My Very Specific Travel Curse

Airport Salads, EDM, Louise's Glass

Here I am holding a moist pole at JFK thinking about how the Smartless guys fly private.

After a successful, fun, challenging, and spiritually fulfilling run of live shows in the spring I’ll be getting the band back together and heading out again beginning…um…checks calendar, drops computer on the floor, kicks computer across the floor, shrieks into the godless void…next week. 

REAL QUICK, remind me why I am choosing a task that requires hours of daunting travel, across a range of experiences including several six hour drives and multiple connecting flights?

Oh right, because actually I love the show. And I love meeting people. AND primarily, I have something to say, so now is the time to say it. Come see it! You will enjoy it, and that’s a Sam Bee *Guarantee ™

Teaching some anatomically correct sex education on stage

But the travel.

I am a pleasant, calm patron of airports. YES, I bring my own stinky salads and chickpeas, but ALSO, I hunch over them like an animal and respectfully gobble them down in deserted parts of the airport for the protection of others. 

I never complain. I wear a perky blouse, I keep my resting bitch face at bay (to the best of my abilities), never lash out at a rude person, stay under the radar, never surrender to the angst.

You would never look at me, in my frankly annoying puffy sleeved blouse, and notice that my guts are boiling inside my body. This is because I am internally gaming out every possible alternate flight/airport/driving route from like—Sioux City, Iowa—to say—Albuquerque, New Mexico—for when my flight is inevitably canceled or delayed. The inside of my brain is a Beautiful Mind chalkboard of every possible FedEx flight I can climb into the wheel well of and make it to the gig on time.

This is a photograph of me, eating an airport salad because my flight is delayed and I have run out of homemade chickpeas.

In a world where we can all feel so powerless, every cell in my body clings to the possibility that when there is a task at hand, when something SO BIG looms on the calendar, I can solve every problem, complete every task, and in fact MUST do these things, prior to departure.

I believe that this is my Witches’ Curse. 

Most likely when I was a baby, as I lay there in my lacy bassinet, the Queen’s evil sister, uninvited to the party, came in to bestow HER gift–and her gift was that if I am traveling, every loose end in my life must be tied up completely before I step across the threshold and out of the house.

This is as true for a two day trip as it is for a twenty day trip, I didn’t make the rules OK.

And when I say curse, I mean this is a CURSE.

All the bills must be paid, all emails returned, cats meticulously cared for, newspapers put on pause, grocery deliveries pre-arranged to arrive while I am gone.

The floors are never cleaner, the laundry is never more laundered, the walls are never as dustless–as when I have something on the horizon that I have light anxiety about.

My BRAIN knows that the Earth will continue to revolve and that my teenagers can make their own quesadillas once in a while, but my SOUL cannot comprehend this. Yes I just forced everyone in my family to do a closet clean-out. 

WHYYYY?

Yes I made a pile of old equipment to sort through before I will allow myself to work through my show materials. 

The donations sack/body bag

I baked zucchini bread, AND muffins for the freezer–put up tomatoes in jars and made plum jam. I calmly made arrangements to trade in my old leased car, recorded multiple podcasts, did a whole press extravaganza to promote the live show, got my roots done, arranged lessons for the kids and worked out vigorously many many times, to my favorite type of music, aggressive EDM that sounds like Transformers clashing in some sort of interplanetary battle.

There is no scene, across the spectrum of film–that captures me more thoroughly than the scene in Thelma and Louise, where Louise carefully rinses the last glass she sipped from and places it perfectly upside down on a tea towel to air dry while she goes away on her brief vacation.

It is actually awful. I do NOT want to be the woman making last minute plans to have the bathroom tiles repolished on my way out the door for six back to back tour dates. And yet, here we are.

Some things rising to the top of my mind this week:

1. I tried Alyssa Mastromonaco’s jam, which was absolutely delicious. You can buy it here. I made this face. 😋

2. I listened to these jaw-dropping episodes of The Daily. The first is a story about the drug Captagon, which I had heard of but did not understand, and the second is a story about how many plane crashes we seem to evade just by sheer luck? Fun thoughts to start a tour with.

3. I’ll be appearing Thursday at the Forbes Power of Women Summit with extremely cool people, ahem ahem, Busy Phillipps. We are talking about the future of feminism-ism. Hopefully we will be talking about HER, not me.

4. AND I am including my recipe for those good blackberry bars from last week, because they were GOOOOOOD. It turns out a few people did want the recipe in the comments, so I will give it to the paid folks who spoke up just beyond the paywall below! I am NOT a recipe developer, so have at it, hope they turn out great, I AM KIND OF LOOSE WITH STUFF LIKE THIS, which honestly makes no sense?

*NOT LEGALLY BINDING, SORRY.

OK now, for the bars…