And so it goes on the road...

I was not quite clear this morning when I landed in Cleveland - so much so that I walked away without my backpack from the departure area. 90 minutes of endless wandering in the mezzanine finally brought me back to it via TSA (those seemingly unnecessary but government-mandated, generally nice people that get to control the security lines that come in and out of every large as well as insignificant airport in the US), and I was out of the airport. But I had lost more than my backpack for those minutes - this culminating moment totalled three nights of sleep that resulted from late nights working and a horrendous flight that saw me spending as much time on the ground as in the air on Thursday - 4 hours at both. Total: 8 hours. The night before culminating in a late-night "connection" at midnight through O'Hare (announced by the pilot upon descent but our taxi was as long as the flight to Cleveland was supposed to be). In short, the connection turned out to be a long walk to the completely opposite end of the terminal (completely under construction as well), but that was to be expected. I arrived at the gate just as the lights were going out in certain parts of the grand hallway. Not so grand, if you ask me. I hitched a ride from my brother away from the airport to steal 2.5 hours of sleep (stealing is what it felt like after I powered up my computer and headed back into the presentation on which I was working when my computer lost its power only 6 hours before). That left me in the airport, late to a conference call thanks to the second late AMERICAN flight in as many days (I hate singling out airlines because they really are all the same, but sometimes they are not - American's service was crap) and the lost bag. Full circle.
I understand the possibility of these things happening - I fly enough to expect it anyhow. Flights that never leave (and never find the gate), planes full of babies full of families full of chatter and crying. I was sitting in the middle - rather the back - of the action this time around and wondering when we would ever take off, then actually find the gate. Somehow I found Cleveland, and I am still confused (and still tired - do they go together?). And so it goes on the road...

Comments

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...

Netscape, We Hardly Knew Ye...

In 1995, I started using email. In my first college days, my friend Virge anointed me with a playful email handle - toddity. She never told me that your email address was somewhat permanent, and I spent the rest of my university days with an username that amused most who got a message from good, old Eudora. At that time, I used Netscape as my web browser. Fast forward almost 15 years. I moved on first to Internet Explorer (Microsoft had a monopolistic hand in it), and then to Firefox from which I am penning this blog entry. Somewhere along the way, Netscape was acquired by AOL and sent down the river on a slow obsolescence. Until next week, when Netscape will end up on the scrap heap with Prodigy, Compuserve, and Excite@Home. How much the internet has changed. I can wax poetically on blogs and social networks, but I can also remember messageboards, usenets, IM, forums, web 1.0, HTML, and the world wide web when www. was a foreign concept. The concept is still the same - connec...

Journal : OpenRoadWorks

Search This Blog