.

As you no doubt guessed several paragraphs ago, I attempted to pee in the bushes, but basically just peed all over my underwear. I’m not sure how it went so disastrously wrong, but I remember being absolutely miserable for the rest of the night.

In the days that followed the reopening of school, we were subjected to a particularly intense bit of earthquake preparation nonsense. This seems a little late, doesn’t it? Still, when I moved to Missouri as a high schooler, I was baffled that students were allowed to leave their backpacks on the floor; didn’t they know that would impede you from getting under your desk? Maybe this is no longer the case, but in my days with LAUSD, every single teacher would reprimand you for that.

It mostly just seemed like we needed stuff. Also, to be in places that there was no rational reason for us ever to be, like under our desks or in the doorway. We later learned that was bullshit and not actually the ideal place to be.

But five-year-old me knew her shit. In my efforts to be prepared, I slept in my doorway for days and/or weeks after that. Honestly, in my memory it was months, but I know this to be the consequence of the weird time distortion that accompanies childhood memories.

I also slept with a football helmet and a backpack on. One of my mother’s friends asked me if I was doing this because I was afraid, to which I serenely replied, “No, I’m just prepared.”

I was pretty convinced that because I was fulfilling all of the items on the checklists, I was totally good to go. I made my mom buy an emergency kit that I kept in that backpack, along with about a dozen pairs of underwear. Yes, that’s right, my five-year-old emergency preparation consisted of a first aid kit, metallic blanket, and some underwear. Oh, and of course that football helmet, in case I needed to tackle anybody as I made a break for it.

Reflecting on this now, I kind of think the emergency kit and football helmet sound like better ideas than the pack-your-whole-underwear-drawer strategy, but that is the only one that has stuck with me. The rest has morphed into me being the now-trying-super-hard-to-reform world’s greatest packrat.

I’m not sure how I got here; I really did think I was going to talk about packing when I started to write this.