I’m ready to go home now.

I came in to work late today, since I got home around 9:30 last night and went straight to bed. This traveling thing is exhausting! I’m really happy that I’m home for a while. I do enjoy getting out there and going places, but air travel is such a pain in the butt these days — especially since everything was running late yesterday due to the storms in the midwest. Thank Bob for the fact that Southwest Airlines runs a non-stop between Austin and San Diego. I don’t know why they do, but they do, and it was nice to be one of the few people in the San Diego airport not having a meltdown about whether or not they were going to make their connecting flight.

When we left off, I was complaining about the conference organizers lying about where my hotel was in relation to the convention center (five minute walk my ass). I think Shin’s reaction when I told him pretty much sums it up: “Um, noooo.”

I met up with Shin on Saturday night, and he took me far far away from convention hell. It was fun to get to meet someone I’ve been corresponding with for months, and he showed me around town and took me up to Hillcrest which is the trendy, bohemian area. (Nowhere near as in-your-face as Montreal’s Village, which is fine with me.) At one point, we drove past the street corner where he took the photo on his blog’s banner, although (as usual) I wasn’t looking in the right direction.

San Diego reminds me a lot of El Paso (note to San Diegans: that’s not a bad thing). A lot of the old district has that same mission-style-meets-art-deco look that buildings in El Paso have. It’s a very pretty town, and I can definitely see why people want to live there. It’s also very expensive. At some point, I was blathering on about something being expensive in Austin, before I had that moment of self-awareness and asked Shin, “You probably have absolutely no sympathy for me, do you?” I mean, I’m still not paying $3.00 a gallon for gas. (It’s $2.99 in a lot of places, but we ain’t hit $3 yet.)

After showing me around, we ended the evening at a little corner hangout around the corner from his old apartment, and Shin knew everyone there. In fact, he seemed to know everyone everywhere we went. It made me a little nostalgic for my big city days, although I can’t say I miss the price tag that went with them. (It was fun going to the gayest diner I’ve ever been to, though. At one point a PFLAG mom and her son were actually sashaying up one of the aisles. Definitely don’t see that in Austin … or if you do, I’m not going to the right places.)

Anyway, it’s my turn to show off Austin if and when Shin works his way in this direction.

On Sunday, after Natalie stood me up for breakfast (I’m not bitter…really. I just didn’t get in until midnight and was up at 7 because I thought I was meeting someone and was exhausted all day as a result, but I’m fine with it. Honest.)

Sandra Day O’Connor was the closing keynote speaker of the conference. The woman is a firecracker! Jeez, she was sharp witted and pointed, and really has taken quite the exception to this whole “activist judges” thing. She gave a very strong defense of the independent judiciary on several fronts, and I could see the woman in front of me getting really agitated. Justice O’Connor was talking about things like abortion and gay marriage, and the detention of enemy combatants at Guantanamo. I told Natalie later that I realized that she wasn’t actually defending any of those issues (well, abortion and gay marriage — she was clearly not happy about the enemy combatants), but rather saying that in each case a court had been asked to rule on the legality or illegality of something and sought to interpret the law. In essence: what she was saying was that not the judge’s fault if no one wrote the Massachusetts state constitution in such a way that makes it clear that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that she’s disappointed that the reaction to rulings that upset people is to censure the judges. As she put it, “If judges aren’t issuing rulings that make people unhappy, they’re not doing their jobs.”

It was a truly great speech, and I was horrified when the last person who got to ask a question turned out to be one of those 9/11 conspiracy theorists who wanted to her to open an inquiry into “what truly happened that day.” She handled the response with much more class than I would have.

Afterwards, Natalie and I wandered around the Gaslamp District looking for lunch, and eventually wound up at the downtown branch of the same eatery I’d gone to with Shin the night before (I knew the prices were reasonable, especially after looking at a bunch of other menus in the Gaslamp District). I remarked as we sat down, “I think this place is a little less gay than the one in Hillcrest,” and was cut off by our waiter, a Latino man whose spiritual inspiration was clearly Agador-Spartacus, Hank Azaria’s über-gay Guatelaman houseboy in The Birdcage, who was bringing us water and attitude, sister!.

And so. I’m home now, for a while, and can reconnect with some long-neglected friends here and hopefully relax a bit. There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …

Tags: airlines, Austin, blogs, conference, friends, gay, marriage, men, Natalie, san-diego, Travel