It is currently 6:26 and I am sitting in the Jet Blue terminal of JFK. I’m flying to New Orleans on a business trip, which is such a hysterical sentence I can’t even handle it. Business trips are the province of people who 1. own suits, 2. have business cards, and 3. don’t look forward to jumping on the hotel bed. Although, who knows. Maybe every airborne banker, doctor, salesman, mover or shaker gets to the hotel, tips the bellhop, closes the door, removes his tassled loafers, and immediately becomes the last little monkey jumping on the bed. Do you still say “bellhop?” I have no idea. Something about it sounds vaguely racist. I have one duffel bag; this sort of thing rarely comes up.

There was this girl Dana who was in, like, every one of my classes from kindergarten to second grade, plus my Brownie troop. Her dad was the kind of dad who took business trips. He brought her back decorative spoons from every location, which made Dana the kind of first-grader who had a Collection, with a capital “c,” to signify something besides bugs you’d found, or gravel that looked like teeth, or rocks that might be arrow heads because they were sort of trianglesque. I remember having to muster up enough enthusiasm to “oooh” once or twice at a spoon from the Netherlands or Hawaii, but even at seven I remember thinking something along the lines of, “I think I’m supposed to be jealous, but what the hell do you do with all these tiny spoons?” Perhaps Dana had a tiny coke habit. Who can say?

My dad, on the other hand, was the kind of Dad who worked approximately four towns over and went to union meetings, not business meetings. The few trips I remember him taking without my mom, my brothers, me and approximately seventy bags stuffed with Garfield collections and the bare essentials of our Matchbox car collection (which, for some reason, was basically all of our Matchbox car collection–God forbid we leave the house unable to barter tiny sedan for tiny 4×4) were to Nascar races. (Yes, really.) (Yes, I’ve been to several.) (Yes, they are exactly like you think they would be.)

Anyway, my point is that going on a business trip alone on a plane to a city in another time zone seems like a terribly grown-up thing to get to do, and I’m excited to do it, but at the same time I feel like someone who got ushered into the wrong line at the DMV and I’m waiting to get to the window, but I suspect I’ll get there just to have the lady tell me I’m not where I’m supposed to be. But until then you wait in the line, and you keep moving up because no one’s found you out yet. Is there a word for this? Faux-dult? That’s what I feel like. Yes, I will go to my weird, serious job and talk to genuine important grown-ups and shake their hands and get their cards, and that will be great.

But what I’m really, really looking forward to is eating Doritos on my hotel bed in my pajamas, watching HBO, and (dare I even dream it?) eavesdropping on people next door.