traveling alone

Thanks, guys.

I think part of it was a "HOLY COW I AM GIVING THIS PAPER LIKE NEXT WEEK" freak-out.

And also - it's been really humid here, and I discovered something: high humidity makes me anxious. It makes it hard for me to breathe, and so it mimics that tight-chest anxious feeling, which my brain interprets as "YOU ARE ANXIOUS NOW."

Thanks, brain.

I've got all the odds and ends of paperwork - all the receipts I can show to various people in case something goes wrong and they claim they have no record of me paying or registering or whatever. I tend to over-plan travel. That's because I mostly travel alone. And generally, traveling alone sucks.

Yes, it does. Oh, it's nice not to have to entertain anyone. It's nice not to have someone sitting next to you and rolling their eyes and making borderline-angry comments when the plane is late and all you want to do is just sit and wait quietly and not be upset about the plane being late. But it's also difficult:

you have to haul your luggage with you in the train station/airport/whereever if you need to go to the toilet.

you don't have someone to send to go and get you an orange juice when you're beat and low-blood-sugar-ing and you just NEED something nutritious.

if you miss an announcement, you have to go up to a stranger and go, "Hey - did you hear what they just said?" (the whole Talking To Strangers thing is not a favorite thing for me to do.)

if something goes wrong, it's on you to see that it gets fixed. You don't have a traveling companion to turn to and say, "Honey, I can't deal with this right now." (Then again - my past relationships being what they were - I'd be likely the turned to and have that sentence delivered to me. Or he'd go into Full Freakout Mode and I'd have to both calm him down and try to fix the problem).

eating in restaurants alone can kind of suck sometimes too. I've been in places where it was like I was UNCLEAN because I was a woman traveling alone and eating alone. (And these are places in our country, I'm sad to report - not in some backwards place whose name ends in -stan.)

you have to be a little more on your guard - against pickpockets, against smiling charming people who might have ulterior motives, against even sitting down next to someone who winds up being one of those motormouths who CAN. NOT. SHUT. UP. because you don't have someone to "rescue" you (I've actually traveled with people where we had a "code word" that if we said it to the other person, it meant: "This individual [whether it was someone at a party or on a bus or whatever] is very nearly driving me mad; please do something to extricate me from this situation.")

All that said - one of my colleagues, the one who's taking over my class for me next week, stopped by. I made some vague comment about the presentation and not knowing the "tone" of meetings and he said something like, "Yeah, I could see a situation where the paper went over people's heads." Meaning, he doesn't think I'm going to crash and burn. And I'm reminding myself - the paper I'm giving is actually a bit outside the specialties of many of the people at the meeting; it's looking at things in a different way than most members of the society would. Which can be good because maybe it will make for interesting (rather than hostile) questions. I don't know.

And besides - where I'm going it's supposed to be cooler and less humid than here. That's a plus.