I’m in southern California for this long weekend – primarily to attend the wedding of an old childhood friend I haven’t seen in several years. This short trip made it somewhat easy to pack light, but it wasn’t entirely without struggle.

After a painful travel experience in which Em and I were both separated from our checked luggage when we had to change our connecting flight on our way to California, we have both made a point to travel with only carry-on bags. This seems to be how the pros do it, and I now understand why flight crews wheel their perfectly-sized carry-on bags through airports in order to avoid having to deal with checking and retrieving bags, as well as eliminating the potential for temporarily being separated from their essentials (though I wonder if that is as likely for them – do they take connecting flights as often as the lay passengers do?). Anyhow, this approach forces some tough choices. Actually, the first one is not really a choice, but a requirement: to leave one’s knives at home. It’s rare for me to go anywhere without tools like my handy multi tool that opens to reveal needlenose pliers and my other miniature multi tool that opens in the same way to reveal tiny scissors. If I am without either of these tools, I will invariably reach for them and be disappointed. I will brush my hand by my belt for the former when trying to tighten a screw somewhere and reach into my pocket for the latter when I realize I should trim a precocious tuft of nose hair or when I discover a hangnail that I should cut loose before it tears off more fingernail with it. Much in the way I have gotten accustomed to being able to send an email by reaching into my pocket, I have appreciated the freedom of being able to do these basic grooming tasks in public restrooms (or even just over a trash can for trimming my nails – though I have discovered that Em is usually embarrassed to be around me when I do this). I sometimes envy Kepler‘s ability to take partial showers throughout the day, but I also appreciate that I don’t have to use my tongue to bathe myself.

Then there are strategies for the rest of the basics: only bringing one pair of pants and shoes and just packing the more compact shirts, underwear, and socks; counting all the pills I will need to take and combining them into one container; wearing a jacket or sweater if I need to take one.

And there are true dilemmas like whether or not to take my laptop and my camera. I could almost replace the need for these objects with my phone, but the photos would not be as good, and I wouldn’t be able to work on a website project that I would like to get started on at the moment. This time, I looked at all the downtime that I anticipated between waiting to transfer between bus and train and so on. There were some gaps of 1 to 2 hours in my original plan. I am terrified of getting bored. Also, my first evening in the hotel was going to be a good opportunity to get some work done. This time, I brought both my laptop and my camera.

I was actually able to fit everything I wanted to into my backpack without too much trouble, thanks to some aforementioned packing strategies, but having my computer with me means that I can spend a lot of my vacation time lost in it. I think I was a little disappointed with myself for bringing it. Often, I have been disappointed about spending too much time working on a project from my laptop and eating away at my own vacation: once when I was finishing some illustration pieces for my design school applications while I was at my grandma’s house with my cousins around the holidays; another time when I was visiting my boy, Chris in DC while building my portfolio site an gearing up for a job search. I recently saw Jane McGonigal in a TED talk quote a finding that the number one regret people had at the end of their lives was “I wish I didn’t work so hard”.

Mid-way through my second and final leg of air travel now, I actually haven’t taken out my laptop aside from that one time TSA made me place it in its own bin and put it on a conveyor belt. The irony of it is that bringing my laptop meant that I had to stuff it so tightly into my backpack that getting it out is something I don’t take lightly. It took me a good ten minutes at the bench next to the stainless steel table after the TSA checkpoint to reassemble my bag and put my belongings back into my pockets. I recently finished one side project that was taking up some time, and I am about to start another small-ish one. So I am in a good place to pull my head out of the sand. Having my laptop at least stashed away enough to be inconvenient to retrieve helps a little bit.

While I was in line to board my first flight out of Providence, I saw a woman in a cowboy (cowgirl?) hat and a thick southern accent walk up to the priority boarding side of the gate with an airline employee. When the employee let her through, she thanked him profusely, gave him a hug, and waved to the other staff who were standing behind the desk. No idea what it was about, but it was a nice human experience to witness.

On my layover in Atlanta, I found a pizza restaurant called Varasano’s that seemed far too nice for an airport terminal. I was expecting to just buy a slice or two and set up at the mall food court style tables, but the clerk asked if I wanted to sit at a table, and I obliged. I ordered some pizza with arugula and olives, and the waitress made a point to tell me,

“Oh, you know that has [some very Italian word that is out of my Italian vocabulary and I don’t remember] on it…”

“I’m sorry, what is [said Italian word]?”

“It’s pork shoulder.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize that! I’m looking for something vegetarian.”

She offered to make it without the pork shoulder. I said “great”. I wondered if she made a point to clarify that with everyone who ordered that pizza, if I was giving off a vegetarian vibe, and/or if she noticed my “kale” t-shirt and deduced that I was vegetarian. Either way, she read my mind, and it was impressive. I sat in the corner right next to a floor-to ceiling window overlooking the concourse, and I watched dozens of luggage carts drive right under me from one terminal to another.

The pizza was the best I’d had in a long time. The crust was flaky and crispy, and the olives were blending into the chesse in a wonderful sort of harmony. A piano player came to play some jazz tunes while I was eating. The experience reminded me a lot of that one oasis of a restaurant I stumbled into in Osaka after I realized I missed the open hours of the instant ramen museum. That pizza should have cost twice as much as it did. I gave an overly generous tip to the waitress (or maybe an appropriate one if the pizza were priced like how it tasted) and an okay tip to the piano player, and I left feeling better about humanity. Airports do this for me sometimes.

Bonus: plane window photos submitted for the Matthew Sunset Eng photo collection.