I've been trying to post for the past few days but there was some problem with blog.com or my "dashboard" or something and I couldn't. If I had, I might have blogged about...
...how I'm kind of over traveling. Traveling that isn't super-wicked-sweet, anyway, like a trip to India. The traveling I'm over is, say, the kind of two-day trip for work that has landed me in Las Vegas (I'm writing this post from McCarran airport, on my way home, thank God). I should say there were some good things about this trip. Not staying on the strip, for one. Meeting some good contacts for work, two. Picking up a few things at H&M, which absurdly has no store in Denver, three. Other than that, a waste of metropolitan energies, this city is, if you ask me.
I must have had the conversation about how wretched this city is about a million times in the last forty-eight hours, with people trying to convince me that it can be "fun," that you can "gamble" here, that it's an "interesting" anthropological/sociological/cultural artifact. Ooh, the people-watching, they say.
See my heels? They're dug in. Vegas sucks, and there's no convincing me otherwise. I could see how, maybe, if I did acid, or was a stripper, or was eighteen, horny, and single, how it might be kind of sort of appealing. But I'm not those things. Not most of them, anyway.
For example. I walk up to a well-known chain restaurant an hour or two ago here in the airport, get in line behind a big, white-haired suit who is haranguing the Indian guy at the host's desk. "Well, I see plenty of tables open there, why can't I sit there?" he's complaining. The Indian guy explains they don't have enough servers on staff so they need to wait a few minutes before old white guy (my brother calls this kind of guy "cheesedick") can have a table. So Cheesedick sticks his pudgy nub of a finger in Indian guy's face and says, triumphantly. "Well, you're clearly telling me you don't want me to be your customer when you say such a thing. Normally I'd walk away. But I'm going to fool you, do exactly what you don't want, and stay." Then he stomps off to sit down and wait for his measly table. Fucker. Cheesedick.
Vegas. Bah.
...there was also some deep-ish blog post about the value of brokenness, spurred on by my marathon reading of the novel Broken for You, one of these Oprah-book-club-type modern novels, in which the most wretched things happen to people in excruciating detail, and there are often poor child victims, and I end up sobbing and sobbing and writing everything in the style of the author for a few days, including overwrought emails and dramatic text messages. I feel bad for anyone who happens to be around me after I read one of these. I'm insufferable.
The post would have been some riff on a line from the book, "We're worth so much more broken," and how it spoke to me about the meaning of meanness and pain and suffering. But I'm over it now. Just like I'm over Vegas.
Over it.
...and I think there was a post in there somewhere about how much I miss my kids, and how I want to travel less from here on out or start bringing them with me. Probably just travel less. I feel slightly guilty about this. I've always loved traveling. Part of me still gets a thrill when the plane takes off. I know how lucky I am and have been to have traveled so much. And I'm scared that my desire to stay home means I'm old and complacent and just want the sheltered privilege of my suburban Colorado home.
But so be it. I like the sound of my kids screeching through the house, my husband twanging away on his guitar. I like my trees. I like the burnt orange walls of my bedroom, and the way the rectangles of sun created by our skylights track across the planes of our floors and walls as the day progresses. I like my cats. Poor Prudence, who needs that tumor removed. I like the order and the quiet. I think it's just about everything I ever wanted, the way life goes there. That's not nothing.
Anyway, if what's in Vegas is supposed to stay here, that's fine with me. I think a quarantine is in order.
...how I'm kind of over traveling. Traveling that isn't super-wicked-sweet, anyway, like a trip to India. The traveling I'm over is, say, the kind of two-day trip for work that has landed me in Las Vegas (I'm writing this post from McCarran airport, on my way home, thank God). I should say there were some good things about this trip. Not staying on the strip, for one. Meeting some good contacts for work, two. Picking up a few things at H&M, which absurdly has no store in Denver, three. Other than that, a waste of metropolitan energies, this city is, if you ask me.
I must have had the conversation about how wretched this city is about a million times in the last forty-eight hours, with people trying to convince me that it can be "fun," that you can "gamble" here, that it's an "interesting" anthropological/sociological/cultural artifact. Ooh, the people-watching, they say.
See my heels? They're dug in. Vegas sucks, and there's no convincing me otherwise. I could see how, maybe, if I did acid, or was a stripper, or was eighteen, horny, and single, how it might be kind of sort of appealing. But I'm not those things. Not most of them, anyway.
For example. I walk up to a well-known chain restaurant an hour or two ago here in the airport, get in line behind a big, white-haired suit who is haranguing the Indian guy at the host's desk. "Well, I see plenty of tables open there, why can't I sit there?" he's complaining. The Indian guy explains they don't have enough servers on staff so they need to wait a few minutes before old white guy (my brother calls this kind of guy "cheesedick") can have a table. So Cheesedick sticks his pudgy nub of a finger in Indian guy's face and says, triumphantly. "Well, you're clearly telling me you don't want me to be your customer when you say such a thing. Normally I'd walk away. But I'm going to fool you, do exactly what you don't want, and stay." Then he stomps off to sit down and wait for his measly table. Fucker. Cheesedick.
Vegas. Bah.
...there was also some deep-ish blog post about the value of brokenness, spurred on by my marathon reading of the novel Broken for You, one of these Oprah-book-club-type modern novels, in which the most wretched things happen to people in excruciating detail, and there are often poor child victims, and I end up sobbing and sobbing and writing everything in the style of the author for a few days, including overwrought emails and dramatic text messages. I feel bad for anyone who happens to be around me after I read one of these. I'm insufferable.
The post would have been some riff on a line from the book, "We're worth so much more broken," and how it spoke to me about the meaning of meanness and pain and suffering. But I'm over it now. Just like I'm over Vegas.
Over it.
...and I think there was a post in there somewhere about how much I miss my kids, and how I want to travel less from here on out or start bringing them with me. Probably just travel less. I feel slightly guilty about this. I've always loved traveling. Part of me still gets a thrill when the plane takes off. I know how lucky I am and have been to have traveled so much. And I'm scared that my desire to stay home means I'm old and complacent and just want the sheltered privilege of my suburban Colorado home.
But so be it. I like the sound of my kids screeching through the house, my husband twanging away on his guitar. I like my trees. I like the burnt orange walls of my bedroom, and the way the rectangles of sun created by our skylights track across the planes of our floors and walls as the day progresses. I like my cats. Poor Prudence, who needs that tumor removed. I like the order and the quiet. I think it's just about everything I ever wanted, the way life goes there. That's not nothing.
Anyway, if what's in Vegas is supposed to stay here, that's fine with me. I think a quarantine is in order.
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