7/27/99  Flying home from my first business trip - Dulles, Virginia.

    There's something about sitting in a plane that finally makes you want to write, even when you haven't in weeks and hate doing it longhand and you have that half-sleepy late afternoon feeling--head groggy, ears popping, dehydrated, cramped, and with AC blowing right on your feet, so that you're trying to put your feet up, when there's nothing to put them up on, and you have to keep your stomach muscles contracted to keep them suspended in midair.

    Yesterday we ate at a restaurant...80^o humidity right in front of a public bus stop and the setting sun direct in your eyes...and of course they want an outdoor table.  K. left for a few minutes to make one of her every-other-minute cellphone calls, and H. started to ask me the dreaded career/education questions.  I haven't answered those in so long (so long meaning 1-2 months, maybe) that my usual rehearsed answers came out in shuffled order, and she smirked as if to say, You don't know what the hell you want to do.  Vocalized more or less when K. returned and chatted about her wayward sister and H. added, "Grace is still finding herself also."  They twittered charmingly.

    As we left, they two walked ahead and L. and I behind.  He asked where I'd gone to school and I asked in turn, and it was a logical step to make to ask how he ended up doing this, but as I was about to say it I killed it, because I didn't care.   I was only going to ask because it was the logical step, but it didn't matter to me how he came and I'm sure he knew, and here he was now and that was all that mattered, right now, in terms of where he stood in relation to me, his coworker.  The humidity had died and so had the conversation...

    This morning the assistant VP at the meeting was so hot that every menial thing he asked me to do (for all of maybe 3 times) was momentous, like what was wrong with the CD-Roms, and did I have the extra disks.  But I loved the way he said my name, and all I could think were 2 things:  how hot he was, and how much I wanted to go home to see my boyfriend so I could get my mind off this assistant VP. 

    Outside the land plots look like those makeup trays of shadow and rouge...and that makes you wonder what kind of person you are, when the first thing you think when you see the land is that it resembles a cosmetic tray...