Friday, January 6, 2006
My inability to get up at the right time bit me in the ass this morning. After waking up at 10am for my 11:30am flight, I made a mad-dash and hit the check-in counter at about 11:15am. Early enough, right? No, apparently. And not early enough for the cranky old woman running the counter to forgo an attempt to impart a lesson about arriving early to catch a flight… Wait, I’m supposed to show up before the time printed on the ticket? Well, hot shit! Who knew? Can you stop lecturing me and just get me on the fucking plane?
No.
So I got bumped onto the next flight. And then had to wait in Dallas for a seat to open. So I got into Austin during the evening rather than during the late-afternoon. Ah, so.
Anyway, waiting around airports isn’t quite as tedious as it once might’ve been. Both Newark and Dallas offer the wifi now so I could send a few e-mails and tinker with the War Against Evil blogging code that I wrote up for this-here site you’re looking at. Someone from the Leonard Bernstein Office sent me a message to inquire about my availability to do some web work. Jack Gottlieb (and Dan Shiffman) tipped them off to my existence. It’d be nice if that developed into a nice little contract. I need to remember to call them on Monday…
Not much to say about flying except that after several years of having a deep primal neurosis towards air travel, I’ve mellowed out about it in the past six months or so and was able to actually enjoy the long stretches of turbulence-free flight. The plane would occasionally bump around like on rocks and my mind would be instantly filled with a million replications of “I hate flying I hate flying I hate flying” — but it was generally smooth going… Few problems. (Although my ability to visualize the aircraft I’m in cracking apart in the sky and opening into shards and fragments of engineering as I enjoy the few windy minutes between me and hard oblivion below remians quite acute. I’ll become famous and then when I die tragically in a plane wreck my fans will marvel at my Ritchie Valens-like prescience.)
Brenna’s fine. Meri’s fine. But sick. Meri called to invite me out for a drink at Six, Lance Armstrong’s new bar at the location of The Lounge (once my favorite martini bar). We didn’t stay long. Some other people were there, including a high school classmate whom I hadn’t seen since 1996. So it kind of turned into one of those “what happened to everyone?” roll-calls that I find increasingly tedious. Someone got married? Someone had a kid? Someone still works at Best Buy? After a certain point, most lives seem to fall into familiar ruts and become more-or-less boring stories. A few people transcend all of that an remain interesting and always worth keeping tabs on, but those seem fewer every year…
