Abducted by aliens

[Fairmont Fountain, San Jose; 9/26/08]

It's been an intense week. Monday afternoon, I flew to New Jersey with some colleagues to deliver a sales pitch the next morning to a potential client, and flew back late Tuesday. Wednesday afternoon and all day today, we were in a presentation skills workshop, which was very helpful but exhausting.

I volunteered to go out on some pitches for the self-serving reason that I need to break up the routine of sitting in front of a computer screen and writing client training materials 7.5 hours a day every single day of the week, week after week, month after month. I've done it for 2 1/2 years and, while I still find a lot of the work interesting, especially when I'm getting to be creative, there are days when I just want someone to shoot me if I have to spend one more hour plugging away at it.

So I'm shaking things up, breaking the routine, traveling (woo hoo, Newark!), leaving my cozy office of introverts every once in awhile to go out on an extroverted limb with the sales team. Oddly, and happily, our administrator never books us into adjoining airline seats, so "air" time is free time, and I write in my journal. No matter how short the flight, being up in the air elevates my imagination. It must be the perspective, being lifted up above my everyday pedestrian view and seeing things from that supernal vantage point, like a small child hoisted on her father's shoulders in a crowd. I'm transported somewhere else, even if afterwards I'm dropped unceremoniously in New Jersey like the characters in Being John Malkovich.

It's exhausting - the intermittent sleep in a hotel room with the blower going all night, too warm, too cool, no blankets and thus the choice of thin sheet or stifling comforter, etc. There's also the anxiety-producing need to practice and then to perform. But there's also an all-expenses paid dinner out, frequently good. And the prospect of something other than the cubicle walls to look at - the unexpected lurking round any corner.

[San Jose, 9/26/98, on a rare business trip not involving New Jersey]

Comments

[Jillaurie]

I have the same experience flying. Have done some great writing in the air. I thought it had to do with being in a liminal inbetween state, neither here or there. Well the clouds are great too!

[Relatively Retiring]

It sounds wonderfully stimulating. Good luck with it all. I love the photo.

[Hg]

Yeah, I feel the same about flying. A recent Postal Poetry submission of mine with the puntastic title of A Higher Plane covered broadly similar ground.

In fact, any form of transport where I'm not actively in charge is fine by me. Some of my clients find it funny that I'd rather do a two hour train journey than a one hour car drive, but for me one is a pleasure and the other is a pain.

[leslee]

Thanks, all. Airline flying is an in-between state, plus the sense of seeing life below from that altered, detached state. Trains are great, too, but I travel on them rarely.