No Style :: No Content

Running silent

Cec had her high school re-union at our place yesterday so I dodged out to the downtown SAS Radisson with my laptop for the evening. The Radisson is a good place to hang out if you need to burn some time - excellent interior design and they were playing decent music in the lounge (Banco de Gaia at one point - I didn't know they were cued in!). Maybe a little scary to feel so at home in a hotel lounge, but it was what I needed, and was open all night. The staff was nice to me- kept me sorted for drinks & calories. I spent half the time catching up on work and the other half working on the book. I felt like it was time well spent.

Then walking back to Copenhagen central train station, the midnight fireworks went off at Tivoli just as I passed by. I stopped to watch like everyone else on the street, with that Ms. John Soda track Sometimes Stop, Sometimes Go playing on the iPod. Perfect soundtrack for that moment, a little bit of melancholy suddenly lit up in colors across the sky. I felt like I was in a movie. But life has been like that a lot lately.

So even though work is heating up again, my travel schedule for the next couple months is a little more open than usual. I'm going to try to spend whatever extra time I can get putting some more pages on the book thing and see what happens, which means I may be running a little silent here on the blog for a while. Will still try to finish getting photos up from the past few weeks, if nothing else than because it gives me a chance to look at them all again.

Hangover

Still struggling with hangover from Chicago and New York before that. Long jetlag recovery and the memory of not having to be connected, constantly on-line and on-call. It's been great to just have a few days here and there to think, to behave like a human again, and I gotta say I'm not thrilled with the work schedule heating up again. Not ready to go back to 14-hour days.

The worst part is I've had a burning desire to start writing again - I pounded a few pages out on the flight back from Chicago and it felt great. Still burning with the need to do this but no time, and it makes me crazy because it's been so long since I've felt that creative angst. I don't want to squander it on conference calls and the daily grind.

But the situation is what it is. I'm lucky to have these moments, Chicago, New York, Budapest, and if all this rolls through on an infrastructure of heavy fatigue then I have to accept that.

The world is what it is, and to refuse to accept it on its own terms is just bad faith.

Touch & Go

Hardly time to breathe these days. Just got back from Lithuania & am off to Chicago for a week. Off to the airport in half an hour. Business as usual. World without end.

Lithuania was strange- they held the conference in a resort way out in the hills outside Vilnius, and due to mismatching plane schedules I had to spend two nights at the hotel for a half-day event. It was off season and though the resort seemed fully staffed, there were only three or four other people actually staying there. It was a grand place - they gave me a huge room with a foyer & separate breakfast area, but the place was empty, full of echoes & shadows. I felt like I was in a Dave Lynch movie.

Must run, more soon. Chicago will be good.

I come very briefly to this place

Yes, I'm back from the dead, but only briefly.

I finally had a day off and was able to get pictures up from Dubai, Iceland, San Diego and New York (the shot above is from the deck of an abra halfway across the Khor Dubai). I haven't had time yet to comment the New York pics- hoping to have a little break tomorrow to do that, and maybe get the Budapest pics up too.

I really enjoy maintaining this site, though I wish I had more time to do it properly. I like having a broadcast method to reach my friends in other cities, and to leave something persistent that people can look at whenever they feel like, if they feel like it. And it forces me to collect my thoughts and look back on what's happened, and to order the memories so that all this information isn't lost. Because these are things I don't want to forget.

I found something I wrote a few years ago that encapsulates the feeling. That's what it still feels like.

Budapest seemed to be a qualified success - a lot of people in the audience had never heard what I was talking about before, which means I have some work to do on the global comms model. The good part is that at least I can reach people one crowd at a time when I do conferences like this. And people were happy for the information.

Next week, another conference in Lithuania. The week after that, training in Chicago. Looking forward to both. I haven't been in the Baltics since I was covering NATO enlargement in 2001, and Chicago is always great.

By the way, anyone recognize the reference in the title of this post?

Turnaround

I've been in the US for the last three weeks, and found out when I connected from the lounge at Chicago O'Hare that I needed to be in Budapest on the 1st and 2nd. Okay, three days back in Denmark, try to stockpile sleep and get over the jetlag, now in Budapest and about to give a speech to 250 people.

Quickie flight to Vienna tonight, then back to Copenhagen and back to work tomorrow. No rest, etc.

Still, better than a desk job.

More soon.