After several days of mingled stress, anxiety, excitement and sadness, I'm finally calm again, on my way to New York City for a few months. I've been strangely out of sorts since getting back from my midweek trip to New York - in fact, I haven't even been able to work out. I tried on Saturday afternoon, but didn't do more than one set of shoulder presses at the gym before I realized I just couldn't concentrate.

It has been very hard to figure out how to pack. Four months is a long time to be away from home. In the end I settled on two suitcases, a large cardboard box, my backpack and my briefcase. I was pretty much all packed by Saturday night, which left me enough leisure time on Sunday to have a physical training session with Cecilia, and see a movie with Brett, "Raising Victor Vargas", a wonderfully sure-footed intimate indie.

Sunday evening, I spent enjoying my apartment for the last time. I love the cushioned, L-shaped bench seat that wraps around four windows in the corner of my living-room. I like to lie there reading, feeling the sun shine in during the day, and hearing almost nothing (assuming my noisy upstairs neighbor isn't at home stomping around on my ceiling) except the tree limbs rubbing up against the deck outside.

Last night, I lay back with a glass of sherry, listening to Mahler's 4th, reading "Master of the Senate". Every now and then my eyes looked around my comfortable living room, with lamps shining on books and paintings, it felt so cosy.

"Master of the Senate" is an amazing book, which documents the equally amazing Senate career of Lyndon Johnson. He was an utter pig: urinating in public, belittling poor Lady Bird in front of house guests, lying and stealing his way to power. At the same time he was an unparalleled political genius. For instance, the way he managed the Bricker Amendment, which was an effort by conservative Republicans to reign in the executive power of the Presidency. He couldn't appear to be against the movement to restrict executive power, because his financial backers were suppporters of that movement. Yet, since he had his own eyes on the Presidency, the last thing he wanted to do was to curtail the powers of the office. Moreover, he wanted to set his Democratic Party on the way to regaining the majority in Congress, and also take the lion's share of the credit for doing so. The sitting Republican President, Eisenhower, was, naturally, against the Amendment, so Johnson decided on an intricate plan of getting another Senator to sponsor a rival, weaker amendment (this would show his financial backers that he was in favor of restraining the Executive Branch). His goal was to have the weaker amendment gain a substantial enough majority so that the sponsoring senator (whose future support he needed) would not be embarrassed, while just failing to gain the necessary two-thirds majority to pass. And he accomplished every one of his goals, with the weaker amendment falling one vote shy of passing. And, of course, the original amendment failed more ignominiously since a lot of its supporters moved to support the weaker amendment. With this magnificent, nimble feat of political manipulation, he'd split the Republican Party, allied his own party with a popular Republican president, retained the strong powers for the Presidency, and cemented his own powers as Minority Leader.

On Saturday evening, I went to my first ever wedding. What an odd year this is proving to be: my first funeral, my first wedding, moving to New York, and several visits to the emergency room. Anyway, the wedding (of one of my oldest friends, James) took place on a hillside overlooking beautiful Portola Valley, about thirty miles South of San Francisco. Despite having never attended a wedding before, the ritual is obviously extremely familiar from movies and television. Yet hearing the words in reality, words that applied to a very good friend of mine for whom I have a lot of respect and affection, it was surprisingly touching. Phrases like "will you honor" and "forsaking all others" became suddenly meaningful. I wasn't quite dabbing a handkerchief to my eyes, but I now understood those that did.

I'd come to the wedding by myself (my one straight female friend was unavailable, and Brett turned his nose up at attending such a straight affair), and didn't know many of the attendees. Of course, almost everybody was there as a couple, so I was one of the spare wheels. This was only a problem during the interval between the ceremony and dinner, when I wandered around the grounds, cocktail in hand, friendly smile fixed to may face, trying not to look as isolated as I felt. Mental note: next time you're invited to a wedding, don't go alone, even if you have to pay somebody to go with you.

This morning I was up at 5.30 rushing around getting ready before my limo arrived. But the limo - one of those ridiculous, white stretch-limos - arrived ten minutes early, and I felt an extra pressure to hurry up. More stress. At the airport, I had to somehow manage to load my two large suitcases and the big box onto a tiny luggage trolley, and push past the jostling crowds into the chaos of the ticketing hall. I'm able to use the Business/First-Class line because I'm a gold card AAdvantage flyer, but even that line was unusually long, and slow-moving. By the time I'd checked my bags and box, paid the excess baggage fees, and passed through the long security line, my plane was already almost fully boarded. I dashed forward to present my ticket, and the ticket-check machine beeped and flashed "Validate Seat". I was told to report to the desk near the gate. The snooty desk agent presented me a different boarding pass, while complaining "Your name was announced fifteen minutes ago!" I was about to give him a snippy response when I saw the magic words on my new boarding pass: "Business Class". I'd been upgraded at the last minute!

The last few days have been so stressful that I truly haven't been able to look forward to living in New York. In fact, I've been surprised how dispondent I've been feeling after the initial excitement wore off. I can only ascribe it to anxiety over living in a new city where I hardly know anybody, and where I'll have to learn a whole set of new routines. Even so, I'd have expected that the excitement would have won over the fear. But now, sitting in my Business Class seat, I'm finally feeling the excitement again. I'll get to New York around 4.30, and apparently, it's a beautiful, low-humidity day in New York. I'm planning on going running in Central Park (Central Park South is only three blocks from my apartment) as my first activity as a "Nyorker"