The best you can expect when traveling these days is to have an uneventful trip. My travels out to Hawaii last week exceeded this measure and bordered on pleasant. In order to keep the universal karmic balance, that meant that the return journey would have to fall eqaully short of expectations. I was not disappointed. The trip was characterized by a bunch of petty annoyances, any one of which would not have induced profanity-laced invectives directed at every employee of American Airlines, along with the entire ramp crew at O'Hare Airport, but the combination of which most certainly did. There was much lugging of baggage at the Honolulu Airport, including having to hurl the bags onto a conveyer belt that was at least 3 feet off the ground so that they could be scanned to make sure we weren't carrying any of Hawaii's precious agricultural goods (except the chocolate covered macadamia nuts) out of the state. Then they had to be dragged to the ticket counter, weighed and schlepped to the security screener.

We had gotten to the airport compulsively early, believing that the American Admiral's Club was open. It was not. It does not even exist any more.

After getting on the plane and discovering that the first class seats (on which we had spent an inordinate amount of mileage) had shrunk to 1.5 cheek width (it couldn't have been all those chocolate covered macadamia nuts), we were offered orange juice or (cheap) champagne. (Yeah, yeah, I know - boo hoo over the choice of beverages when the cattle class passengers are offered a moldy crust of bread and lukewarm, bacteria-infested tap water at a cost of $9.50 (exact change only).) I had been craving a mimosa and asked to have one of each so that I could mix them. The flight attendant scolded me that she had run out of glasses and would mix one for me (what??). Two of them gave me a piercing headache that lasted all the way over the Pacific.

The lovely sky waitresses continued to be bitchy, to both the passengers and each other, for the entire flight. They miscounted the dinners they had and I ended up with the worst in-flight meal (meat-like protein slab, stringy green vegetable, and some sort of cardoman-and-arsenic laced starch) I've had in a long time. Although tempted to ask for one of the coach meals, I was wary of being either ignored again or testily reprimanded for daring to venture outside my class of service.

We get into Chicago on time, with about an hour to make our connecting flight. Note that "getting into" an airport has absolutely nothing to do with disembarking. When the plane pulled up just short of the gate, the pilot assured us that it would only take a moment to move the piece of equipment that had been parked in our way. That's an American Airlines moment, which translates to roughly 30 minutes. What the pilot didn't count on was that the piece of equipment wouldn't start and it took a lot of other pieces of equipment to get it out of the way. So, the real question is why would some fucking moron leave a large piece of equipment parked in the path of a plane getting into a gate anyway???! Isn't that against some sort of rule? Or violate the Patriot Act? Or something?

After running to the next plane, and glaring icily at the gate agent when he tried to make excuses for the ramp crew, we got seated on the final flight. But, of course, our luggage did not get seated until the following flight and did not find its way back to us until that evening. I'm ready to lock the doors, start ordering groceries online and never set foot in mass transportation again.

Dreams: Sleeping away from home most of the last three weeks generated all sorts of psychic clean-up:

1. I was watering my mother’s plants in kitchen at the house I grew up in. They covered the copper-colored Formica countertops, in a foreboding, Little Shop of Horrors kind of way. Probable basis for this dream - I haven't watered my two remaining, sadly isolated plants in a long time. Despite the fact that they're succulents, I doubt that an epoch-long drought encourages growth.

2. The setting was UC Berkeley (the "UC" was very important for some reason). I was attending classes, apparently while continuing to live and work in my current location. I had a full course-load and decided to drop out after missing the first 3-4 classes of each class. Sort of a variation on the "unprepared for the final exam" theme.

3. There was a company that arranged "re-adoptions", where the original adoption of a child did not work out. The set-up was like speed dating - you worked your way through conversations with the parents who were placing their child up for re-adoption. I stopped to talk with one couple who did not want to disclose the name or picture of child they wanted to have re-adopted, making me suspicious. Of what, I have no idea.

4. Zombies! The first set, all innocuous looking types, could only be killed by driving a cheap ball point pen through the roof of their mouth. The second set were more vicious and had to be decapitated. I ran into the kitchen (the same one as dream #1) and tried to find a knife, but the zombies had stolen all of them from the knife block. Instead I grabbed some spatulas (apparently believing that the creatures could be scrambled to death), and a knife that was hidden in the drawer. In a moment of audacious self-preservation, I gave the spatulas to the other people I was with and kept the knife for myself, eventually beheading one of the ghouls. Despite the nightmarish quality, I was always aware these were just dreams because I only ever use rollerball pens.