The Pause that Stresses

Oh, there's just so much that has happened overnight.

1. The Repub' talking heads did their thing yesterday. More Yada Yada, more brightly colored ties, more self aggrandizement by men who basically get their jollies pushing the buttons of power like a playpen full of three-year-olds with over-sized Speak and Says. For more info on the whole tragic mess, click here.

2. Pope Benedict XVI was nearly offed while riding in his Pope-Mobile in Vatican City yesterday. Yes, that's what the press actually calls it, the Pope-Mobile. Really, what happened was, a man jumped onto the back of it. The press assumes it was an assassination attempt, but perhaps the gent only wanted a ride?

However. I will comment no further on any of it.

Because in exactly 29 hours, 31 minutes, and a handful of seconds, I'm getting my ass on a plane with three other girlfriends for our annual trek to an outdoor adventure spa in southern Utah while S.B. stays home with Ivan.

And so I will spend much of today not only rushing to tidy up as much work-related loose ends as possible, not only trying to decide what to wear for dinner in Vegas tomorrow night (we're going to Tao! we're going to Tao!), not only making sure all the birds and bats and bees and flowers are well-tended to, but also trying to talk myself out of shaking in my space boots about the plane flight. Yes, I can hurl my body from the top of a mountain tethered to safety by one thin rope, two pieces of bent metal, and a twenty year old dude named Brent, but I cannot get myself calmly onto a plane.

Oh, I know all the you're-safer-flying-than-driving stats. I also know the solution. I tested it a few years ago during a flight from L.A. to Istanbul: one Ativan and a couple glasses red wine. Knocks me right out. Slept through the whole damn 12 hour flight with only the half murmurings of a couple Danes behind me to occasionally bust through the fog. (While we're on the subject, this is perhaps a good time to ponder a linguistic anomaly: why do the Swedes and the Norweigians speak with such a lovely sing-song intonation to their voices yet their Danish brethren to the not-so-distant south sound for all the world like they're reading off a laundry list with their mouths stuffed with Havarti? Discuss . . . )

However, I do not have any Ativan. And even if I did, my little ritual would do me absolutely no good because, party people, it's only an hour and something-something minutes from ABQ to LV. They would have to take me from the plane in a stretcher. And then the news would be all over it and in my fifteen minutes of fame, looking more groggy and disheveled than Lindsay Lohan on a good night, I would be accused some way, some how, of instigating a terrorist act and wouldn't get to have dinner at Tao.

And people say vacations are relaxing . . .