must have used up all of my travel karma, because yesterday’s trip from new york to san diego could have gone much smoother. first of all, who doesn’t even give a bag of peanuts or pretzels on a 6 hour flight? (american airlines, that’s who) that’s longer than the flight to heathrow, people. my bag almost didn’t make it on my flight, since american airlines hid all of their self-check-in kiosks in the back when they closed terminal 9 at jfk and squeezed everything into terminal 8, so i stood in the ticketing line for 40 minutes just to check in with my e-ticket and check one bag. fortunately my bag ended up on my plane, because my plane ended up landing at lax due to fog or some such nonsense, so i ended up on a bus to the san diego airport for over two hours with an overly chipper driver who liked his perky music LOUD and a bunch of passengers who thought that this would be the perfect time to carry on conversations with their friends at the other end of the bus (low blood sugar + jetlag = grrrrr…). fortunately, my seat mate was a nice quiet young woman reading “getting things done” who in no way interfered with my struggle between passing out and exploding in a frustrated rage. in the end, tom waits saved the day (doesn’t he always?).

so here’s how jetlag is setting in today: while watching the sunday morning news magazine shows, a cadillac commercial came on that uses hum’s “stars” (from ‘you’d prefer an astronaut,’ the album that gave me the tattoo on my left arm), so i wikipedia’ed hum, started looking at side projects, and ended up raiding the iTunes music store and the amazon .mp3 store for all of the drm-free national skyline that i could find. not exactly how that commercial was supposed to work, but my neural pathways grabbed on to the “buy something” message and ran with it.

god i would kill for a good cup of coffee right now.