I'm here in Newport Beach on a three-day retreat with all the staff from the "Western Region", an area defined by my company to include California, Washington State and Oregon. This is my second business trip in two weeks, and I'm not too thrilled about either of them. Last week, I spent an absolutely miserable few days in our headquarters in the south for training. It's hard to say, really, why I was so miserable during that particular trip, since it was really no different from any of the other training trips I've been on. Sure, it meant spending three days away from home, in a classroom with people I barely know. Yes, the weather was cold, and definitely I'm past the point where I get much pleasure from hotel room-service. But none of that was sufficiently out of the way to lead to the level of discontent I felt on this trip.

Maybe travel to places like our headquarters in the south is just becoming so routine that it's no longer inspiring in me the pleasures of a stimulating break. It has always been in the past that I've found something to get excited about and interested in even in the least promising surroundings. Like the week I spent in Arkansas, earlier this year. But this time, I felt a kind of dull, resigned blankness the whole time. My spirits only began to rise during the long trip home - a trip which took me through a snowy Chicago close to Midnight, and finally back home to San Francisco at two in the morning.

This current trip I'm on is a kind of drawn out celebration of the 2000 sales year, and a pep-talk for 2001. I just spent a day listening to sales success stories, sales strategy ideas, and bad jokes. At the end of each day, we're asked to recount our "key take-aways" (I groan again at the jargon), and throughout the three days, we're put through little team-building exercises meant to solidify our corporate spirit. I'm definitely living up to my assigned role of "resident cynic" - I'm not a "team player", I'm afraid. This evening, everybody trooped off to a dinner, and I skipped out so that I could work out instead.

What else do I have to tell you? Not much, really. Oh yeah, apparently I was on CNN Headline News the other day. On Friday, when Gore won a brief moment of promise from the Florida Supreme Court, I headed quickly (and somewhat breathlessly) home so that I could watch events unfold on CNN. (Oops, hold on a minute, room-service is at the door!) Okay, now, as I was saying, I was heading home and was waylaid by a woman with a microphone and a man with a whopping big video camera. She waved a print-out of the CNN.COM main page in my face, as if that was some sort of formal identification, and asked me if I'd heard the news. So I blurted out that I'd been listening to CNN all day! That seemed to impress them no end. Unfortunately, I didn't do so well with the other questions - in fact, I don't even remember what it was I babbled on about. I've always been kind of nervous when I'm put on the spot, or asked to speak in public. I know that after my first answer, the reporter kind of looked at me as if expecting me to say a punch-line. The whole thing felt horribly embarrassing to me as I left. And I'd not taken the chance to ask for the autograph of dishy Bill Hemmer (their gorgeous man on the scene in Tallahassee), nor even of Greta van Satchern (not sure of the spelling there), whom I like for other reasons. So I was mightily surprised to get emails on Saturday from a couple of people who'd seen me on Headline News that morning. Unfortunately, by then, events had moved on, and the news of Gore's triumph of the previous day was old news, which meant that my profound babbling was now too stale to use again. My five seconds of fame, and I don't even have a tape of it!

My only other news to report, really, is the lack of news about my career-search. To be honest, I've been through a very difficult patch the last few months. I've been very short of energy, and intermittently depressed, and I've not made much progress on many of my long-term goals. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, my kindly old doctor (a wizzened, silver-haired old man who looks not unlike Warren Christopher), prescribed Prozac as a means of dealing with both the fatigue and the depression. And it's had an immediate and dramatic effect on my energy levels. For the first time in weeks, I'm feeling strong at the gym again, and running my full five miles. So I feel I've passed over a bit of a hump, and I'm starting to feel optimistic about 2001. I've arrived at a kind of interim career goal of searching for a new software-development job in a company or organization which I feel is making a difference in the world. So I've polished my resume, and send it out there, winging its way from personnel departments to HR desks in cyberspace.

Just twelve days now until my birthday. And on that very day, I fly to Washington D.C. for a week's vacation. I hope to be doing lots of writing and photography while I'm there, so you should hear from me daily during that time. Hope there's lots of snow, since it would make for some teriffic photos!