Dateline: somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, 10 p.m. CST (roughly 6 p.m. local time … ish)
I love travel blogging. Seriously, folks, few things make me happier than sharing with you all my random observations while I’m traveling. This maxim holds generally only when I’m traveling without a specific travel companion; even though my parents and grandma are ostensibly on this trip with me, they’re family, not travel companions (no offense intended towards them, promise!), so if you’re a faithful LizBlog reader, well, you should brace yourself for photos and updates over the next seven days, ‘cause I am Hawaii bound, baby! ALOHA indeed!
My day has been sooooo long. Holy cow. I couldn’t fall asleep last night, so I went downstairs to watch some NCIS on demand (the siren song of cable has, in five short days, proven utterly un-ignorable, as I’ve suspected would be the case for the last year). I fell asleep on the couch around, oh, 11? 11:30 p.m.? And then I was woken up by an alarm going off at 5:45 a.m. No, that was not a typo. {/commentary}
Despite all my best intentions to go back to sleep at some point before beginning day-of-travel preparations, it didn’t quite pan out that way, so I reluctantly set about my morning chores … until I realized that today’s Sunday (when I wrote this, I swear, it WAS still Sunday!) and the morning talk shows were coming on soon. Well, color me happy! I was never so glad to take a shower and finish packing than I was once that realization hit me. I was downstairs and showered, ready to partake of This Week, at 9 a.m. sharp! (This, of course, made me think of going to Houston’s for Jennifer’s 19th birthday and spying George waiting for a table. And, since Robert Reich was participating in the roundtable today, this also made me think about my friend Mike, who so graciously nabbed me an autographed copy of “Supercapitalism” when Reich was speaking at Mike’s mom’s church in Dallas. Ahhh, memories! It also made me long for a trip to DC to see the Newseum, which I’ve yet to visit. For shame, Liz, for shame!)
At any rate, my lengthy day o’ travel has otherwise been unremarkable. American Airlines has seriously been on the ball today. We got to DFW (from Nashville) in excess of 30 minutes early, and my plane to Hawaii began boarding at least 15 minutes ahead of schedule. (This, sadly, turned out to be a net negative, as I’d hoped to download some data at the LAX airport for the purposes of working up a dataset en route to Honolulu, but the early boarding totally cut into my data-downloading time. Derik suspects this is evidence that American Airlines has formed an alliance with Pam. I’m not disagreeing.) Even with a short delay in Dallas while maintenance fixed something (perhaps the phalange? They wouldn’t say, so I’m definitely guessing it was the left phalange!), there have been very few hiccups. I strongly suspect this can be directly attributed to the fact that my three flights today have all had flight numbers ending in the number 7 … I know attributing luck to the number 7 is so clichéd, but considering I was born on the 7th day of June in 1977, I feel I have every right to imbue 7 with lucky juju. Screw you if you disagree! Ha!
I cannot tell you all how desperately I need this trip. With the exception of my fabulous Labor Day road trip with my BFF, I haven’t really had more than a single day off (consecutively, I mean) since June, and it has really taken a toll on me. Very few people think they know how difficult the last many months have been for me, and even fewer actually know. Maybe only one.
It’s fascinating to me the extent to which my life has shifted in the last, oh, seven or eight months. I’ve been reflecting on that a lot today, as I’ve been doing a lot of sitting and thinking and writing and staring out plane windows. The things I’ve always believed to be true about myself don’t seem to hold anymore; even the fundamental stuff has clearly changed, and I’m engaged in a daily effort to understand the contours of this new person, this new life, this new outlook on the world. I’ve always thought I knew exactly what I wanted, but I’m starting to think that predictions of that sort are, at best, a fool’s errand. Life is unpredictable and the winds of change invariably knock you in directions you never anticipated going. That’s happening to me right now, and the quiet reflection that pretty much always follows time spent at 38,000 feet has been very illuminating for me today. I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t fly. I mean, where else can you look at your world, tiny and anonymous below, and realize how insignificant most of our daily worries are?
(Incidentally, while I do so adore my dose o’ perspective from 38,000 feet, it’s not the best thing one might do at 38,000 feet. {/vague reference intended for you-probably-don’t-know-who})
But enough of all that! Wanna know what I’m hoping to do over the next week? Here’s a list!
- Get a pedicure. I think this is on the agenda for tomorrow morning. Grandma foolishly thought we’d sleep all day tomorrow. AS IF!
- Get my anklet fixed at Jungle Gems. It’s my favorite anklet and I hope they can repair it. The string snapped and some of the gems fell off, but I managed to keep them all. Fingers crossed!
- Garlic shrimp! Score!
- Visiting Marcus at Jamba Juice. Who else can embody three distinct stereotypes in one? I just hope we remembered his name correctly. Otherwise, I’m gonna feel dumb.
- Climb Diamond Head! But, I promise, never by jogging up the trail like the crazy Asian girls who make it look like a snap. Granted, I don’t want to kill myself en route, but I DO want to kill them. Or maybe just make them carry me up. Hmm. Are those two mutually exclusive? Hard to say.
- Lots and lots of work. I know, not exactly exciting, but it’s a necessity. If I can work up data for my Congress paper (the only of my three final papers that actually requires data analysis), then I’ll be in good shape. If I can get the stack of research I brought along read, so much the better. And if I could start writing my research design for my public opinion class? Well, hell! Life’d be swell. Seriously. I really don’t want the last two weeks of the semester to suck out loud, and I’m highly motivated to do what I can this week to make that happen. So we’ll see. Wish me luck.
So there you have it, folks. My first of (hopefully) many travelblog entries over the next week.
Time to try to sleep – they turned off the cabin lights, and I have about 3.5-4 hours left of the flight. A nap would be lovely. But then, aren’t they always?
Aloha, baby! Anyone got a map I can go into? 😉