Tonight We Fly

Well, tonight I'm flying back to the US. A weekend in New York, then driving to Chicago, then flying back to LA. I'm excited about eating tacos out of trucks, about apologizing if someone knocks me over, and about seeing my puppy (though that won't happen until Tuesday...).



Today I bought a newspaper. I walked by a group of 40-something year old men sitting outside of a shop chatting. One called out to me, "Hey, can I have the sports section?"

I figured I wasn't going to read it, so why not. I walked over to him, and he seemed a bit surprised when I started trying to pull the sports section out. Finally I managed to get it out, and he thanked me. He then asked if I liked music. I said, yeah, of course. He then pointed to a nearby CD shop and said that he owned said store, and then from now on I'm welcome to come in whenever I want and get a bit of a discount on a permanent basis, since I was such a nice person (at least according to this guy's standards!). We exchanged names, shook hands, and I was on my way.

I walked away smiling, and then I realized....FUUUUUUUUCK....I'm leaving.

It kinda made me think of a fable we read in elementary school, about a beggar man standing in the cold who is given a warm coat from a passerby...and it turns out the beggar man was actually Jesus, so the passerby gets to go to heaven or something. I don't really remember the finer points of the story.
Okay, so maybe I didn't get promised a place in Heaven, but a permanent discount on CD's isn't so bad!




Later I ended up drinking so much water that I knew I wasn't going to make it home. I decided to stop into a restroom in a hotel near my house, but the security guard stopped me. She asked if I was a guest, and I said no. She then asked why I was going in...

I didn't really want to admit I had to pee. First off because no self-respecting hotel would just let random people in off the streets to pee in their lobby, and second because it's just embarrassing to announce to strangers that you have to pee--really really really badly.

So I whipped out a trick from my mom's playbook. "Well, I'm a travel agent back in the states, and I'd really like to just take a look around the lobby." It's actually true when my mom says it, but I figured that since I grew up in the industry I could pull it off convincingly.

The guard looked surprised for a second, then offered to have the manager show me around. I thanked her but told her I didn't have much time (aka I was seriously about to pee my pants), so a quick look around the lobby would be just fine.

SUCCESS!!!!