I am the all singing, all dancing Crap of the World!

Howdy. Its 2:00 in the morning and I can’t sleep. Been trying for a couple hours. Aargh. My insomnia is most likely the result of the four-hour nap I took this afternoon. I took a four-hour nap this afternoon because I hardly slept at all last night. I hardly slept at all last night because I had to catch a 6:18 a.m. flight from Kansas City to Buffalo, which meant leaving the house at 4:30. I’ve never felt so much like Edward Norton’s character in “Fight Club.”

I got to spend a long weekend in KC due to my plane getting a new exhaust pipe. We were having trouble with the engine exhaust distorting the photographs, so they slapped a big ugly pipe to the side of my plane to carry the hot gases aft of the cameras. The work had to be done at our home base in Batavia, NY (between Rochester and Buffalo), so I flew up here from DC Thursday morning. I had been told to expect to go back to DC on Friday. When I landed, however, I found out that it would be Monday before the work was finished. I booked an evening flight out of Buffalo and was having a beer with old friends by midnight. Felt great to be home.

As I sat in the terminal in Cincinnati, waiting to board my flight to Kansas City, I had the strange realization that I this was the first place in three months where I could have known one of the strangers in the crowd. Or that one of them could have known me. They didn't.

“Have I dated that girl?”

I hadn't.

I suddenly remembered one of the impetuses for my taking this job and wanting to get away for a while. It had to do with expectations held by people who are close to me and have known me for ages; expectations of who I am, my personality, my beliefs, my character, my capabilities. Surrounded by friends and family, its easy for one to convince himself that change is impossible, because he has so many voices correcting him if he ever tries to stray from the mold of assumed continuity of being.

I’m finally tired. To sum up, I didn’t think too much about the feeling in Cincinnati after I got home. I had a great weekend in KC. Partied like a rock star. Time to turn into Brad Pitt.