I should just wear a bell collar the night before I have to go anywhere early in the morning.

Today, I had to leave from Santa Cruz at around 4:15 in the morning, which means I got up to get in the shower at 3:30. But as some of you might be aware, on nights like last night not only do I wake up every hour convinced that I’ve slept through my alarm, but I also sometimes look at my clock and somehow lose all sense of reason. I almost got into the shower at midnight, thinking it was time for me to get ready to go. (I’ve done this in the past. I tried to go to crew practice at 2 a.m. once instead of 5, etc.) It’s not quite sleepwalking, but it is a certain kind of madness. Oh, well. When I realized it (towel in hand, turning on the light in the bathroom), at least my dazed self could still see the humor. “Oh, for ****s sake!” I said to myself. I laughed, and crawled back into bed.

And so I’m on my way! I considered telling the people at the Peet’s coffee in the terminal (when they were trying to be all friendly to me) that I was a mathematician – when can you start saying that? I feel like a BA is too early, though I have that now. I’m done with my BA! Still a crazy thought. Anywho, I thought it would be funny to tell them I was a mathematician just to see how they would react. I didn’t – but someday, I will.

Do you occasionally give a different name at Starbucks? Do you make up stories about where you started your day? One time, at least two years ago, I was in the San Francisco airport waiting for a flight to Germany and a young man started talking to me and in temporary insanity brought on by cooped-upness in an airport, I pretended I was German and, if I do say so myself, charmed him for about fifteen minutes with accented conversation and got him to cheesily say ‘auf Wiedersehen’ to me as he went to get on his own flight. Alas, such tomfoolery did not take place this morning. Just in my head.

And I’m flying somewhere I’ve never been before! Well, I have to connect in Minneapolis, which is a place I’ve been, but I’m going to end up in Milwaukee. I know nothing about Milwaukee except that a certain person resides there – a certain fellow who was a cook where I was a waitress and who is currently studying gravitational physics at graduate school there. One of my dearest friends. I haven’t seen him in at least a year and am looking forward to a weekend of nerdiness, sciency-beauty, and general catching-up. We’re boarding now. See ya!