Where Is Hawkins?Where travel is cheaper than psychotherapy.

I’m counting down the days until this mess is over. It’s gotten nasty, and I’m tired of it. In all likelihood, I’ll cast my vote for Bush for President and Obama for Senate. They’re wasted votes because the Obama’s guaranteed and Kerry will take Illinois and her 22 electoral votes. That’s all that matters.

I’m a minority when I say that the electoral college is brilliant. The US is not a democracy, it’s a republic. When the electoral college was conceived, it was with the thought that there’s a distrust of a strong central government, and for the most part, thought that political parties were downright evil. And our founding fathers believed that the office should seek the man, not the man should seek the office. Direct elections aren’t a good idea, because for the most part, people would vote with knowing sufficient information about candidates and at best, and that larger states would dwarf smaller states.

Now all we need to do is get rid of the 17th Amendment.

Even for a sorry guy who doesn’t vote the way he should.

1) I found a cool blog about a flight attendant from Delta who got herself suspended because she’s got a picture of her on her blog *gasp* wearing her FA kit. Cute girl, but alas she doesn’t fly my beloved airline.

2) Paris upgrades have cleared both ways, same with London upgrades. A good stroke of luck, as it were. Now all I have to do is get upgraded to/from Honolulu and my year will rock.

3) Jeff and Drew are planning the migration back from California to the midwest which is a good idea. I think they just got fed up with California and the idiocy of it. I just have no further incentive to swing out to San Jose and say hello. Flying to Indy just doesn’t have that same cool feel. And you have to admire the effort when some flies 1800 miles just to have dinner with you on a whim.

So I put in 10 minutes worth of effort and got the trips for the rest of 2004 nailed down. Got my hotel for the overnight in Honolulu (The Radisson Hotel Prince Hukio on Waikiki) on November 10th. It’ll be fun just for one night, which will be spent being out on the town and trying to get some good night shots.

Confirmed upgrade on the outbound leg for Paris, which is cool. Sort of sucks that my buddy is in coach while I’m in Business, but alas, his is a free ticket so you get what you pay for.

Chicago Marathon pictures posted.

I really can’t believe that I’m going to Paris in a mere 6 days. It’ll be good to get out of town after all the drama at work, and it’s good to go with a friend. Philly girl would have been the preferred choice, but alas, it’s not up to me.

As for upgrades, I’ve not had good luck. I wasn’t able to get Eno and Stacey upgraded on the way out to Rome, but it looks good on the way back. At the very least, it would be cool to hook them up so I can seem like I’m cool and curry favor with someone who might be valuable. And who’s got a cute sister too.

Paris is still waitlisted in both directions. London is waitlisted for the outbound but confirmed for the return. Osaka via Honolulu will be a crapshoot.

I got some additional tips from a friend for Paris so that way, I can pretend like I know what I’m doing.

I need to rest up this weekend. Sunday is football and drinking. Monday is drinking. Tuesday is time with Mom. Wednesday is a night out with friends and Thursday is the flight. :(

One of the things that grows when you travel is your postcard list. When I was in Sydney, I sent out over 25 postcards to family, friends, acquaintances and other. I got off light in Toronto, only mailing out 14. It’s rough writing postcards because there are only so many iterations of “The weather is here, I wish you were beautiful” that you can write before it’s not only a pain in the ass to write, but it becomes mentally taxing because you can only tell the same story a finite amount of ways.

So what works is that I break the postcards down into groups and divide the target population from there:

Group A: This is the semi-serious postcard that I generally send to family.

Group B: The lighthearted postcard that I send to my cousin and his wife.

Group C: Mostly serious card that I send to my uncle and aunt. Maybe a bit of fun.

Group D: Grandma’s. Totally serious with zero fun.

Most of my friends get the lighthearted postcard. For the people that I work with, it’s generally pulled from Group A. I send postcards to my friend and his parents, so the parents get the A card and the friend and his family get the B card. Of course, there are a few ones that aren’t totally canned, like the ones to ex-girlfriends and such. But it helps save time (which is important because you don’t want to spend yout vacation time writing postcards). The important thing is that family members don’t get the same postcard NOR the same writing.

It hit me when I got back from the office today that the rest of the year is going to suck. Travel wise, I’m going to fly 35,722 miles in the span of 29 days, hitting 4 countries and 7 airports. It’ll be fun. I leave for Paris in less than 10 days. 7 more passport stamps by the end of the year.

I just realized that I’ve spent 31 nights in a hotel this year.

Professionally, work will not be any fun. The two guys that I liked working for have quit, and I’m stuck like the old days – fighting for just myself. I can’t say that I blame them because work was being lame. But I was promised slightly more influence which remains to be seen that if it will actually translate into something. But I can already see that some of the people in the department smell blood in the water and like sharks, they’re circling around. To mix cliches, there’s a big vacuum going on by the departures, and people are trying to get dibs that benefit themselves. I’m 100% that I don’t want to stay and have been reconsidering for quite some time what I want to do in the profession. I see my company for what it can be, and not for what it is like most people that I work with. I just am starting to develop a disdain for my coworkers who have been so willing to accept classical conditioning within the organization that their responses are so predictable. Pavlov would have been proud.

In Toronto, I felt at home for the first time in a while. It was nice – the same weather, the same polite people but with zero stress. That place might be my chance to start over in the future. It’s close enough to be different. Perhaps that’s why I travel – to find what feels comfortable and helps me feel like I belong.

And Philly girl’s birthday is in December, so I’ll be a nice guy and send a card. I figure I can try to be nice and resign myself to the fact that what I wish for and reality are two separate things and that I won’t ever see her again. I don’t even know what I’m doing with that. I feel so lost.

I’m so beat from the weekend. Tim and I got our asses kicked at the Rock Paper Scissors World Champs, but so did the 2002 winner in the first round. But we had fun watching the chaos and people being idiots.

Pictures are being uploaded. I’ll put captions up later.

The best part is that I got my CANPASS and I was op-uped to Business for the short flight on the way back home. Sweet!

Vineyards Of My Mind. Wine, and lots of it.

Two things about AA:

1) I noticed that my Paris trip dropped $60, and I was able to get a fare rollover. Sweet! $459.10 down to $399.10 is pretty cool. Very opportune.

2) I got a frantic voice mail from American Airlines regarding a schedule change to my Hawaii flight (the Honolulu-Osaka run). Turns out the outbound leg was 4 minutes later. 4 minutes. That was worth the 10 minute phone call.

Also, I was :thisclose: to having an article in the Chicago Tribune’s Tempo section about the Rock Paper Scissors championship on Saturday, but it was nixed over how I’d be participating AND reporting on it and there was doubt whether or not I’d be able to have it in by Sunday at 1pm CST. I was planning on being mostly sober for the tourney, but I guess that’s now out of the window.