Between now and Sunday, I'm flying from Washington DC to Dallas to Tokyo to Singapore. The shuttlebus picks me up at 3am, and then I hop those 4 destinations with 3 flights and 2 layovers of 1 and 3 hours each respectively. If any of my planes get delayed, I am screwed. Also, I have an IRC board meeting during the first layover.
In deference to this impending schedule of doom, I decided to go easy tonight and wimped out and took the train/bus back to the house instead of biking from downtown. It's probably just as well I didn't; my jacket was thin and when I biked the last few blocks down to the house, the wind cut straight through it. That's why I usually layer it up with another jacket. But in this case, the other jacket I had on me was a blazer, and blazers... do not layer well.
It turns out that I don't clean up all that badly - on the rare times I'm dressed in formal or semiformal clothing, every time I look in the mirror I can't help but think "wait, who is that person?" Collared shirt and nice slacks, shiny shoes, a jacket. Every time I stepped outside the building I swapped the shiny shoes for sneakers and the formal jacket for the bike-grease-stained one and tried not to spill/smudge/stick/smear anything on my new pants. I'll get to practice being comfortable in that sort of clothing this coming week.
GOSCON was the kind of conference where there are goblets and an elegant vase with water and a bowl of fancy candies plus notebooks and branded pens, on the center of each table where you sit to listen to the talks. During the lunch keynote, servers brought out food in courses. "Is there more?" I kept asking, going through my salad plate, my entree, my dessert, Greg's dessert, and two pieces of bread before the servers cleared the table. Everyone was in a suit, except for some women who wore sweaters over collared shirts, or jackets that weren't suit jackets but were still Very Nice. (I took notes. I might be able to tolerate the sweater-over-collared-shirt thing.)
I need to pay very close attention to getting proper rest and not going overboard and not being overly hardcore (because I know I will be) whenever possible over the next 1.5 weeks. I'm going to stop by reining back and packing and going to bed now, before I finish out the thoughts rattling into this post. They'll soak themselves out for the few hours that I'll get to sleep tonight. I've got a game plan for the flights and layovers between here and Singapore that'll let me get everything done, rest, and shift timezones en route; I've got backup and a shameless ability to improvise, I've got... oh yeah, clothes. I probably should pack those. And my bass. And then I'll have everything I need.
Instructions: be safe and kick ass.
Can do.