The day after tomorrow I will get into a large metal tube that will fly thousands and thousands of feet above the ground and zoom across the sky at hundreds of miles an hour.

Human beings weren’t meant to do this. There’s a reason we don’t have wings.

(OK — technically, there is no reason we don’t have wings, and there is nothing human beings were meant or not meant to do, because there is no such thing as intelligent design, and we evolved from previously-existing species, and will eventually evolve into not-yet-existing species, species that presumably will never have to worry about such things as war, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, or verbal speech. But I was trying to be cute.)

I’ll be flying to San Diego, and it will be my first time on an airplane since before 9/11. Flying used to make me nervous enough as it was. Of course, millions of people have flown since then without incident. Actually, I’ve been more worried about accidentally setting off security by having nail clippers in my carry-on or something, but then again I’ve been nervous around such authority figures as police officers and store security guards ever since I was a kid, afraid that I was on some Suspiciously Imperfect Children’s List or something.

Anyway, I’m leaving for San Diego on Saturday morning and returning next Friday. I’ll be at a work-related seminar, and I’ll be staying at a very nice resort, possibly bored out of my mind but at least getting nicely tanned. I’ll probably rent a car, even though driving around an unfamiliar city makes me a little unsettled (can you sense a theme here?). I plan to bring my old laptop, which is six and a half years old, originally came loaded with Windows 95 (and now has Windows 98), and has 32 MB of memory and a slow processor. I figure I might want to blog or Web-surf while I’m there, which I will presumably do via dial-up. On the other hand, I might just lie out by the pool and read and unplug myself from the cyberverse for a week. I’ll see.

Wish me luck.