Photo by Camilo, taken Dec 30, 2003

I think I'm finally beginning to lose my thirst for business travel. It's just getting to be too much. I mean I haven't seen my therapist in almost seven months. Part of my new found distaste for business travel comes from the bad luck at being in New York for two of the coldest weeks in memory. Today, just walking the block from my hotel to the office was painful; each cruel blast of wind left you moaning and shuddering.

On two consecutive weeks, I've stayed in sister Sheraton hotels across 7th Avenue from one another, and in both hotels the service is characterized by the boastful marketing slogan of a "Service Promise" set against the reality of unfriendly, thoughtless incompetence. So it's with relief that I'm heading home to San Francisco this evening, that city of warmth, both physical and social.

I did get to see Chris, finally, on this trip. He braved the bitter cold on Tuesday evening to take the train in from New Jersey. We met in Chelsea (I was delighted to find that the E train stops right outside my hotel), and had dinner on 8th Avenue, followed by a drink at the G Lounge. Chris seems to have become something of a hermit since I left New York. I hope it's just a Winter thing. It reminded me of my years, quite recent, where I became a bit of a social recluse.

Each morning, I got up early for a tough workout at Golds, or today, at the New York Sports Club with my other New York friend Phoenix. At Golds, I worked out with my New York trainer Wendy, a tough, cheerful New Yorker fresh out of a disappointing relationship with another trainer at the gym, a six-foot-nine guy who eyes me with distrust every time he sees me with Wendy. When we were training early on Thursday morning, another black guy came up to Wendy and made small-talk. Later Wendy told me that the guy, Montell, kept inviting her to go snow boarding with him in Utah. I didn't immediately twig that it was Montell the talk show host. In fact, I'm not even sure I'd have recognized him if he'd said "and now a quick commercial break." Me and pop culture don't mix.

It's been tough, these two weeks in New York, to balance getting up early to go to the gym, working late, and getting enough sleep. I've usually had to short change my sleep, on top of sleeping badly on account of the time change. So I've been frequently tired and grumpy during the day. On Thursday night, I was kept up by my next door neighbor in the hotel, a flautist, practising her riffs until ten-thirty.

I'm not exactly sure why it was so screamingly necessary for me to be in New York this week, except for face-saving; to appease the chronic suspicions of our customer that we're not working hard enough. The only event that benefitted from my being in New York rather than in San Francisco was a two hour meeting this morning in which we went over some long-term stability problems in the software applications we're building. I often come out of meetings with upper level management feeling depressed, and today was no exception. It's an area I've made little progress in over the years; overcoming my fear of authority figures, I guess. In most technical meetings I throw my weight around, expressing my views forcefully, sometimes overwhelmingly so, coming from an absolute confidence that I know what I'm talking about. But put me in a room with people of authority and I revert again to the shy, unself-confident teenager who was berated for half an hour in front of a peer class by a sadistic music teacher.

I had a real scare at JFK tonight. When I checked in, I found that I had neither an exit row now a bulkhead seat. And despite all my efforts (calling American Airlines frequent flier program and my company's after-hours travel agent, and trying to persuade the gate agent to overlook rules and upgrade me two class to first, explaining to everybody how impossible it was for me to squeeze my 6'6 frame into a regular economy seat for six hours), the plane boarded while I stood at the gate still holding a boarding card for my nasty little seat. At the very last moment, when upgrades were being handed out to everybody but me, the agent found that a bulkhead seat had somehow opened up, and I breathed again. It's still a little cramped, but it's bearable. And I'm getting plied with free wine stolen from business-class by my saucy male flight attendant who recognized me from my flight into Dallas on Tuesday morning. Sometimes it pays to be tall and have a moderately pretty face.