Kindred spirits

I am not sure if it is a good idea to blog while hungover, but it is probably better than blogging while drunk so it is good that I resisted the call of the glowing screen at midnight last night 🙂

Ah vendor parties. Dangerous things I tell ya. Last year in Orlando it was at the vendor party that I rode Expedition Everest a whole bunch of times and actually fainted on it once when I inhaled and then exhaled in an effort to let out the most ear piercing scream on the drop portion of the ride – passed out right at the bottom of the drop and was out for about 10 seconds – truly bizzare!  Last night we party hopped between 3 vendor events. My friend from work is very good at procuring invitations to these things 😉 We had an agreement to head up to our rooms no later than 10:30 since we both had potentially excellent 8:00am sessions this morning. I had a glass of wine at each event though I never finished the last one so I maybe had 2.5 glasses. Problem was that there was only appetizer type food. Then the real problem was that at the last event I met a kindred spirit. She sat down at our table and we started chatting. Where are you from…where do you work…blah blah..lots of boring work related questions and we figured out why we were at this conference. Then I noted her accent and having successfully identified an Alabama guy earlier in the evening I tried to guess which Caribbean island she was from. Her accent is not heavy, but it was there. Of course, after 2 glasses of wine and a long day my brain could not conjur up the names of the islands that I’ve been to thanks to a couple of cruises in that area in the late 70s. I named every one but hers – she is from Haiti. In fact, she was there in Port Au Prince when our cruise ships stopped there for sure. She left in ’82 when she was 17…so we figured out we were the same age at that point. Then we continued talking just about life and marriages and divorces and children….then somehow that turned into things like valuing our alone time…she spoke of one day being in the bathroom and seeing a lovely stack of magazines and thinking “hey, I could be happy in here for a few hours!” which I totally understood…then for some reason she asks if I was born in December..I tell her I just missed it and my b-day is Jan 3. She just laughs and says Dec 29..then we both laughed and said “Capricorn Dragon!!” We are just 5 days apart and it was so amazing given where she grew up how similarly our lives have progressed. Well, thanks to this instant connection we did not want to stop talking so she and I and my work friend left and headed to the jello shooter bar (eek!). I bought a round of shots and we sat and talked until midnight.

So now I am back in my room after somehow getting myself to that 8am session (which was worth it) and I will attempt to regain human status. Luckily the rest of the morning sessions were iffy as to their value so I don’t mind ditching them in order to recover and pack and checkout. There have been several great sessions already which more than paid for the expense of coming out here for my company, but mostly I will take away from it the warm fuzzy feeling of connecting with a kindred spirit.

Oh, and aint it lovely to know that I am flying on Southwest Airlines? And aint it lovely to be watching CNN right now and see that they have responded to the allegations of safety violations by grounding 41 planes in their fleet? Weeeeeeeeee.