Current Mood: calm
Current Music: It’s a shame about Ray – LEMONHEADS – Kitchen

Libby – Girl who lived in the same apartment complex I did, circa 1999-2000. She was a student at UT, and I met her one night coming home from playing foosball. There was a party by the apartment pool, and she was there and called me over, and we talked all night, and now we’re good friends. Libby lives in Massachusetts at the moment.

Hayley — Libby and Hayley were roommates back then. They both were by the pool. Libby is who I got to know first, but after we first met, we spent a great deal of time at each other’s apartments, so I know Hayley quite well also. Hayley still lives in Austin, and I see her occasionally.

So I’m in Boston. I’m sitting in my room at the Logan Airport Hilton — despite its name, it was the cheapest hotel I could find close to the T (aka subway). It’s a nice hotel, though — I cannot complain. The guy who checked me in had a French accent and kept calling me monsieur and saying oui and tres bien and stuff. My room — the cheapest room they offer, called a “single” — has not one, not two, but three chairs and two telephones, and the phones have two lines. The bed is enormous, and there is a nice corner window that offers a view of, well, of airport construction at the moment. It has a mini-bar, which is nothing unusual, but I decided I’d try a Tanqueray and Tonic since I’d never had one. I discovered that ice was called for, and I recalled seeing an ice machine on the way to my room. I realized this while standing by the mini-bar in my boxers and a t-shirt, my usual attire when at home. I was at the door to the hotel room, ice bucket in hand, when I decided that it would be inappropriate to get ice in my boxers in the Hilton, so I reluctantly donned a pair of pants. I’m now sipping on the T&T, and it’s pretty good, although my greatest joy is seeing the miniature bottles of liquor. I was joking with my friend Libby at dinner tonight (more on that later) about the mini-bar, which I had not yet checked out. I had noticed that a beer cost $4 or something like that, and I was hoping it would be a little tiny beer. Turns out it’s just a can of beer, which is bad enough for $4. But hey, it’s the Hilton, they probably pour gold dust in it or something. Or it speaks to you in a French accent and has three chairs.

Let me tell you about the exciting events of my day today. If you get bored, just hit page down.

I consulted my flight schedule and saw that I was flying out of Waco at 8:30am (flying out of Waco was much cheaper), and as Waco was around 100 miles way, I figured it would probably take me about 90 minutes to get there. So to be safe I figured 2.5 hours, and planned on leaving at 5am. So I did, and I got into Waco at 6:30am. I figured I had time for breakfast, so I stopped at IHOP (not a lot is open at 6:30am) and ate an omlette and read Lolita. As I walked back to my car at almost 7am, I thought “What if the flight times were Eastern time — that would mean I was an hour off!”. Now, I’ve flown a lot, and I know they always give flight times as local times, so I wasn’t really worried. But, I idly glanced over to the paper to make sure…

Arrive: Dallas 8:30am

What?!?!? I had mis-read it. It left Waco at 7:22am, and here I was, not at the airport yet, at 7am. I sped as fast as I could, and got to the airport by 7:08am. People were still just boarding my plane — whew! But wait! Despite my seeing the airplane right there (Waco’s airport is one room, two “terminals”), they wouldn’t let me on. I wasn’t there early enough. Some poor girl named Stephanie was in the same boat, evidently, and she had been there for at least ten minutes before I was. We both were booked on the next flight to Dallas, which would push my arrival in Boston back by a little over an hour. This shouldn’t matter, I figured, because the only hard-and-fast event I had planned in Boston was the Red Sox game at 7:05pm. Oh, and checking into the hotel, and traveling between these locations. My flight was still getting in at 3:30pm, so I was good. Anyway, the rest of the air travel story is not much worth relating, except a few tidbits:

– On the flight from Waco the flight attendant was reading off connecting flights in alphabetical order and read “Ontario, California” as one destination, in the midst of other California destinations. I suppose it is possible that there is an Ontario in California that you can fly to from Dallas, but I suspect she just saw Ontario, CA, and misread it. She didn’t correct herself, and I just smiled. This was hardly even worth mentioning.

– Stephanie and I talked a little while we were waiting in Waco, and a little bit longer in Dallas. Our connecting flights left from adjacent gates. so we walked over together. Turns out she’s going to be in Austin next Spring to hold an intern position at the Capitol. So she gave me her e-mail address, and maybe we’ll meet again, who knows? She was nice, we both missed a flight, maybe she and I will form a corporation together that will eventually control the world.

– Moments after I left Stephanie’s company to board my plane (her flight wasn’t for hours), I was kneeling by my bag, waiting for my boarding group to be called. Somehow a girl and I got talking (I honestly can’t remember how), and it turns out she was part of the group of people who decided that we should board by groups now, instead of by row number. She’s involved in a lot of airline decisions, it seems. I want to say she worked for Saber or Sabre or something like that. She just said it, and it sounded familiar, but then, when I was a kid I played the computer game Pirates a lot, and you fought with swords in it, and I think saber was one of the three swords you could use, although I always used the medium-sized sword, whose name I forget, although it may have been saber. So in conclusion, this girl is responsible for people being boarded by groups, and she confided in me that the airlines put people in group two whom they most wish to search, and otherwise the groups are just boarding by row number, thinly disguised. Take it for what it’s worth.

– Back in time to Waco, by which I do not mean that I, at some point today, traveled back in time to Waco. I mean that I forgot an event that happened in Waco and rather than go up and put it where it chronologically belongs in this narrative, I am going to write it here. I was waiting to go through security, idly looking through my carry-on bag (which holds my laptop, and other stuff). I hadn’t used this bag in ages, and I found a pocket I had forgotten about. In it, I discovered something that at first I couldn’t identify, but then figured out was one of those two-part, assemblable corkscrews. I don’t really want to go into great detail about what they are — suffice it to say that you could stab someone with a corkscrew, and I had no idea why I put it in there long ago, but I imagined the security people wouldn’t like it. I went through my options. I couldn’t carry it on my person, it would set off the metal detector. If left in the bag, the x-ray would see it. Then I realized it was a goddamn corkscrew, so I through it in the trash, rather than asking them to check it through to Boston.

Ok, so I get to Boston. I go to the hotel, check my e-mail with my laptop, call Libby (she is from Massachusetts, and is home for the time being) and we arranged to meet after the game, near Fenway Park. I called my mom to let her know I got in okay, and exchanged a volley of e-mails with Nat and Matt about the BBS and the softball game tonight (which I still do not know the outcome of). I took the T to the Red Sox game (they lost), and met up with Libby. It is good to see her — she is working as a receptionist/customer assistant at a psychic’s shop. And she is a college graduate. Evidently she makes only $7 an hour, but it’s all off the books, and she fell off a ladder the other day and got bruised. She is the only employee of the psychic who doesn’t believe in the psychic, and the psychic thinks she (Libby) and her boyfriend (Matt — interestingly, Hayley’s boyfriend is also named Matt, and so is my brother) have bad energy. Oh, and she’s an Aries and he is a Capricorn. So yeah.

I still haven’t finished my T&T. Evidently not as good as I thought, although I am not disliking it. Evidently not really a drink you drink fast. The ice has melted, though.

A lot of other amusing stuff happened today, I am sure, but I’ve already typed what must be a million pages at least, so fuck it. I like being on vacation, on my own, in a city I barely know. I want to live in a hotel. Maybe I can live in this very Hilton. That would be fabulous.