Deep Sighs and Eye Rolls in Toronto's Pearson

Backstory: two days of meetings with reluctant Canadians. Readers, your beloved American corporate traveling blogger is pooped to the poop.

I am in Toronto Pearson. I arrived four hours before my flight was to take off. I was second on the standby list for the earlier flight. The AA gate lady said "You just have to wait." So I waited with two other weary, hopeful would-be stand by flyers. The AA gate lady kept taking calls and discussing the dire situation of some guaranteed flyers with a delayed connection. She kept repeating: "I don't think they're going to make it." Hope reared up in the chests of three weary travelers.

Right before the door closed, one of the three of us waiting got standby. She told the other two of us "Sorry. It's full now."

Oh my god, AA Lady! What sick games are you playing?! There was only ever one seat remaining? Your "they're" on the calls referenced one person not a few, And I don't think you were being respectful of a gender non-binary passenger. I think you were fucking with us! Evil woman!

You held our dreams of an early arrival in the palm of your hand and you toyed with us!

Respect.

So I wandered through Duty-Free. Here's the thing about brief work trips to Canada. You get all the little inconveniences of being in another country (your money don't work, your cell phone don't work), but it doesn't feel any different than any other Anywheresville, (North) America. Sure, there's an occasional "aboat." But mostly, we're cut from the same cloth.

This is probably deeply offensive to Canadians. I would apologize only I didn't make the earlier flight and am not feeling inclined to regional sensitivity.

So I wondered through Duty-Free where I learned that my math skills are not equal to the task of combatting sticker-shock at Canadian prices. You want SEVENTY dollars for that?! I know it's only *clicks tab to google currency converter* $51 in my money, but it sounds like SEVENTY DOLLARS!

So then I wandered to a bar (shocking) where I learned that at Toronto's Pearson the only bourbon you can get is Knob Creek (YOU WANT $24 for one double bourbon!!).  Which was better than in the terrible Hilton Garden Inn in Vaughan, OT, where they only had Maker's Mark and did not even have the good manners to feel bad about that. Maker's Mark is terrible fucking bourbon and if you drink it you should feel bad about yourself. I said it. Fight me. Go to the island of people who buy overpriced bad booze and hang out with a bunch of senselessly smug Grey Goose drinkers.

So I sat at this bar and ordered a Knob Creek (double. Don't judge me. I DIDN'T GET ON THE EARLIER FLIGHT!) and a glass of ice water. The 60-something lady bartender returned with the bourbon but not the iced water and I said "Can I get that iced water?" And she engaged in the world's most inadvertent deep sigh and eyeroll and said "I know. I'm just getting it."

Did I get my dander up?! You bet I did! I (silently... never piss off the bartender) got my dander up and engaged in an internal diatribe railing against that inadvertent deep sigh and eyeroll.

Dander determinedly still up, I decided that since I had all this time to kill, I should probably do some work*. I opened my laptop, logged onto a VPN and then an RDP session at which point a Windows OS had the rank AUDACITY to ask me for a password.

Obviously, I let loose a deep sigh and an inadvertent eyeroll.

And now I feel a deep kinship with this bartender.

The world is fucking exhausting and people (and operating systems) are always requiring us to be polite in the face of dumb things and we really all just deserve to sit on comfortable couches and watch endless reruns of Schitt's Creek while drinking lovely cocktails and, I don't know, probably snuggling a cat or a cute little dog or something and instead we just have to keep smiling through all this nonsense!

I really thought I'd slide into the second half of my life as a lady who offered wisdom and kindness.  I pictured myself a disseminator of pearls of wisdom, hugs and auntuncular (THERE IS NO FEMALE EQUIVALENT TO AVUNCULAR GODDAMMIT PATRIARCHY!) enthusiasm. I may still be that lady.

But I cannot stop myself from the deep sighs and the eyerolls. I have earned them.

Also, Woodford Reserve which should be available at every airport bar in North America!

Goddammit, Toronto's Pearson!

*I did not do any work. Instead I wrote in this dumb blog. It's way more fun.

David Byrne Thinks I'm Doing Fine, right?

I have a pretty good job. I work from home which means the days when I wear a bra are outnumbered by the days when I do not, which is amazing. Also, I like most of the people I work with; they're nice and funny and smart and come up with clever and interesting ways to do get the work done and to keep the ship moving. It's nice.

But it's still corporate America. It's still all that shit. It's still emails and calls with people who think that sounding less human makes you sound more professional; it's still the bleak, nagging, constant awareness that the men (always men) a few professional tiers above me are barely aware I exist beyond whatever potential I have to increase or decrease a bottom line.

And so, no matter how much fun I have with my colleagues, no matter what little successes I enjoy, on the daily, I'll find myself poring over a string of text in a log file or entering my 90th minute on a conference call and suddenly...

I like to think there are people out there enjoying professional lives in which they, also on the daily, stop and think "Yes. This. This is exactly what I'm meant to be doing." But I also know that even if you have the most fabulous career... even if you're an alpaca farmer or a dolphin trainer or an astronaut... you still have moments like:

And I think that's just life. Or maybe it's the middle of life? There was a time when I got a huge gas out of business cards and meetings and feeling like a grown-up. That was fun. But then, at some point, I can't help feeling like a banal cog in a boring wheel and I'm sure I'd be a huge disappointment to the kid you used to be.

Sigh. That's probably not true. I have a nice life. I have a great family and a good salary; I'm healthy and fairly strong and, this really cannot be overstated, often go DAYS without having to put a bra on. Still, I'm curious, how do you handle the existential dread? The feeing you missed that left turn at Albuquerque? Right now I'm watching Stop Making Sense with my daughter and a glass of pretty decent red wine. It's working. It's mostly working.

God David Byrne was such a fabulous weirdo.

But Why are the Big Stories?

I click over to The Chicago Tribune on the daily because, frankly, no one is better at weather than Tom Skilling. I'm pretty sure Tom Skilling doesn't so much report on the weather as he controls it (magic!). Back in the old Streeter's days, my lunchtime crowd was often made up of construction dudes who would demand that I turn on the WGN news so they could check with "SkilletHead" about the weather. "Skillethead is always right," they told me. They were not wrong.

Fun fact: Tom Skilling is Jeffrey Skilling's brother. If you don't know who Jeffrey Skilling is, congratulations on forgetting about the Bush years - but seriously, you should remember the Bush years because they were terrible and instructive of how Trump is a symptom of the evils inflicted on this country and the world at large by movement conservatism and getting rid of him will not fix everything; in fact, it won't fix much of anything. We have to do it, but don't kid yourself that a Trunp-free America will soon be anywhere near what America had oughta be.

(Man, it'll be nice, though, to see the back of the lying loudmouth tacky tacky tacky old racist misogynist. Pick your candidates, volunteer, knock on doors. Engage.)

Anyhoo - back to the Trib. They also have good food critics and theater critics and some good OpEd writers. But I refuse to subscribe to them because they endorsed Gary Johnson in 2016. Gary Who? Gary Not Hillary Clinton, I'm sure, was all the hoary old conservatives manning (word choice intentional) the Trib editorial board cared about.

So they get no money of mine; but I do return, on the daily, to find out what old SkilletHead says is comin' down the weather pike or what Chris Jones thinks about whatever play I might be checking out. And I always start on the front page.

The Trib has been flogging two stories on that front page for what feels like forever (this is how time works now). One of them is the Jussie Smollett thing. We'd all be better off letting Jussie Smollett fade into obscurity. I believed him when the story first broke. Turns out he was lying. But this doesn't mean there isn't a huge surge in right-wing violence in America. It doesn't mean the CPD is suddenly a paragon of professionalism and public service. It feels less substantial as a celebrity scandal than the Varsity Blues thing.

Their other story du jour is that terrible, TERRIBLE story about the Crystal Lake couple that murdered their 5 year old son. That is such a tragic, horrifying, upsetting story. But I also don't get why it remains front page news. Those two should die in jail - what more is there to say about it? I guess there's an argument that the bigger story is how the system failed that little boy - but it sure does feel like the paper is trotting out the pictures of those two monsters for us to gawk at and feel superior to (lord, is a lower bar possible?).

Earlier today, I clicked over to the Trib on my way to find out if it'd be raining tomorrow (it will) and saw a breaking news post about William Barr deciding to skip the House Judiciary Hearing. "Can he just do that?" I wondered. But I had some work to do and figured I'd come back to that later.

When I went back, I had to scroll past two stories about Jussie Smollett before I got to one about Bill Barr.