April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us

–TS Eliot, The Waste Land

I’ve made it through March. Some of it was pretty crappy (although it certainly had glimmers of goodness), and yet here I am. I’m tired and I have to keep going when I just want to find a quiet corner and rest, and I can’t see far enough to know when I’ll have time to just breathe, but March is a lock. But then, the reward for getting to April is, well, April. And I’m not feeling so confident about that. What I want to do and what I should do and what I can do and what I have to do are all swirling around in my mind and I have a likely suspicion they’ll all come crashing down around me come April.

But when I say I don’t know if I can make it through, of course I can make it through. We can get through anything, right? And my God am I a whiny baby. I am experiencing normal, everyday life. I have no crisis I just can’t face, no unsurmountable obstacle. I’m not alone and friendless and living under a bridge. Just losing a little confidence. I’m just on one of those paths that start out paved and smooth and end up winding through woods and turning to gravel, then dirt, then overgrown with grass, until you’re surrounded by trees and you’re not sure where the path went. But that’s why life is an adventure, and you just keep exploring until you get somewhere. I know all of this. This is life. And it’s good and it’s bad and it’s joy and pain and uncertainty and you doubt yourself and you have all the faith in the world and you know exactly what you need and you don’t know anything at all and it’s all life. And we all stumble our way through. And along the way I’ve experienced unexpected joys I would never have known had the path remained straight. When you lose the path, you gain the chance to discover. And what is life without that?

Sometimes, I imagine that worst thing that could happen. Like, I’ll think, what if I was suddenly diagnosed with some terrible disease and I was going to die soon and there was nothing I could do about it and I had to live with the knowledge of my impending death as I slowly withered away? It could happen, right? Happens all the time, why not to me?

Or I’ll be driving down the freeway and think about a car could just plow right into me and knock me off the road and I could be crushed to death in a moment.

Funny how all my worst-case scenarios are about bad things happening to me. I don’t think it’s that, really. I think it’s more than I don’t want to consider the real worst cases, especially since they are things that will happen.

I saw my grandparents recently. It’s wonderful and sad to see them. They have been the one stable thing in my life, ever since I can remember when I was two years old and living with them. They’re getting older, a lot older. They still get around on their own and are as sharp as ever, but they’re clearly aging. We all age. I will age that way one day. (I know, selfishly back to me again.) Our bodies slowly fail us and we can see the inevitable. How do you cope with that? I don’t know that you really can. I know it’s what keeps me anxious, always feeling like I don’t have enough time, that all the time in the world can’t possibly be enough, is only a moment, will be gone, and I can’t keep it, can’t grasp it in my hands and hold it tight. It slips away from me like sand, like water, like air.

I keep getting email notifications of coworkers planning vacations. A week, two weeks, a month. I think, it’s so easy. They schedule the time and they go. Why can’t I do that? But I can’t. I can’t fathom it — adding to the overwhelming avalanche of work and life by pausing the juggling act while more plates fall. I was at the grocery store today and they had all the spring flowers out for sale. I don’t like jewelry and flowers. But sometimes I do. Or I wish I had time to be the kind of person that did.

But, of course, April’s cruelty has nothing to do with not being able to take vacation or enjoy spring. It’s that melting of the forgetful snow. It’s the part of my soul that reads fortune cookies facing my practical center. It’s the whiny child inside me meeting the somewhat more grown-up me and learning the lyrics to Rolling Stones songs. You can’t always get what you want. And if you don’t know what you need, you just keep exploring. You’ll find a path eventually.

It’s the weight of making decisions when you don’t know which way to go. Decisions seem so permanent, even though I’ve seen time and time again that it isn’t so. I agonized so much in high school about my classes, my extracurricular activities. This will determine college. Which will determine career. Which will determine my future. Only it didn’t. And I know, I know that I can’t know the future. And that things always change. And that sometimes you make decisions and sometimes you later change course and some decisions you don’t have to make right this minute and you can keep going day by day.

And it’s dealing with the realities of life. Of sometimes not having any control at all, but knowing that you have just play the hand you’re dealt. Of gracefully handling the consequences of your choices.

Or maybe it’s just that I should just stop reading poetry. I sure as hell am not reading all that crap Robert Frost wrote about taking the road less traveled by. What the fuck does that even mean, anyway? I mean sure, I get the whole sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler thing. I get the telling ages later with a sigh. And the saving one path until later, while doubting you’ll be back. And never mind. Enough with the poetry already. I have to go now. I need to stop by the library and get some nice non-fiction about aerodynamics or something.

I collect fortunes, the kind in cookies with stock words of hope and wisdom that always work better in bed. I don’t mean to collect them. I don’t mean to believe in signs or be superstitious or have any faith at all in horoscopes or fate or predestination about my future. And yet.

When I’m especially happy and things are going particularly well, I tend to think: there will come a day when things won’t be going quite this well. Enjoy this now while you can. Today is one of those not-quite-as-well moments, one of those days, those weeks, when I’m feeling particularly beaten down and overcome. So what does my fortune say?

The tiny slips of paper speak of resolution, success, happiness, thoughtfulness, and joy. No one wants to break open a fortune cookie to learn about despair, pain, and heartbreak, after all. But the uniformity of positive feelings makes me question the reliability. Surely everyone doesn’t have a happy future to look to all the time? I fear the fortune cookies have failed me.

Where else can I turn? Horoscope.com perhaps? “Staying positive and upbeat is the best way to go today, as a particular planetary formation suggests that a tricky situation will be caused by someone’s clumsy or even unnecessary criticism. However, as soon as you realize why this person is behaving in this way you’ll feel much, much better!”

Well, fantastic. I’ll feel much better once I realize the planets have aligned to make someone into a jerk. Not all that helpful actually. Yahoo’s advice is a bit better, if unreachable: “Ease up on workaholic tendencies. Pointless frivolity is just what the stars ordered right now. It’s a good time to seek out some fun-loving pals and cement the bonds of friendship. Rewire those connections to refresh your soul.” And my “couples” horoscope (who knew there was such a thing?) is “the situation is almost completely beyond your control now. It’s a good opportunity to practice letting go.”

Pointless frivolity. Frivolousness without a point. I’m drowning, sinking, being pulled down; I’m suffocating, gasping for air. I have nothing to hold on to. My mind is unable to get itself around the idea of frivolity.

It’s not as bad as all that, of course. I’m just in period of darkness. I know it will be followed by light. For now, I’m inching along in the dark, one hand in front of me, feeling my way rather than seeing it. And letting go? When you’re not holding on to anything, those are words that make no sense. They clang around the room and fall to the ground with a crash that has no meaning.

I’m not Buffy, 16 years old, just hearing that the prophecy calls for my death. I’m not on my way out to an underground church so an ugly vampire can suck me dry. I’m just human. And tired. And wishing for things to be other than they are.

I’m having kind of a bad day, a day when I need to be strong. And I haven’t been doing a great job of it. In fact, I’ve been failing miserably. And I’m normally so good at the strong thing. But today I feel like shattered glass that cracks and cracks until it can’t hold up anymore and ends up in a million pieces. And I feel as though I’m letting things get to me that I shouldn’t and if that only I were a better, stronger, more together person, I wouldn’t be glass. I would be stone. Unbreakable. Solid. And even more than that, I think that the things I’m letting break me are like feathers and only a very weak person would fall under their weight.

And faced with miles to go before I sleep, I am tackling my weaknesses, the miles, the promises to keep by shopping for dresses online.

I don’t really own any dresses. Not really a dresses or jewelry or frilly kind of girl. I’m mostly a jeans and t-shirt kind of girl. I’m not at all into shopping for clothes, mostly because I’m infinitely too lazy to deal with trying things on. When I do shop, I tend to just grab things and bring them home and tell myself that if I don’t like them or they don’t fit, I’ll return them later. Only then I never do and I end up with clothes hanging in my closet with the tags on until one day I clean everything out and donate everything.

During the rare times that I do shop, I’m always attracted to very ugly things or very pretty things. I look at fancy party dresses I would never wear and frilly lacy things that would swirl as I walk. And then I buy a pair of jeans. I was in New York over the weekend and walked through the designer clothes and tried things on despite my laziness and ended up with jeans, Vans, a t-shirt, and a hooded sweatshirt. All of which I love way more than frilly dresses, so I’m not in any way complaining. But today, being all jagged, splintered, blunt edges, I just want to be pretty. I don’t want to have to be strong and hard and take anything that comes at me. And so even though I know that’s what I need to do, I pretend, for just a minute, that I can be soft and frivolous and might one day be able to just breathe and have somewhere to go in a swirly dress.

I should be working right now. Lord knows I have a lot to do. Too much to do. A crushing avalanche of todoness that threatens to bury me beneath its suffocating, all-encompassing grip. But instead, I’m wondering at the sign posted on the door of my hotel room. It’s the obligatory sign you often see, warning about blazing inferno danger and how to save oneself from an untimely fiery demise. I tend to scoff at the undue attention potential fires receive at hotels, as compared to say, the danger of a meteor crashing from the sky and falling through the building or a hellmouth opening under the hotel and unleashing the master from his underworldly prison.

My hotel stays of late have been marked by fires, or least fire alarms. And the lesson I have learned from them all is to ignore the door instructions and just stay in the room. And make sure you have good earplugs. During one lovely evening when I was peacefully sleeping in my so-called heavenly bed, alarms screamed through the room at 1:30 in the morning. I considered ignoring it, but it was really fucking loud. Fire alarms aren’t designed to be loud enough to wake you; they’re designed to be so annoying that you have no choice but to get as far away from them as you possibly can.

Fortunately, I was somewhat clothed and I sleepily found some shoes and my room key and my car keys and my purse. Hey, if I had to stand outside too long, I was going to find a new hotel for the night. We brave hotel guests stood outside in the cold (OK, not so much — it was California after all) and the dark and wondered if our temporary home would go up in flames, and if so, would we have to all wear pajamas to our morning meetings.

The fire trucks came. The firemen ran through with hoses and hatchets. The hotel employees stayed inside where it was warm. Some of us in the unenlightened crowed tried it but found the cold was vastly preferred to the screeching noise of doom and scurried back outside. Eventually, we all were able to return to our rooms. No details about the fire were forthcoming, but we got a vague sense that someone had set off the smoke alarm in the kitchen by burning toast.

Much more recently, I was staying at hotel in London that had an odd tendency to sound its fire alarms at random times, but only for short moments, so easily ignored. Until the time when I was packing up, when they sounded and refused to stop. And I thought, oh great. Someone has once again burned toast, and I won’t be able to get back into my room in time to pack up and make it to the airport. So, I stayed, packing, while the fires raged away and threatened to consume me at any moment. Until I couldn’t handle another second of the screeching that drilled into my brain and I fled down the stairs. I was on the 13th floor, which in British terms means fourteen flights up. When I reached the bottom, the wailing stopped and I trudged back up again. At least I made it to the airport on time.

But the door instruction in this hotel is a little different. Oh sure, it has the exit route and tells you to use the stairs and all that, but it ends with this helpful tip:

Attack the Fire if Possible

Good advice in any situation really. The formerly useless collection of hotel fire instructional doors has been redeemed.

In another airport. I’m starting to like the airports, really. Maybe it’s like that thing that happens with kidnapping victims when they fall in love with their kidnappers and they fight against all odds, the police, and a world that just doesn’t understand to make it work in this crazy life. Or maybe that was a movie.

Anyway, the airport lounge is rather peaceful, and even though they only have tiny sandwiches, they cut off the crusts, which is thoughtful, and they have cheese, and most of the time, they even have Internet access. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think free wireless is a God-given right, although I do think that wireless of some kind is a bit like drinking fountains and bathrooms. I mean, my God, why wouldn’t it be there?

Today’s wireless was like this: First, I tried using the shiny new wireless card I got from work. When they gave it to me, one of the techs asked the other, “doesn’t this need a driver or something.” The other tech waved him away. No, it just works. Fantastic! Only it didn’t just work, but I managed to track down the software online earlier today when I was at home. So, I started it up, ready for wireless everywhere! A brave new world! Only it wanted a username and password. Which I definitely didn’t have. I tried a few things only to have it stop recognizing the wireless card altogether. But rather than spend fruitless time trying to debug that problem, I checked out what other wireless was available. The lounge has access you can pay for (which makes me miss the free wireless at the Alaska lounge, but Alaska doesn’t fly to Europe, so what can I do, really), so I hopped on that. Only I didn’t because of some DHCP problem. I asked the desk guy, who told me to try the free airport wireless. I found that, only to get a weak signal error. No problem. This lounge has free workstations. So, I hopped on one of those. It was rather nice actually — back in a corner, surrounded by books. It was hard wired in and was working great. For a while. Until it stopped working altogether. The guy in the workstation across from me looked up. Does your internet work? Not so much.

Fortunately, my blackberry rescued me. It was a good thing too, since it had mercilessly let me down yesterday by refusing to work at all mid-conversation. It deceitfully gave the appearance of working, with its signal bars and logged in green ball and web of lies. I eventually beat it into submission by removing the battery and thinking mean thoughts about it. But it redeemed itself today as the one internet option of five that actually worked.

I’ve finally managed to get the 6 pound an hour wireless working, just moments before I have to board, and it brings a brightness to my day. After all, it’s letting me write. Nothing wrong with that.

I remember life without the Internet, certainly. But I don’t make me go back.

I love poetry. I rarely read it and I absolutely can’t write it, but I love so much about it. It relies on an efficiency of language than can be breathtaking. (That is, good poetry. Bad poetry just makes me want to cry for the poor abused words.) It’s an art to using words exactly right, just so; harnessing the power of writing, of phrases and sentences and paragraphs.

The books I enjoy the most are those with compelling stories and those with indvidual phrases and sentences that speak to me. With the latter, the story may be good or not, but it’s the way the words are arranged together that pulls me in, a kind of poetry. I’ll linger on a phrase, struck hard by it. I pull the words out of the context of the story and shape them into something of my own.

In college, I was endlessly in literary debates. Oh, the debates. We were so earnest and passionate and serious, as though the world would turn on what we discovered. And I suppose our worlds did turn, are still turning on those foundations.

We argued whether literature — all art, really — meant what the author intended or if we each bring our own experience to what we read, so that the writing then is different for each of us, a living thing, reborn anew with each reader.

I, being young and foolish, argued the first view. I was selfishly thinking of myself. If I write something, it means what I meant it to mean. Someone might read it and think it means something else, but that someone would be wrong. But I was wrong.

What we write doesn’t belong to us. We capture the words and thoughts in our heads and shape them, give life to them and set them free to be captured and shaped by those who read them. And thank God for that, for all the words set free for us to claim, to call our own, to read and think, yes, this is exactly how I feel. I needed words for this feeling and you’ve given them to me. Thank you.

I was reading this book a friend gave to me. She said, you’ll really like it until the end. Then, like with most books, everything wraps up too neatly, and you’ll think, why can’t these books end a hundred pages sooner, with loose ends and messiness like life really is? And she was right.

But what I loved the most about the book wasn’t the story, but the crafting of the words — sentences that jumped at me, left the context of the story and said, here, I am how you feel.

It didn’t surprise me then to learn that the author had also written poetry. You can’t read poems the way you read books. I gobble books up as quickly as I can, down them like shots of tequila. But you have to linger over poems. To get the feelings between the words and the lines. You have to think about those spaces and your life and what you feel right now as the words move through you. And the poem takes the shape of you and you set it free.

And I can see how love, once started
can become a thing apart from us,
a being all its own, unstoppable,
just watching as we waste our human gestures
in the air, and who can say if it’s
the monster or the hero of our lives?

-Wiglaf, Marisa de los Santos

Childhood is cruel. I don’t mean all the usual ways, although those are cruel too. I mean how everyone tells you that you can do anything you want, and even worse, how you have all this potential — this newly born, unrealized promise of youth. The cruelty is that you grow up, and you don’t grow up into the all-dreams-attained superhuman you’d been given cause to believe you would become. But into someone who’s human: imperfect, unsure, and quite often a mess.

I’m organizing my home office right now, and I came across a box of my childhood. You know this box. It’s musty and stale and full of construction paper drawings and report cards and school pictures. And potential. The once shiny ideals of what you might have been.

In my box:

• A number of report cards, all with one thing in common — none of them report for an entire year. My second grade report card, for instance, has the following note from the teacher: “progressing nicely.” However, if you look at the actual grades, only the first of four quarters is filled in. I’m not quite sure how she knew how I was progressing when she knew me for an entire quarter of one school year. For that quarter, I needed improvement in the following areas: “does neat work” and “talks at the proper time”. I’m not sure if that latter meant that I didn’t talk at all or too much. However, I did get a satisfactory rating for “is usually cheerful.” Fortunately, the second grade report from the next school gave me all excellents, including for “work is neat”, as well as “sits and stands erect”. So, you can see that I greatly improved. On my sixth grade report card, they rudely wrote “NOT ENROLLED!” over the first three quarters, but seemed to like me anyway.
• A picture (on orange construction paper) with two sides. One side features a girl saying “goodby”. Flip the paper over to find a door and the girl walking away. The quality of the picture would lead one to believe I drew it at around age four, but honestly, if I drew that right now, it would likely look exactly the same. Except I’ve become a better speller.
• A letter from Stuart Hall that accompanied the year’s supply of paper products that I won for writing an essay, apparently on the topic of “the challenge of tomorrow.” And here’s one of those cruel statements I was talking about: “I can tell that you have a bright future ahead of you,” wrote the form letter composer for Charles G Hanson, chairman of Stuart Hall Company, Inc. How could he tell, really? Because had I known what the challenge of tomorrow truly was, well, my essay may have been a little different. Not that I have any idea what my essay was about, but I assume it wasn’t about saying fuck it and running off to the ocean.
• The index cards holding the speech I gave at my eighth grade graduation, which oh goody! Is about being “faced with the future” and our “search for tomorrow.” Well, at least I know about that second part. Tomorrow shows up whether you search for it or not. (In my defense, the entire graduation apparently had a soap opera theme. What were they thinking?)
• Lots and lots of certificates for things like reading a bunch of books and being a good citizen and student of the month and perfect attendance and honor roll and unimportant stuff like that, but also a very important certificate from 1978 for PROFICIENCY IN ROLLER SKATING!

The point is that I remember being in school and scoring in the 99th percentile in standardized tests and thinking that it meant something. That life was a road paved with yellow bricks and had milestones and checkpoints and all you had to do was head in the right direction and you’d reach the goal of happiness and happy ever after and as it turns out, there isn’t even a grown-over walking path, much less a road.

I don’t know how far I’ve traveled from that girl in the picture I’m looking at now — curled up reading a book, holding a stuffed Snoopy. It’s interesting how even though you grow up, some things never change. In a school assignment from second grade titled “Introducing Me” with a fill in the blank essay, I wrote:

I like to eat potatoes. I don’t like to eat corn. I like to read because it is fun.

Well, at least being grown up lets me do some things I like. Which isn’t the same as fulfilling potential and living happily ever after, but I’ll take what I can get.

I was talking to a friend that other day about my paper journal and what I write there rather than here. And by journal, I really mean journals, since I have lots of them, scattered everywhere. Paper is a kind of security blanket for me, I suppose. I just feel better when I know it’s close by. Maybe I’ll have a burst of inspiration — a writing emergency! Best to have a notebook of some kind around, just in case.

I don’t have those bursts of inspiration quite like I used to. When I was younger, I scribbled on every piece of paper I came across. Blank paper just compelled me to write on it — post-it notes, napkins, didn’t matter. And since I keep every random thing I ever write, no matter how crappy, you can imagine the scraps of paper, index cards, and receipts I carry around from place to place.

For a while, I became obsessed with good pens and papers. But now, any old notebook will do, and any pen works, as long as it’s comfortable. Of course, I mostly type when I write now — here, and when I’m working on fiction. But the stuff that’s not fiction that I just can’t really write here is all still by hand in the paper journals.

What’s different about what I write here and what I write there? Mostly, what I write here is better. Or, at least, I tend to use actual grammar and sentences and nouns and verbs. That’s one reason I started this journal, after all. I figured the fear of potential readers would scare some literary discipline into me. Not that it’s worked, exactly, but I do sometimes make the effort towards complete sentences. I continue to fail at that occasionally. Clearly.

I would say that what I write in my paper journals is more honest, but that’s not true exactly. I’m honest here. I suppose it’s that if I can’t be honest and write about it here, I don’t write about it here at all. And that’s when it ends up on paper. Maybe I don’t always write about the whole story here, but then, I don’t in my paper journal either. My paper words are likely even more cryptic, since I write them with no thought at all to anyone else reading them.

I wrote a lot in my journals when I lived in my apartment. The more things are quiet and peaceful and still, the more I write. When I lived there, I would take to the nearby hiking trails by myself and bring a notebook with me. Well, I did that until the day I walked out of the apartment and found myself face to face with a bear. After that, I did more writing from the balcony, looking out at the woods.

I was thinking about that old writing and flipped through some of it. The first thing I wrote about when I moved into my apartment was my camel.

A camel is in my living room. The best thing about this camel is that I never once had to wonder if he would be welcome. I wanted him; he was wanted.

I then go on about Herbert, the pig on Buffy who was eaten by teenagers possessed by hyena spirits, so you can see why it’s best that my journal writing mostly doesn’t see the light of day. That entry then ends with:

Sometimes, you don’t know what you want until it finds you.

I assume I was talking about the camel and not the pig. Or the hyena spirits.

I came across another entry, entirely about underwear. See what you’re spared from? In this entry I wrote, “it’s amazing that my drawer is overflowing, since I rarely even wear underwear.” Funny how things don’t change. I was thinking that very thing earlier today. I also wrote about a recent trip to the ER, that in my semi-defense, was in the middle of the night.

When I got there, the nurse gave me the familiar paper gown. “You can leave your underthings on,” she said in a cheerful voice. And somewhere in my pounding brain, I thought, “underthings?” I was wearing neither bra nor panties. And it was then that I realized. My mom was right. You should always wear clean underwear (or, at least some underwear). You never know when you’ll end up in the hospital, being handed a paper gown.

(However, I apparently didn’t actually learn much from that experience.)

You would think I wouldn’t have many more stories about underwear, but you’d be wrong. My scribblings go on for many more pages, including a mention of undies a guy gave me in high school.

These panties came disguised as a rose. You bought these panty-roses at the gas station. Gas station rose panties. What could be more romantic?

It’s not all gas station roses though. Some of it’s fairly heart breaking, if only because I can remember exactly how I felt when I wrote the words. Like my phases of a relationship, which included:

5. Think being wanted is the key to happiness. 6. Never for moment consider what I might want… other than to feel wanted. 7. Fret and stress and do everything in my power to remain wanted, including, but not limited to: catering to demands; taking on any and all responsibilities; changing myself. 8. Feel drained and overwhelmed due to taking on too much and being someone other than myself. 9. Realize am getting nothing in return; don’t even really feel all that wanted anymore. 10. Spend an enormous amount of effort and time trying to figure out what went wrong and change even more into the person that he’ll really want. 11. Say fuck it and walk away.

My rambling writing then goes on to wonder if it’s possible to find someone who would love me for exactly who I am.

I haven’t dug out the old scraps of paper and post-it notes in a while. Those go back to junior high school. And also probably wonder about finding someone to love me for who I am. Well, and have little hearts scribbled in the margins with the names of the members of Duran Duran.

At least some things change. These days I scribble little hearts around much newer and cuter bands.

I’ll likely keep filling up my paper journals with whiny ramblings and rants. They let me give my inner teenage girl a place to have a voice, so the more grown up me (such as it is) can do more grown up things. Like seek out those mature, yet attractive bands.

I had a very odd feeling this morning. I stepped into a cab, and something seemed wrong. Like the cab was off-kilter or something. And then I had the following three thoughts in rapid succession:

• The driver is sitting on the wrong side.
• Oh wait — the left side is correct.
• What country am I in again?

Bay area cab drivers are different than the talky drivers in Dublin and London. Neither driver I had today offered me any unsolicited personal advice at all. And neither told me how they felt about all that fucking porn on the Internet.

Dublin taxi driver, as best recollected: “Fucking porn. It should be illegal. Who wants to look at that? I don’t fucking want to look at that. Well. I bet my fucking wife does.”

No fewer than four drivers said things to me along the lines of, “you’re not married are you?” And one put it quite succinctly. “No, if you were married, your husband would say it’s either me or the plane.” He was nicer than I’m making him sound though. They were all very nice to me. On one of several trips to Heathrow, my driver asked if I needed help hauling my stupidly large and heavy suitcase from the cab. I said it was no problem. I was used to carrying it around. “You’re not like English girls, love. They would never carry their own suitcases.”

The driver I had in Zurich didn’t speak English and had no idea where I wanted to go. While it was true that I did a terrible job of pronouncing the street, I did have the address written down. Didn’t help. He got out the Swiss version of the Thomas guide and did lots of cursing at one way streets. And stopping. And turning around. And turning off the meter. And backtracking. He felt so bad when we finally got to the right place that he gave me a sort of hug. Hugging is the shared language of apology. I didn’t really mind that he got so lost. I got a nice tour of the city.

I have traveled 28 of the last 58 days and am writing this in an airport. Tonight will be my 14th time on a plane since the beginning of the year. That is, if this flight ever leaves. Right now, a loud voice over my head is apologizing that our delay will be just a bit longer, but Starbucks coupons are available to ease our discomfort. As long as we don’t mind going back out through security to get to Starbucks.

About an hour ago, I considered paying someone lots of money to scan my eye, take my fingerprints and keep it all on file. And the only reason I didn’t was because they wouldn’t yet be sharing my personal details with enough airports to make it worth the time it would take to fill out the form.

I must even give off frequent-business-traveler vibes because people are always stopping me and asking questions as though I’m a traveling advice-dispensing service. This morning, I was on the train to the terminal, having an emotionally involved conversation over IM (No, you are wrong; that is indeed absolutely possible. And anyway, how else am I supposed to have any conversations at all when I’m forever in airport terminals?) and a woman leaned over to look at my blackberry screen. “Is that a blackberry? Does it really keep your calendar and contacts and e-mail? Do you like it?” What I like is having private conversations on it, actually. But instead, I told her about how it’s great, and how I can answer email while walking to my plane (and by that, I meant that it lets me chat while driving and when in boring meetings) and she quizzed me a bit more and then seem satisfied, possibly because she’d caught up on the details of my emotional well being and could contently look away from my screen.

Tonight, two different people asked me if the airport had wireless, and if so, how much it was. One woman said, “$6.95! Next they’ll be charging us for the bathroom!” And while I enjoy free wireless as much as the next person, I don’t know that it’s an inalienable right or anything. And really, $6.95 for 24 hours seems fairly reasonable, considering I’ve recently been paying upwards of $15 an hour for the privilege.

I could tell her the airports where she can could get wireless access for free. Vegas has lovely free access. The Alaska lounges do. US Airways and British Airways, not so much. Heathrow terminal one seems to have no wireless access at all. Be grateful you’ve got the opportunity to pay the $6.95. But I may not need to worry about lack of access much anymore. Today I learned how I can brilliantly power broadband on my laptop via my blackberry. If only I had known earlier, I could have added that to the list of the benefits for the nosy train woman. But in any case, heathrow terminal one can no longer hurt me. In fact, I welcome my next visit to heathrow terminal one. Which is coming up pretty soon, actually.

All this traveling means I’m never actually sure where and when I’m going to be. I started keeping a separate calendar with just my trips. (Not to be confused with my regular calendar that holds all of meetings. And since apparently I’m all about numbers today, I’ll explain that I have 35 meetings scheduled for just this week, so you can understand why I need an entirely different calendar for my travel in order to have a clean visual view of my life.)

I like traveling. I don’t always like individual moments like this one, when I’ve been awake since 3:30am and have no chance of getting to sleep before 1:30am, and am in an uncomfortable chair, and my eyes are too tired to stay open, and I’m lonely. But I’m taking the time to write, and after, I’ll ignore my email for a while and read my book about perfect moments and grilled cheese sandwiches and Alfred Hitchcock and Love Affair, my favorite movie after Breakfast at Tiffany’s. (All three versions, in this order: the original from 1939; the remake with Annette Bening; the version with the changed title, An Affair to Remember. Sleepless in Seattle doesn’t count and isn’t included in this list.)

And I’m driving my own car home from the airport this time, so I guess I’ll have to give myself unsolicited advice. Although I’ll likely be so tired that maybe I’ll take the bay area cab driver approach and make it a quiet trip. Hopefully I’ll remember which side of the road to drive on.