I thought I was lucky when I got on the cleared list for standby for an early flight back to New York this afternoon… until we approached the vicinity of LaGuardia Airport and the pilot announces that the weather is too tumultuous to land. Granted, the same thing happened to me yesterday en route to Chicago when we landed in Detroit, but this time, we were headed to Syracuse… and THEN to Buffalo because when we arrived in Syracuse, the storm clouds quickly got there, too. After a very turbulent flight, we landed in Buffalo and stayed there on the plane for over an hour. We eventually got back to New York, just over three hours after the scheduled time. And again, I have no one waiting for me, and no one checking up on me to see if I’m okay.

Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to really not have anyone at all that you care about who cares about you. Then, if you were to go missing, either on the streets of your city or on a train or in a plane, what happens then? Who’s your emergency contact to list – no one? Who is supposed to claim your body if you die? I guess in those cases, you just get buried, un-embalmed, in an unmarked grave with an unmarked stone in a barely identifiable cemetery. I wonder what it feels like to be that alone, that lonely.

It’s just my luck. I made it out to Chicago (after getting my plane diverted to Detroit for weather reasons) and there are thunder storms here. When I get to my hotel room and push aside the curtains in an attempt to see my glorious view of Lake Michigan and the Navy Pier, instead, all I see is mass fog. There goes my idyllic ideas of strolling down to Millennium Park in the early evening to get photos of Bart with the Bean and Buckingham Fountain.

Chris is out in San Francisco, where the temperature in Fahrenheit will hit 90 tomorrow, and I’m in a city I love at one of the worst possible times. He’s happy and relaxed, and I am tense and irritated… and alone. He says he feels like he’s gotten that feeling back about why he loves San Francisco; I am sure it’s because he’s a) not staying at my parents’ place, which is full of tension and negative energy, b) the weather is incredible (and abnormal), and c) he’s visiting all the glamorous parts of the city I never take him to when he comes to visit my family. There’s nothing glamorous about the Richmond District. All the above makes a big difference when you are in a city deciding whether you like it or hate it.

I have no one here to see, so I have dinner by myself at a nearby Italian restaurant at their bar, watching other people converse and congregate. It’s funny how weather can affect one’s mood so much. I just want to go home.

Though many who know me would say I’m very vocal and outspoken, especially when I am displeased, the truth is that I actually feel very awkward and unsettled when it actually comes to confrontation. Nothing makes me feel more squirmish or red-faced than trying to express dissatisfaction and anger with someone. And with a voice like mine, I rarely come off as sounding commanding and aggressive; I usually end up sounding far more mild and girlish than intended. I stayed at the W Hotel in Midtown Atlanta the last several days, and I didn’t really feel like it was up to the same standard as the Ws I have seen and stayed at before. So instead of asking to speak with the manager after I checked out yesterday, I went home last night and wrote the GM an e-mail complaint.

I received a cookie-cutter response to my feedback e-mail and felt pretty pissed this morning, so I sent another e-mail to this non-response and told them that it was ridiculous that they would send me what sounded like an auto-reply that had absolutely no thought, nor any offer of compensation, when I am an SPG member paying a pretty penny for my stay and future stays. So then I got a really apologetic response, plus an offer for bonus points, plus an offer to be handled completely by the GM from the point of my next booking to my departure.

Sometimes, it’s really worth it to suck up my red face and complain.

Today, I arrived in Atlanta for another work trip. I’ll be here until Tuesday meeting clients, so I set some time up to meet with an old high school classmate who is down here getting his MBA at Emory. This classmate and I talked on and off throughout high school, and other than Facebook, we never really kept in touch since then. The last time I was here a month ago, I posted a photo of Atlanta skyscrapers, which prompted him to message me on Facebook and ask to catch up.

He was just as quirky and awkward as I remembered him to be, except now that we are adults, the awkwardness comes in around conversation topics that I don’t really embrace, like “when are you getting married?” and “by the way, most of the girls around your age are already married!” He told me he dated someone for five years to eventually break up with her. She was indirectly pressuring him to get married; he did not have marriage anywhere on his radar. This is why men suck.

Believe it or not, though, it was still a good meeting and dinner.

…Especially after they have filed theirs and you think something may be wrong with their filing. It’s better to let the IRS tell them that they will get audited rather than you tell them that they could be wrong. Remember – parents are always right, and their children are always wrong.

Planning the next vacation with my parents probably isn’t the best thing when my dad is calling me now, nitpicking at all the little things that happened during the last trip that he didn’t like. The one that is one of the most ridiculous is the black car service that was parked outside our hotel, and my dad walked up to him to ask how much a trip to the airport would be. $27, the guy responds. Obviously, it’s not going to be a deal; it’s a black car service! The trip we ended up taking via a regular yellow cab was $15. I’ve heard this about ten times since it happened, and will very likely hear about it again in the next week. “Remember when…” Yes, I remember. Now, can we stop rehashing something so pointless?

Was this a highlight of our trip? Of course not. But it’s something he wants to complain about as much as possible.

I think I am going through one of those phases again when I feel disconnected from the world. It doesn’t help that the day started out gloomy, and I’ve been waking up to a persisting soreness on the left side of my jaw. This is what happens when you grind your teeth, even with a mouth guard.

Then my friend sent me this article about the crossroads of “should” and “must.” Then I felt even worse. What if your job = your career = your calling? Is my calling to work in ad technology? Was it my calling to have spent over four years working at a digital agency, or nine months at a technology company before that? Maybe most of my life has been spent doing “should” and only very recently I’ve really started on the “must” – as in traveling or photographing because I love those things. Or maybe I don’t really know what my “must” is that could be my career.

I came back to work today feeling sluggish and in withdrawal. I tend to get like this when I have traveled somewhere I really enjoyed and realize that I have to return to my daily grind at work, which is never anywhere as exciting. I only told two people on my team I was going to the Grand Canyon with my parents prior to leaving. When we had our Monday morning team meeting, I told the rest of them I went. They seemed more excited that my fellow colleague saw Captain America than the fact that I traveled to one of the greatest wonders of the world. This is my world five days a week.

So my friend’s birthday was yesterday, and I decided to surprise her by having a cheery spring bouquet of ranunculus flowers sent to her office as a belated birthday gift using this awesome flower delivery tech startup I found out about through Chris (via a flower delivery he had arranged for me, which produced the freshest, longest lasting flowers I’ve ever had). Me being me, I wanted it to be a surprise, so instead of double checking what her office address was, I looked it up online and chose the second address I found and had it sent there.

Then I found out that Amazon.com, her employer, has numerous office buildings all over Seattle – not just on the Amazon campus. And well, the address I chose was NOT on the Amazon campus. Actually, it ended up being a 20-minute drive away from her actual building!

The flowers eventually did get to her (and still looked quite fresh), as someone had the package redirected to her building after I told her what had happened. I was intently tracking the delivery, and as soon as I got the FedEx notification it was delivered, I was waiting for her to message me. But she never did. And my gut told me something was wrong.

It’s funny how a delivery like this didn’t work out the way I had hoped, but when I had a birthday cake delivered to another friend in Singapore – halfway across the world – that worked out perfectly.

Who gets on a plane and listens to a book about all the sky jackings that have happened in the history of the U.S.? I do.

I finally finished reading Winter of the World, which I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms for (that may be my masochistic side since I learned a lot of horrible details about World War II that I certainly did not learn in my U.S. history courses throughout school. Boy, is our U.S. education system crappy and too pro-American), and I just started listening to Brendan Koerner’s The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking. The book discusses the history of hijacking planes in the U.S. and in other parts of the world, the stupidity of the U.S. government in their reactions (or lack thereof) in trying to regulate this, and the even deeper stupidity of the airlines in not wanting to deal with it even after people had gotten murdered. One example: most of these hijackers just wanted the pilot to transport them to some other city (the favorite example is Havana, Cuba). All of them were carrying bombs, firearms, or both. The airlines didn’t believe these people would actually kill anyone. Really? Then, people start dying, and it suddenly dawns on them that people dying is a possibility from the sky jacking.

After the Malaysia Airlines plane went missing (and today, we still have no clue where it really is), a slight paranoia went through my head about a potential plane hijacking that could have happened here. Then, I started reading hypotheses from former pilots about possible disasters and how the pilot would’ve most likely reacted, and it started to make more sense to me.

However, I’m not sure what I should be more paranoid about – a potential hijacking on a plane a loved one or I may be on, or a freak accident like this one seems to be with the plane going on fire, and then the plane going into cruise control and crashing into the South Indian Ocean.