When I haven't slept in three nights due to overnight trips that require 6:00 AM flights and dingy hotel rooms with closets containing sticky Conair hairdryers, wet-dog-smelling brown-fleece blankets and a safe named El-safe, I get depressed. I think it's the lack of sleep that induces a drop in my serotonin levels and causes me to scan the internets for stories about successful young writers like Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss (serious uuughhh) and Zadie Smith (that's a deserved success, though) and feel sorry for myself. It's yuck, I know. Does anyone else think that Jonathan Safran Foer looks like McLovin, all growns up?

I don't know what it is about sadness or envy that causes me to respond to my own emotional distress by redoubling my demands on myself. Like a full-fledged attack on a particularly sensitive ecosystem, like those assholes who drive hummers while the environment shrivels and dies. I could have acknowledged how cranky and irritable I get when I don't get enough sleep and emotionally incubated myself from further affective strain, but my fingers were, for some reason, itching to reach out into the internets and see what other people out there in the world were doing while I was doing something relatively useless and insignificant.

Maybe it's not just a lack of sleep, but the slow degradation of the state of the Westin Hotel that made me depressed. A broken toilet, a room that smelled musty and wet-dog, a scan of the mini bar revealing post-it notes rather than snacks declaring that the Westin is "out of honey roasted nuts," "out of peanut m n m's" "out of banana nut crisps," and "out of Pringles." What is this, the third world? We might as well start distributing ration cards. Not that I was going to eat anything out of the mini-bar. I was raised in a home where eating something out of a hotel mini bar was the equivalent of flushing a $100 bill down the toilet.

And the strange sense of alienation that I felt for the first time being away and in a different city. Normally, I'm a cheerful and adaptive traveller. I mix in well. But this time, I pondered the state of a travelling life as reduced to various vaguely similar cities filled with various vaguely similar hotels and various vaguely unattractive people and their equally unattractive germs, and wondered when exactly I had turned into J.D. Salinger without the writing skills. Is it the result of getting older that makes me want to cocoon myself into a familiar place and share it with only a handful of people? I always used to see strangers as potential friends, but now they were slothful and loud Midwesterners with screaming kids who had been conceived by too young parents who watched too much reality TV and didn't read newspapers and probably voted for McCain, if they voted at all. And I could just see it - that these young kids would undoubtedly grow up to put a strain on the country's natural resources, without compensating for this by contributing anything useful to society. And then I hated humans. And the state of the human condition. And myself. We should leave this poor planet alone. We're not worthy of it.

Or maybe it was the United flight that set me off. The self-ticketing kiosk desperately attempted to sell me/trick me into upgrading my seat/doubling my miles/buying more miles in the way that unethical gas stations switch their signage around to sell you premium gas that you don't need, even before you realize it. Then we were herded on the plane like cattle and given tiny cups of ice, each containing a shot of tepid, funny-tasting water.

My hair smells of Westin green tea grapefruit shampoo, which, while appealing (and even somewhat novel and exotic) in Shaumburg, Illinois, immediately smelled unfamiliar and even unsophisticated the moment I landed in L.A. My hair doesn't smell like me. And this was the last unfamiliar straw I could handle.

And so I came home and went to the internets seeking the elusive but masochistic something that I always seek on the internets. The scratching of an itch, or a scab. Till it bleeds. To read about people who are contributing something to society but are most probably just as unlikable as those who are not, but for entirely different reasons. And then I couldn't tell if it was coming from within or I was being assaulted by everything around. But the mixture of schadenfreude and misanthropy and guilt and sadness and futility made me curl up on my bed and read Kandinsky (to no avail) then M.C. Richards (also not the antidote) then Joseph Campbell (to whom I've built an immunity after multiple reads) and then various underlined passages in The Corrections (which only served to reinforce how I was feeling about humanity and middle America and pretentious but highly skilled authors).

And now I must work. Really work. Put together a summary of my notes. And I resist this by blogging. Throwing maybe useless words into the void. And attempting to reconcile what is with what should be.