[This post was written on 19 December; internet access has been a bit non-ideal, so things are coming on a bit of a time delay.]

I hate to admit it, but Meg’s right: I’m clearly cursed. I want very much to say that I make an exceedingly good travel companion—good organizational skills, excellent sense of direction, very flexible and relaxed attitude, a good eye for pubs—but things have now hit a point at which I’ve got to begin looking a little deeper. Perhaps it’s just more of that post-Catholic guilt, or perhaps it’s life in a post-Dr. Phil age, but there comes a point when enough bad things have happened to you that you’ve got to start wondering what you’re doing to bring it on.

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Today’s going to be filled with nuttiness. And this time tomorrow, I’m going to be over halfway to Houston, on my way to BTR for Thanksgiving. I’m having one of those moments where I’m just not sure how everything that needs to be done between now and then will actually get done.

Apple Teams Up With Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM & United to Deliver iPod Integration.

CUPERTINO, California—November 14, 2006—Apple® today announced it is teaming up with Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM and United to deliver the first seamless integration between iPod® and in-flight entertainment systems. These six airlines will begin offering their passengers iPod seat connections which power and charge their iPods during flight and allow the video content on their iPods to be viewed on the their seat back displays.

Wow.  This will be a fabulous thing for international flights.  I’m very enthusiastic about this development, enough that I’m able to squelch my queasiness with the fact that the announcement later refers to “the iPod ecosystem,” and in an approving tone, at that.

I’m reeling.  Absolutely astonished.  My worldview has been shaken to its core.

I wanted to write about this over the weekend, but held off, afraid that the release of the first part of this story onto the internets might result in a round-the-clock patrol being stationed outside my condo, just waiting for me to leave.  I mean, it’s not like the Claremont PD is too busy to stake out scofflaws such as myself.  In any case, I’m glad I waited until the resolution to post, because I never would have expected the story to turn out this way.

So Friday, as I’m jetting off to Portland, I had a pretty harried arrival at the airport.  The long-term parking lot was full, so I had to speed around to the daily lot to park, and then I had to check in at an unfamiliar kiosk, which wasn’t that big a deal, but I just felt all stressed and all.  And so by the time I got into the first security line, the one downstairs in front of the escalator, where they check boarding passes and IDs, I was already a little keyed up.

So when the small south Asian lady said “your driver’s license is expired,” I immediately argued back.  “No it isn’t,” I insisted.  So she showed me the date:  08-23-06, not 08-23-08, as I’d thought.  I received no renewal notice from the DMV.  I’ve been driving with an expired license for two months.  And, in fact, I’ve flown on that expired license at least once.  I don’t have my passport with me, and I don’t have my social security card.  So I had to go back to the ticket counter, get approved by the desk agent, and submit to a very thorough secondary screening.  (Which, as a slight digression, involved my bags being thoroughly unpacked and checked and swiped for bomb dust.  And—as if things weren’t already going well enough—the first swipe of the interior lining of my suitcase set off the alarm on the bomb dust machine.  I kid you not.  It was, however, a false positive, and so after some steely glares and even more thorough examination, I was allowed to go on.)

On the way home, in Portland, I fessed up to my expired driver’s license at the ticket counter, and the agent there set me up for the secondary screening again, which was, if anything, even more thorough than that in Ontario.  But the most astonishing part was its efficiency.  I was traveling with a colleague from ITS, and when I presented my “SSSS” boarding pass to the checker, she directed me into lane eight for my special screening.  I had my very own team of two TSA agents, who put me through a puffer, which I’d never experienced before, and so I felt momentarily like I’d walked into a science fiction movie.  (Of course, recent reports suggest that the puffer isn’t all that reliable, but it sure felt convincing.) After the puffer, the regular x-ray and metal detector, and after that, the swipings for bomb dust.  Every single article in both my suitcase and my pink bag was swiped and checked (and this time everything came up clean).  And as one of the two members of the TSA team finished with an article—shoes, laptop, laptop case, pink bag, suitcase—they handed it to me so that I could put myself back together.

The most amazing part is that I was done, redressed, repacked, and waiting for my colleague when she finished with the regular security process.

In any case, I’m flying out again on Thursday, headed to Austin for Flow, and would rather not go through such checks again, so this morning I tucked my passport into my bag, just in case.  But I also had to take care of the driving part of the driver’s license, and after a phone call to the DMV yesterday, it became clear that the only way that I could get it taken care of was to actually go to the DMV.  And without an appointment, at that; the only available appointments were during my classes.  So I gritted my teeth and went out there this morning, first thing, right after they opened.  I brought a magazine, just in case.

And I never even got a chance to pull the magazine out of my bag.  I was literally—not exaggerating in the least—in and out, including checking in, filling out the form, waiting for a window, and getting the whole vision-check-thumb-print-picture-shebang taken care of, in ten minutes.

Ten minutes.

My driver’s license will arrive in the mail sometime in the next 60 days; in the meantime I have my old license, a printout that represents my renewed license, and a slightly bewildered new respect for the ways that large-scale bureaucracies really are learning some lessons about customer service.

I’m back in SoCal, and so is my suitcase, though it decided to take a little breather in Houston halfway through the journey. (So yes, for those of you keeping score at home, I’ve now had a bag delayed two out of the last three times I’ve checked luggage in. And they wonder why we insist on carrying on!) While my suitcase is lounging around at home, taking long naps and eating bon-bons, I’m madly trying to get caught back up on campus. I’ll hope to have something worth posting about in the next couple of days.

I haven’t exactly recovered from my décalage horaire yet, but the trip thus far has gone quite well. I got up at 4 am on Thursday and was, thankfully, ready to go when my cab showed up 20 minutes early. I had about an hour to kill in ONT, and then another six hours in IAH, where I sat in the President’s Club and got a ton of work done. The flight from IAH to CDG was about as painless as those things get: crowded and long, but I had an exit row seat and—thanks to the TSA’s recently updated regulations—I had a bottle of water. Things could have been much worse. I was able to doze some, if not exactly sleep, and I was clear-headed enough to make my way from CDG to Marcus’s without incident.

I don’t much remember Friday. I know Marcus and I went out for a lateish lunch, and that I took a bit of a nap (though I forced myself to keep it short, and get up long before I wanted to); and I seem to recall that Marcus’s partner Rom made us a fabulous dinner, and that I completely crashed pretty much immediately thereafter. I know all that happened, but I don’t really remember it; I feel as though I read about it, or watched it happening.

Yesterday, Saturday, was quite pleasant; I woke up around 8 am, and lay in bed reading for a while, then showered and went down to Marcus’s studio where he had a croissant (which he’s become Parisian enough to say is “only okay”) and some quite fabulous coffee waiting for me. I checked email, we chatted, and then I headed out for a quick lunch with Michael Joyce and his partner Carolyn, who are here on sabbatical. After that, a nap, some reading, and Marcus and Rom and I headed out to a soirée at the flat of a couple of friends of theirs whom I’d met several times. The party was lovely, but by that point in the evening, my already limited French had completely failed me, and so I wound up having a few stilted conversations with a few very patient souls, and chatting for a while with one guy from England and another who’s just returned from a post-doc in Canada.

I woke up far earlier this morning than I intended, but I sat in bed and worked on my paper (which, yes, is still in process, but which I’m enjoying more and more) and then had a replay of the coffee-and-croissant (this one from a different bakery, one which Marcus informed me is a bit more “industrial” than the non-Sunday bakery; “we really don’t get good croissants in this neighborhood,” he told me, which I responded to by pointing out how utterly relative a concept that is) before retracing my steps to CDG, where I now sit using some mighty expensive wi-fi and waiting for my flight to VIE, which should board in about half an hour.

I’m venturing a bit outside my comfort zone with this trip, as I can muck along in most romance-language countries, at least puzzling out enough signage to find my way where I’m going. I’ve got no German, however (save a good “verstehen Sie Englisch?” and a bit of “wie geht es Ihnen?”, along with enough “bitte” and “danke” as to not appear a complete arse), and so I’m a little curious to see how this goes. One of the more patient French guys assured me last night that tout le monde parle anglais à Vienne, though, so there’s that.

The hotel and the conference center are thoroughly wi-fi’d, I’m told, so there should be more once I settle in.

So I’m on the road again, in NYC, and I’m desperately trying to get done at least a small fraction of the stuff that has to be completed by a week from Tuesday. In the meantime, I’m completely exhausted from all the travel—my body clock is pretty screwed up from having jumped from EDT to PDT for two days, before jumping right back again—and so am trying to get a bit of rest around the edges, where I can.

The result is that I haven’t contacted any of the folks I ought to have gotten ahold of upon coming to town. I’ve spent some time with my sister, which has been great, but I just haven’t been able to do anything else, partially because I’ve been working, and partially because I’ve been so tired.

And the result of that, of course, is guilt. Massive guilt. Guilt disproportional to the offense, and thus, alongside that, a dread of picking up the phone to explain.

So, hoping to avoid a guilt death-spiral, I thought I’d send a little message to the folks I ought to have gotten ahold of here: I’m sorry. I’ll hope to touch base with you next time out. And I’ll hope that the next time out doesn’t come at the tail end of three weeks of traveling, and one week before several key deadlines.

There’s good news, for me, at least: because, on returning to the U.S., one goes through customs on the Canadian side of the border, and because one can’t check one’s suitcase until after customs, one goes through the duty-free store dragging one’s huge rolly bag. This used to be a pain, but now, in the fluid-free era, one has the opportunity to shove the two bottles of booze one purchased into said rolly bag prior to checking it in.

Of course, this doesn’t work when leaving the U.S., or when returning from anyplace other than Canada. So I’m wondering what changes in the structures of airports, or in check-in procedures, will be required by the new anti-liquid regime.

I’ve written before about how productive I manage to be while I’m on the road, whether it’s a matter of working on planes or in hotels (something I’d swear I’ve blogged, but can’t find an appropriate link for right now). Something about a change of venue, and the enforced disconnection from all the trappings of my regular life, makes me both efficient and focused. And thankfullly, my trip to Montreal has been no exception. In the last two days I have:

– polished that article draft and prepared to send it off on its merry way;

– designed the syllabus for the senior seminar I’m teaching this fall;

– ordered the books for said seminar;

– finished reading and taking notes on a key text for the paper I’m giving at BlogTalk.

And I’ve still got tomorrow’s enormous day of travel ahead of me.

All I have to say, though, is that it’s a good thing I’m productive on the road, because the tenatively scheduled trip to NYC did get confirmed and ticketed, and so I’ve got two days at home before jetting off again. And when I get back to Claremont after that trip, it’ll be the 24th, and we’ll be in the last mad sprint to the start of the fall semester.

No way I can leave it at that.  Not when there’s so much more to tell.

So I left my house at 5 am yesterday, headed to LAX.  The morning began with two bits of dumb luck:  first, that the trip to Montreal is going to last five days, and thus I couldn’t use my usual roll-aboard suitcase, and so had already planned on checking my bag, and so would get to keep my toiletries; and second, that I drove myself to the airport, and thus got to listen to NPR on the way, and so knew what was going on, and so was prepared for the madness that I found when I got there.

The lines were absolutely unreal.  The line of folks trying to check in outside terminal 1, for instance, stretched all the way back to, and halfway down in front of, terminal 2.  Things were bad over in terminal 6, where Continental is, too.  The first line wasn’t terrible for me, at least, as I got to use the super elite line to check my bag, and thus only waited about ten minutes.  The line for security, however, took forever, and everybody around me was in a foul mood.

I made it upstairs, finally, where I quickly wrote the last post and headed to my gate.  My plane boarded on time, and left only a few minutes late, packed completely full.  And the flight was pretty much uneventful, and I got a ton of work done.

But we didn’t seem to be descending, not in the way I expected, not at the time I expected.  Because heightened security wasn’t enough, apparently, there was also weather near Newark.  In fact, the flight attendant told me, we’d almost gotten diverted to another airport.  As it was, we did land, a mere 32 minutes late.

Of course, I had a 35-minute layover scheduled.

And my flight to Montreal was apparently the only one in the entire airport that hadn’t been delayed.  I found this out when I called the elite help desk after we landed, telling the agent that I had less than five minutes to make my flight, if it was leaving on time.  It was.

And the only other flight that night, the 9 pm, had been cancelled.  So the soonest I could get out of Newark would be 9 am today.

I asked the agent if he could send a message to the gate, telling them that I’d be there in ten minutes.  He said he would, but warned me that they might not hold the plane, no matter what.  I promised to run.

And I did:  with my big pink briefcase over one shoulder and my laptop case over the other, and wearing my boots with the two-inch heels, I ran, from the middle of one concourse, down the connecting corridor, to the far end of the next concourse, and down the escalator to gate 115a.

Where the door was shut, and the agent was gone.

I looked sufficiently bewildered that a woman sitting nearby said “someone will be there in a minute.” “For Montreal?” I asked, pointing at the sign which indicated that the Montreal flight was leaving, like, now.

I ran over to the next gate, and got the agent’s attention, asking about the Montreal flight.  “Oh, that’s gone,” he said.

“Really?” I asked him, my desperation totally evident.  “Because they called to tell them I was coming.  And I ran.  And the last flight tonight is cancelled.” Gasping for air inbetween sentences.

And then a miracle occurred:  he picked up the phone.  Dialed some number.  Asked if Montreal was still there.  “I’ve got a runner,” he said.  And then led me over to the gate, where an agent had just re-opened the door.  He asked if I could still be gotten on the plane, and led me under the rope, down the jetway, and—amazingly—right to the still-open door of my still-waiting plane.

I thanked him profusely then, but want to do so once again:  god bless the gate agent at 114!

I plopped myself down in my seat, called R. to tell him I’d made the connection, if barely, and then proceeded to have the worst asthma attack I’ve ever had.  I don’t have asthma, at least not under normal circumstances.  But I spent the next hour-plus unable to stop coughing, and unable to catch my breath.

Aside from that, though, the flight went smoothly.  I had a little bit of bourbon—to soothe the throat and calm the nerves, you know—and a nice chat with the woman across the aisle.  And then we landed, and waited in the usual long passport control line, and headed into baggage claim.

Where, as you might expect, my suitcase did not greet me.  A very nice guy named George, though, who works for Northwest, was there, and he helped me with the paperwork.

My belongings caught up with me about an hour ago.  I spent all day today conducting interviews in the same jeans and t-shirt that I traveled in yesterday.  Now I can change my clothes, and even use the toiletries that I was able to save from TSA by checking my bag.