Christmas Rant #3 (or Santa really hates me (possibly because I use military acronyms))

So, I've arrived in Reno to visit my parents for Christmas.

[Small side rant: why does everyone say that I am going home for Christmas? Reno is not my home. My parents moved here well after I moved out. San Diego is my home. Reno just happens to be a location where my family is meeting this year. Home is not automatically where my parents are. As Murakami says, home is where I make it.]

Apparently, with all of my flippant requests and trash talk, I've really pissed Santa off because out of the four bags we checked today, the only one that didn't make it here was the one with all of my clothes in it. Leading into short rant #3:

Why can't airlines seem to keep track of the luggage that we pay for them to take care of?

They have computers and bar codes and such. How hard is it to scan a bag in and then scan it out? It must be extremely hard because my bag has effectively drop off the grid.

Normally, I would be stoked at my bag's choice to live a life outside of the Man's ability to monitor it (I once tried to start a movement with my pregnant friends for all of us to have our babies in a field and never register for social security so that we could start an off-the-grid generation revolution. It didn't pan out. . . And now my son is fully vaccinated). However, when my bag chooses to become MIA during Christmas, when full of presents and my underwear, I have to cry foul.

Further, we can't file any type of claim until 5 days after it has been missing. In 5 days, my bag will be in Tahiti, getting blitzed on sex on the beach or whatever, showing my tattered bras to tourists for laughs.

I am fully going to be in Meet the Parents mode this week, complete with speedo and stoner jacket. I have nothing but the clothes I have on and my little brother's old snowboarding jacket. Normal girls could share their mom's clothes; however, my mom is way too tall and too skinny to be able to share anything of hers (or am I too abnormally short and fat?).

This isn't the first time an airline has lost my luggage. It has happened once before when I went to Italy. Imprudently, I decided the best way to handle that situation was to get incredibly drunk and puke all over myself (and my only clothes) and the cab I was riding in (that stunt only cost 180 euros). This time around, I am handling the loss more maturely: I am only half-way through a bottle of Rosenblum zin and nowhere close to vomiting.

I am in enough of a relaxed state to start wondering why my luggage got "lost" (actually, I have no idea why I just put those quotation marks around lost. I am not being sarcastic. I don't think my luggage was stolen. It is way way too ugly for that). We have a postal system that manages to keep track of millions of letters and packages a day around the US, yet a single airline at a single airport, servicing maybe 100,000 people at the most couldn't make sure my bag made it to Reno? Granted, it was raining in San Diego. That does freak people out a bit, but enough to lose my bag? It wasn't tiny. It was my huge, green, apartment-size bag I used to travel to Guam and Japan with (it didn't go AWOL then). It could host me and a few of my friends inside of it for a little dance party and still zip shut. It's not like it can sit in a corner and be missed. And if it can make it over the Pacific multiple times, surely it can make it over the Sierras.

Sigh.

So I will be reporting to you now for the next week commando and in dirty clothes. Because there is no way in hell I am going to brave clothes shopping two days before Christmas.

Ollie would be proud.