Too much traveling
Mar. 16th, 2005 | 05:10 am
Sitting in an exhausted heap at O'Hare in Chicago. Four hours sleep,
coming down with a cold, feeling crumpled. For the first time ever, I'm
traveling in sweats. At 4:00 a.m. I was lucky to get up and stagger into a warm
up suit and downstairs. It's been a long intense week and my feet hurt, my
throat is getting sore and I am beyond tired at this point. The conference went
well and I think I avoided getting myself into hot water this year. Last year
will live in infamy and become one of those corporate stories.
Last year I went with two raucous women from California
schools and one mouse from Oklahoma
to the infamous Howl at the Moon which is a dueling piano bar. This means it is
way too noisy and smoky and generally great fun. I was drinking martini's with
olives stuffed with blue cheese in them--dirty martini's, even worse. Things
were fine until about 2:00 am when we rolled out and hit the fresh air. I realized
I was beyond drunk and somehow staggered back to the hotel, up the elevator and
into the bathroom where I proceeded to puke for four hours until I had to take
a shower get dressed and try to get downstairs and present a topic to 100
people who weren't expecting a slightly green drunk person to show up. I lied
and told my boss I had food poisoning--like that worked. Somehow I got through
the day and then literally passed out in my room for three hours. From here
forward I only drink beer at conferences with clients--it's really hard to
drink enough beer to get so drunk you puke for four hours. The fact that you
have to pee every three minutes usually tips you off to stop taking fluid in.
That being said, last night I did recover enough to leave my womb-room at the Westin and trot forth
into the twenty nine degree night with Juanita from Loma Linda and Pam from Southern Oregon and Juanita's sister Carmen.
We were determined to have some sort of Chicago
experience before we went home, Pam had never been in the city before and had
been trapped for a whole week inside a hotel. We decided we wanted to ride the
El, too many episodes of ER I guess. We fumbled our way into the vestibule of
the station and it took a guard and a passenger assistant to help us find our
way to an E ticket ride on the El. I'm sure they thought we couldn't navigate
our way out of a wet sack, but between the four of us we managed to figure out
how to get four tickets from the vending machine, get them inserted right way
up after three tries, go down a flight of stairs and get the blue line and get off
at the first stop--Washington, go through the tunnel and then take the red
train--away from O'Hare and get off downtown at Howard. We managed to get up
and down stairs on the trains and emerge just two blocks off Michigan. The Magnificent Mile.
Foot pain had not set in yet so we trotted over to Borders and roamed around
for a bit looking for airplane reading--and I found a pink martini CD to listen
to--which is excellent by the way. We annoyed the guard on the Water Tower steps
and then flocked across the road to Marshall Fields. Emerging from the cold
into the perfume laden world of the up scale cosmetics counter I couldn't help
but grin to myself at the costumery of the thin white pretenders who were shilling the products. All of them wore a sneer and all black outfits. I
really fell in love with the blonde who had on skinny leather pants and Very
Interesting shoes. High heeled boots that had elastic tops that her pants
tucked into. Very weird and seriously tragically ugly. Found a new foo foo I
love too, Thierry Mugler's Angel. Nice smell, I got it on my scarf so I can still
smell it.
Upstairs the rubes stared at $98 Coach coin purses and Mahnolo Blahnik shoes
sold in a shoe atelier by a gay shoe fetishist. Before we left the store on the
second floor which dumped into the Water
Tower Place mall, I discovered a sales counter
that looked interesting. It was retailing pet stuff. Leashes, coats, collars.
$48 on sale? I think not. But, I did find an Italian dog coat that was just too
chic. Reflective silver vinyl with little zippered pockets on the back. I
suppose you could unzip them and stuff in a whole box of milk bones for your
dog to carry resulting in a really lumpy looking dog, or just admire the silver
zipper pulls in the shape of bones that are engraved with the word
"baby". The coat is made by friends of I can't remember but the label
is cool, full color with a picture of a Yorkie or something like on it.
I looked at the tag on the thing and saw it was originally $260.00. Yes, for a DOG coat. It was marked down to $25.97 and had had five intervening markdowns.
I peeled off the layers of tags to observe the coats slide from haute couture
to bargain basement. I had to have the coat for Nellie. Who could resist a $260
dog coat souvenir? I read the label when we got to the restaurant where we had
dinner. The damned coat is lined with cashmere. Yes. Cashmere.
When Nellie finds out she is wearing dog couture will she develop an attitude?
Demand nail polish? Massages? Refuse to be seen with ruffians like us? Who
knows?
