Faith Based Packing

I've come to realize a fundamental difference between Danielle and I over the course of the last week or so. There are actually a lot of these, and even after all the years we've been together I'm still finding new ones to ponder. She sent me this article recently which kind of highlights some of them (and is actually pretty interesting), but of recent note I have found myself able to practice faith based packing, which drives her absolutely bonkers.

The premise of faith based packing is a very simple one; I have faith that everything in our apartment that I put in a box will eventually get sorted out at the other end. If I don't label a box completely (or even accurately) it's not really a big deal. Everything is in a box, and so long as the apartment is empty when we leave for Orange County, everything we own will be with us when we get there. If my boxes are extremely heterogeneous (holy shit I spelled that right on the first try according to firefox), I don't sweat it. T-shirts in with the coffee mugs? They make a great match! One is soft, the other is hard. EZ game this packing. If all of a certain thing is not in one box it also is not of great concern to me. I didn't even get all of our video games in the same box. Doesn't bother me in the slightest. I needed something light to fill out the magazine box....half the Wii games fit....again, light and heavy is a packing match made in heaven. It'll all get there, and eventually, if I need it, I'll find it. At this point I'll allow you to contemplate what it means that I had to pack nearly an entire box of magazines. Why would we have that many? Why wouldn't they be thrown away? Why was the magazine pile actually a load bearing structure on the bookshelf? There are two half used bottles of white vinegar; when's the last time we even used vinegar, let alone needed vinegar and somehow couldn't find the bottle of it we already had and went out and bought more? We have Pez? These are the questions that life is made of when you're moving, and if you think about them too hard you'll never leave. Just put the shit in the box. My friend Nate once stated the most brilliantly obvious tid-bit of wisdom regarding packing I have ever heard; it takes as long as you have, so you might as well start late.

All of the stuff I just described drives Danielle insane. All of her boxes must be homogeneous, and they must be labeled precisely. She even has "levels" of boxes, which dictate the preferred order of opening once we arrive in the new apartment. To me it's much easier to blindly march forward, doing the same things I've always done, and simply believe that it'll all work out in the end, instead of taking corrective action to improve my chances of success and happiness in my own life. It's simpler that way. I have faith.