Preparing for a cross-county trip. I will leave for the airport in just a few hours.
Do I sleep? Or do I just stay awake? Always the debate. You don't want to over-sleep, but you also don't want to be tired all day when you know you will be thrust into work after you land at your destination...
It reminds me of days gone by. This story, originally written 4/16/2008... five years ago.
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I woke up late again this morning. My 4AM alarm apparently went ignored, and I didn’t realize it until quarter to five.
My 6AM flight time was looming. It apparently was going to be one of those mornings.
I raced to the airport, keenly aware of the time the whole way. Ticketing was busy; security only moderately busy. I arrived at my gate with only a minute to spare.
But that is the way I like it. Why take my time and spend an hour sitting idle in an airport just waiting to get on a plane? My technician traveling with me on this trip was already waiting at the gate.
“Morning chief,” he said, “I was beginning to think you weren’t going to make it.”
“I like cutting things close,” I replied dryly.
“I see that…” his conversation tailed off into an explanation of how he had to wake his wife up this morning at 3AM so she could drive him to the airport, and how she was going to go into work at 4:30 after dropping him off and…. He likes to talk.
I’m not that good of a listener at half-past five in the morning. I just want to be sleeping.
But the rushed morning has me a little wired. Sitting on the plane with a Bloody Mary isn’t relaxing me. So I write.
The pilot welcomes everyone to the flight over the PA. He announces that this flight is heading to DC with continuing service to New Orleans…
I ponder going to New Orleans. I’m heading to Louisville, a city I’m all too familiar with. And despite this is a job I asked for; a job I demanded to get due to its size, exposure and the teams I would be working with… I simply don’t want to go there right now. There is too much going on in my life. This is only a two-day trip, and my first travel in almost two weeks, but it just feels so inconvenient right now.
But New Orleans… that would be something different.
For a moment I think of my friend here, Dena. A conversation we had recently she explained to me that she writes in her head. Words are always coming to her. Her next poem or story is written in her head before it ever touches paper or the digital bits and bytes of a text document.
I’m much the same. As I sit on the plane waiting for the flight to taxi, I observe and consider how I would define my observations to thoughts and words on paper, in my journal, or even to just formulate my thoughts to myself and make them coherent.
My life swirls around me at times. So much to do… I’m told to relax, reminded that things will work out or whatever I have to do will still be there tomorrow.
But this is me. I can’t relax. I feel my time is too short, I want to fit so much into my life.
Unenviable to myself, I simply don’t feel I have the room in my life to carry a pen and note pad in my pocket all the time. I don’t have means of putting my thoughts and words to “paper” all the time. By the time I get to, often it is too late. The thoughts have passed, the stories are gone.
Often, what is in my head is leisurely and insignificant. It takes a back-seat to the more important priorities. The words vanish in a myriad of responsibilities and more important details of life.
Little stories like the woman who just walked to the front of the plane to use the toilet. She walks up and stands there looking completely bewildered. For a good 30 seconds she stood there, looking… obviously perplexed and a bit confused, until the flight attendant pointed out the door to the toilet to her. Ok, there are four doors where she is standing. One says “Flight Deck Door – authorized personnel only,” two doors have little windows where you can see the sky out of them, and one door has a green sign that says “VACANT.”
Why was this so confusing?
On to Lousiville….