trapped in airport land

part I: I Should Have Called Ahead.
showed up in proper time for my afternoon flight out yesterday, gave heather a big hug and thanks for ever-incomparable hospitality, waved so long and watched her toodle off in the adorable blue mini. dragged the typical crap inside to check in– only to find that all flights into and out of chicago were canceled due to weather until the morning. oops. poor heather, having reached home, received my distress message, turned right around and came back, swooped me up and whisked me away to most delectable goodberry’s frozen custard confection, followed by an evening of further delightful conversation, wild mushroom risotto, and an early night to bed once more in the mmmmmmarshmallow guest bed.

part II: Yaawwwwwwnnn– And For What?
arose basically at Insomnia Hour, 4:30 (3:30 cst) to make my 6:30 a.m. flight– cabbed it to the airport in the pitch black, wound my way through the longlong snaky lines through security and down to the gate, only to discover no evidence of my fabled flight, only the previously scheduled and long-since filled 7:03 one. I should have suspected something was afoot on the basis of the agents’ shifty eyes yesterday and this morning as they scrambled through terminal screens and printouts in search of my “flight” and then were all, oh– oh yes of course– flight 9578– they’re just building that one. um, building it? never a good sign. basically? it never existed, I now realize. I am but a pawn in their game. how exactly it benefited the airline personnel to invent this crack of dawn flight when no one ever had a hope of flying us out before 11 (if then…), I’ll never know. now they have hoards of hopping mad chicagoans mobbing the podiums, their own little circle of transit hell, and everyone’s day is wrecked. oh, air travel, thou harsh hearted mistress. it’s never fun being lied to– even when it’s as impersonal as an airline doing it.

part III: Remaining Zen About It All
so here I sit in Cyber Cafe, sipping not actually terrible coffee and eating greasy airport egg “panini”, counting my blessings– most wonderful visit just enjoyed, respite from chicago’s snow and ice for a weekend of raleigh’s blooms and victorians, a coupla bars of wireless access. the only real loser, ultimately, is my employer, cheated irredeemably out of half a day’s labor, possibly more as time will tell. but what can I do? I sit at the whim of the aviation gods. at least I can get online (don’t get me started on the airports and hotels that charge for access in this day and age), vent my spleen in rather pointless bloggery, and attend somewhat to emails and digital biz. que sera, que sera, que sera. nothing in the end is really all that doggone critical– only annoying, and annoyance is fleeting. just like those beautiful waves of clouds out the window before me, rolling across the horizon in untroubled flightpaths.

3 a.m. carolina time

the insomnia knows no time zones.

beginning to suspect I may be operating on navarone time, which could substantially foul up my calculations for a certain device I’m contractually prohibited from discussing. likely as not, documented inconsistency of staircases in my “chicago” apartment building denotes a glitch in the matrix.

meddling with the time-space continuum is no job for sissies.

to do list, 3 a.m.

  • wash 5-6 loads at pirate laundromat (braving 100 yds of treacherous snow & ice) done! yeargh!
  • vacuum house, so that pet-sitting friend is not horrified by squalor and fur tumbleweeds sort-of done— that is, did not employ a vacuum per se
  • check flight information for north carolina done
  • pack for trip done, slap-dashedly
  • think up something clever to contribute to blog of navarone story jam regrettably, not done
  • pick up bottle of herbsaint for most delightful nc friends attempted, I swear, but half dozen places called not carrying
  • get cash done
  • figure out ground transportation to and from airports done, thanks to most excellent friends
  • pick up coworker at 8:15 corner of lawrence and california done– well, more like 8:45…
  • solve certain new product line wallpaper emergencies done and never done
  • give animals pets and love prior to desertion done
  • consider bank balance and other matters of irresolvable dilemma not done, probably just as well
  • refuse to look too hard at ongoing Life Questions done!
  • do dishes and clean up spilled cat food done!
  • remake bed with clean sheets (once washed) not done– rather, freshly washed sheets dumped higgeldy piggeldy for pet-sitting friend to make bed herself
  • walk dog done!
  • fill up car’s gas tank at the cheaper station near work done!
  • clean out disastrously untidy car not done– rather, rendered further disastrously untidy with basket of last-minute dried laundry– why indeed interfere with a good run of grunge?
  • lay out clean towels for pet-sitting friend done!
  • write note/instructions re: pet care not done– good thing pet-sitting friend is so ace
  • um, sleep? not done
  • acquire time machine I am contractually bound to silence on this matter.

(the upside– weather in raleigh:

Detailed Local Forecast

 

  • Today: Abundant sunshine. High 54F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph.
  • Tonight: Mainly clear. Low around 35F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph.
  • Tomorrow: Partly cloudy skies. High near 65F. Winds SW at 10 to 15 mph.)

calling all camcorders…

back when I was a grad student heavily involved in teaching various forms of “writing” with media (traditional verbal in various genres, yes, but also visual/interactive), I had a great resource at my disposal: the university’s media lab for teachers– we could checkout digital video cameras for various projects, play with them to our hearts’ content, and turn ’em back in, ta da. it was awesome.

so now, unsupported by great mother university and back out in the rillworld, I wonder how to get my mitts on a little handful of digital video cameras for an event thingy I have in mind to put together, say 3 or 4. I’ve taken a peek around at rentals in the area, and could do it for $35/day per camera. alternately, I could put a call out to friends and friends of friends for camera loans and hope that I’m not setting myself up for a format nightmare when it comes to compiling footage and also that nobody’s beloved camcorder gets accidentally dropped. it’s kinda challenging to figure out.

see, this is the problem with being a dilettante and having my hand dabbling in about a zillion different areas– all my knowledge is pretty superficial, sometimes little more than anecdotal or briefly experiential, whereas others geek way out, research the thing top-to-bottom, and create a mental catalog of various highly technical points of note. me, I cannot be bothered– quick n dirty does the job. idle and lazy, from some perspectives. eh, it’s all in the name of play.

so that’s the littlest wee thumbnail peek at my current project, just hatching. more later as it develops. shoot me any advice you might have about corralling cameras when you have a minute– all thoughts welcome (via email if you can’t comment here). thank you kindly. xo, sat.

we have a winner!

hands down for creepiest personals ad response evar:

me: today = really freakin’ cold. took george out, and my ears near froze off– so this sunday equals utter indoor laziness for me.

him: It’s cold here too.who is george. I had a horrible night last night.I shot my dog, that I’ve had for ten years, but she didn’t die

him: I’ve been outside all day digging a grave on frozen ground.

me:

jesus. that really is pretty much the worst weekend imaginable. and me not responding unfortunately feels a bit like adding insult to injury– but I’m kinda thinking I’m not going to pursue this one. if you want him, he’s available– and, I’m presuming, dogless.

el-oh-el-ay

so last night I went to a house party/ro-sham-bo championship. the host used to be an event promoter, so he did up his own event in stylee, with a little pa/dj station and prizes from the dollar store and everything– verrrra nice. and a group of people who like to play games– I was in heaven, totally happy and excited– and maybe a little manic into the bargain.

that’s the part that hassles me out in the cool light of morning– the old instant replay of shame. certainly it’s a result of certain indulgences, an oh shit just how big an idiot was I… kind of thing. woo fun.

the instructions at the door were to make up a fictitious name for the championship and write it down on a slip of paper for the competing order hat and also on a sticky nametag to wear– so I became lola for the evening. and, geez, but that lola was a bit of a rager, loud and downright obnoxious at times, occasionally witty, and generally so not the me I am for 99% of my life. it’s a little weird. I’ve written here before about how once in a blue moon I’ll get a wild hair and tear it up. those blue moon nights where the turtle emerges from its shell– and dons showgirl feathers and struts around. there’s the ungainly tarantella right there.

I am, I suppose, a clown at heart, though I seldom give it much free reign and then the superego kicks in once I do. I had a moment of self-assessment alone in the bathroom at one point where I thought, sometimes I feel like lucille ball, and sometimes I feel like my mother, and other times I feel more safely, groundedly like myself. tonight I do not feel like myself. there’s that razor’s edge to giddiness– am I lucille ball or pratfall-prone lucy?– if you let go, sometimes your laugh rings just a little too loudly and echoes in your own ears as shrill. it’s most alarming to a turtle.

too, I don’t really know these people– I liked them, some of them very much. it’s a network of old local friends, a community of sorts, immensely attractive to a transplant who craves a wider local social circle. I get out so seldom. there are these little forays into existing social networks, and it can be a bit nerve-wracking. there’s that part in eat pray love where gilbert’s talking about the significance of social networks in indonesia, how people’s identities are essentially relative– being x’s son and y’s cousin on his mother’s side and so on.  we have a little bit of that here, though less rigorously. and then we have floaters like me, people who have maybe moved around a lot. like the narrator of the book. deracinated. maybe rootlessness is a little maddening– possibly the person without real roots becomes to some extent a social danger, a loose wire. loose wire or wild hair, sometimes it’s a tough call. ah, the overanalysis. :) my forte. lola versus the turtle.

p.s. also I fell in love. her name is biscuit. she’s a four-year-old heinz 57 that her person has neglected to spay, so she was wandering around the party in a diaper. near the end of the party, in my loud and obnoxious way, I was giving her owner a hard time about this, and he started talking about how he wasn’t sure he could keep her, pointing out the window to his camper and talking about a big trip he was planning… I started to argue it and then just whipped out my card and told him to call me if he decided he needed to get rid of her. so maybe someday biscuit will be my biscuit. and she’ll get properly spayed, I can tell you that.

carla bruni

so while we’ve been preoccupied over here with u.s. election primaries and outrageous weather and recession and whatnot, across the water a supermodel/singer-songwriter has married the french president. this is already old news to a lot of people, but I’m just coming to it this morning. I’ve had bruni’s album quelqu’un m’a dit on shuffle for a couple of years since jen and her france-visiting manfriend adi burned it for me. pretty music. check out her wikipedia writeup–quite the femme fatale.

terror and joy

is it possible that we make our lives small because all the opportunities and richness and potentiality are just… overwhelming? terrifying? maybe we are afraid that our own lives will drown us if we enter them fully.

sometimes I see these little glimpses, this verge, right there… and I– step back. it so stops my heart– or starts it pounding in the most disturbing way. of course, I must collect myself. I must have myself well in hand. I turn away. hesitate and then the moment passes away.

this horace quotation that came to me in a.word.a.day recently is just kicking my ass all over the place lately–

He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.”
-Horace, poet and satirist (65-8 BCE)

I feel like I’m standing on that river bank, just waiting, so afraid to get wet– and the river keeps running by, just laughing and crying at me hanging there as if there were such a thing as the opportune moment. there is grace in diving.