It's 4:30 am and I am at the airport waiting to get on my flight to Denver. There was not a single person in the security line, and the only sound now is the humming of a vacuum cleaner in the distance. I got a little less than three hours of sleep last night, so hopefully I can snooze on the plane. I had every intention of going to bed early after my reading, but there I was drinking a martini and eating a steak at midnight.
I finally got my suitcase yesterday, about an hour before my reading, so I am wearing clean clothes now. Relief. I thought it would be funny to go to H & M and buy a totally inappropriate teenager outfit to wear, but I couldn't follow through. Just how funny would it be if you showed up to hear a 40-year-old author read, and then she was wearing a neon mid-riff sweatshirt and supertight pants with ankle boots? Maybe a side ponytail. Hey you guys! I'm a fun author with a new book out!
I realize more and more that I am obsessed with propriety. One of my brain's favorite activities is to think of what would be the absolute worst thing to do or say in a given situation. I'm sure that is somewhere on the OCD spectrum. Thank god, I have some impulse control. Like when I get to Denver this morning, I have 45 minutes after my plane lands to pick up a rental car and get to a TV station for a local morning show called Colorado & Company. A HUGE part of me wants to wear really bad pancake make-up and slur the whole time, pretending to be way more out of it than I really am. Stare off into space. Scratch a lot. I mean, that's what people want to see on TV. Or at least, that's what I would like to see. In a way, it crushes me to know that I am actually more concerned with coming off smart and funny than trying to sell some books. Oh well. Maybe when I am a senior citizen I can start acting on some of these fantasies.
UPDATE FROM DENVER:
Colorado and Company was awesome. I made it just in time and the man-and-lady hosting team was plenty chipper. There was a giant backdrop of the Rocky Mountains behind us and lots of ferns in shiny copper tubs on the set. The other guests were kittens from the SPCA and a sixty-ish lady doing push-ups named Coach Stacey. That's got to be a weird job, talking with strangers on TV all morning, but Denise and Mark are great at it.
Speaking of career choices, I meant to write the other day about how I met up for coffee with Ron Hogan of Galleycat and a woman named Gretchen Rubin who is writing a book about happiness and has a blog called The Happiness Project. Gretchen made a great point about how many people out there say stuff like, "I'm going to dentistry school because it's a decent career, but what I really love are flowers. I would love to open a flower shop someday." Or the lawyer who wants to be a baker, etc. My advertising copywriter brother just told me might want to be a butcher at some point. So many people say stuff like that that it doesn't strike me as weird when I hear it, but if you think about it in terms of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (a book I read and liked for my book) you should probably just go ahead and start doing the thing you really want to be doing.
More deep thoughts tomorrow.