No one is ever meant to feel bad for me while I'm on vacation.  That would be cruel and unusual punishment for all you readers grumpily dealing with mid-April snow showers in the USA.  What you should have no problem with, however, is laughing at my own personal pain while ON vacation.  If you are too nice to be able to laugh at me, it is currently 80 degrees and sunny, and I'm writing this post while lounging on a cliff by the Caribbean Sea.  So yah, now you should be able to hate on me just fine.

Along with each specific item I forgot, I will also provide a rating (between 1-5 'oh shits') describing the severity of consequences that I incurred as a result.

1.  My anti-anxiety medication.  (oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.)
I'm a big friggin dummy.  One of the downsides of packing at 2 am before leaving at 5:45 am, is that no matter how organized you lay out all of your items, you still have to remember to grab them all on 3 hours of sleep.  The world is blurry at that hour.  I set up all the necessary pins for this trip, and yet somehow forgot to knock any of them down.  These meds help me sleep at night.  When the demons from Ghost seep into the bedroom, and thoughts of my mortality and future job prospects start churning in my brain, these pills help me fight the power and get to bed.

Forgetting these pills was a super bad move.  I had to call wifey back home, admit how stupid I am, and have her rush their delivery.  Sorry hon.  You married a stupid.

2. My anti-OCD meds.  (oh shit, oh shit)
I figure I should keep the meds section together.  It isn't as bad that I forgot these pills, only because they have a less immediate effect on me, as they are playing the long game.  There pills were also left by the sink at home, and they didn't get mailed.  I'm hoping I don't arrive home hairless.  Or if I do, i hope it was a result of drunken hot waxing and not me individually plucking every last hair.

3. My computer cord.  (oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit)
If I needed the computer cord in order to go to sleep at night, this would have warranted a 5th oh shit.  Thankfully, I have enough porn downloaded on my personal hard drive (that's my brain ya'll) that I can still get to sleep without electrical power.

What I can't do without electric power is write on my blogs, my book, or freelance writing with a word processor.  I mean, I distinctly remember finding my Mac cord hidden in the bedroom where my wife had last been using it, bringing that cord downstairs, and placing it just next to my computer bag.  How I forgot to slip that thing inside the front pocket of the bag come morning eludes me.  It is lost in a mixture of blurry dogs, a sleepy wife, and an impending early morning drive to the airport.  In true me fashion, I didn't realize this packing omission until late after my arrival, after I had drained the computer battery to dangerously low levels.  If my compadre didn't bring his Mac cord down to the island 2 days later, you wouldn't be reading this right now.

4. Lactaid pills. (oh shit)
I can't eat dairy without these suckers.  I especially can't eat dairy if I hope to go snorkeling within 24-hours of said lactose intake.  Snorkeling becomes a non-issue when quarantined to the bathroom.  The reason that this omission only registers 1 oh shit is because there are two easy workarounds to this problem.  A) don't eat dairy.  Just avoid it.  Like a grown-up.  B) Since we know how grand I am at "grown-uping", I can thank the field of genetics for allowing me to inherit a bunch of these biological deficiencies, and therefore my mother keeps a solid stash of Lactaid pills down here at the house.  Apparently she is prone to forgetting these dairy-devouring suckers as well.

5. Anything to read. (oh shit)
Another personal peculiarity of mine is that I pretty much only read for pleasure on vacation.  I am not promoting this approach by any means, but I only seem to devour literature when I have sequential days to dig right in.  You can imagine with a reading approach like this that while I have a number of books in my queue, they aren't favorably located inside the house in a way that would promote remembering to bring them along.  I didn't even grab the kindle, which was admittedly really dumb.  I is stooped.  Thankfully, with my computer (pre-cord missing), there is plenty of words on the internet to keep me reading far into the week ahead.  And when my battery died, which it did, my family has amassed a medium-sized collection of vacation books that have been read and left at the house for future readers.  I am now a future reader.  Very meta.


Other than all of that, I have everything.  Didn't forget a thing.   It really is difficult being perfect.