Here I am in our headquarters in the south again, in my favorite Embassy Suites. I arrived late last night after a smooth journey noteable only for the big-haired Dallas flight attendant who looked like she'd recently received a large electric shock, and the argument I had with my seat neighbor when he started making cell-phone calls while the plane was still taxiing. I didn't want my death on his conscience, so I reminded him that it was against the rules, and that he was endangering us all, to which he replied with a significant look that said "f... you". A fairly typical example of a certain type of passenger you encounter in first-class, believing that rules apply to everybody except their own royal butts.

Jeez, how I slept last night. The shuttle for the morning's big meeting was departing at seven (are they crazy or what?), and I was still snoring 90 minutes past that time. I simpered into the meeting at around 10.00, and, since there were several thousand others in the meeting, nobody noticed. So I listened to a couple of hours of corporate blah-blah about who moved the cheese, before deciding I'd had enough and calling it a day. Unfortunately, I won't be able to get out of the smaller meetings on Wednesday and Thursday, since we have tickets with our darned names on them, which, presumably, will be collected and made note of.

But I did take advantage of my freedom this afternoon, and ran on the treadmill for forty minutes, had a tough workout at our gym, and then drove into town to pick up a new book at Barnes & Nobles.

From time to time, when I travel alone, I find that I lose touch a little bit with my personality - I suppose this is called "feeling uncentered" in California. The strangeness of my surroundings, or rather the lack of familiarity, can cause me to revert somewhat to the blankness I felt in my teens and early twenties; at that time of my life I would routinely write in my diary that I didn't have any clue who I was. I think that this lack of external personality came mainly from the enormous supression I put myself through to hide my sexuality. At any event, I found later, to the amazement of both myself and my closest friends, that when I finally came out of the closet in my early twenties, my personality blossomed, and unfolded like a squashed, crumpled, yet still-alive flower, and I started to show a real person to the outside world.