Travelogue: APS Baltimore 2025

The woman in the pink velour tracksuit stares at the TSA agent, who keeps pulling empty quart Ziplock bags out of the woman’s carry-on. They are not encased by a box, just loose, one after another. There are already more than a dozen, containing nothing.

The TSA agent seems more and more perplexed and is asking, “Ma’am, why do you need this many bags?”

The woman continues to stare back, blank faced. She says nothing. This agitates the TSA agent further, who is now holding something I cannot see. “And we can’t allow this through at all!” That is concerning. I edge a little farther away while scrambling to put on my boots.

The woman does not react. Not a shrug. Not a word. Nothing to even indicate she’s even on the same physical plane as the TSA agent, who is, I think, also starting to doubt her own corporeality. Before I can doubt my own existence, I grab my bag and wind past the Freeland Distillery kiosk and Blue Star donuts to dull my anxiety at my Happy Place.

There, now we’ve gone ahead and broken the seal on this thing. I’ve tried to start blog posts a few times now but nothing’s as intimidating as a blank page, so let me just do the thing that I really love to do: tell you stories about my life, the weird, the wonderful, the strange, the hard, the terrible, the everything, but never boring. People say they like them, I like writing them, and I would like a way to tell these stories and share them in a way that I don’t have to worry I’ll lose when the whole system collapses, probably. I hope you’ll enjoy. And welcome to Jesstations. It’s not what I was going to call it (a story for another day), but I really like it. Thanks for the moniker, Ken.

Back to the travel.

I had woken up unexpectedly anxious. I’m always some flavor of anxious, but it’s unusual for travel days. I like to travel, generally. I love airports. I always have. When you’re in an airport, you’re no longer in Portland or Minot or wherever, you’re EVERYWHERE at once. They are places of infinite potential. My favorite liminal space for a very long time was in the center mall of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport underneath the arrival and departure boards that stretched from end to end all across the walkway. You could see where everyone was coming from or going. Where YOU could go, how easy the threshold is there to just be somewhere else. I find that electrifying and uplifting.

So when I woke up and the first thing I did was have a panic attack and cry and rock my sleeping toddler, this felt Ominous and Not At All Good.

Royal, ever Best Husband, helped me come back down from Anxiety Peak, and I spent a little more time in bed with my boys, but I really had a hard time shaking the feeling that something was wrong. Even after following extra mitigating steps, like double checking my packing list, making sure my poster and extra clothes were in my carry-on (I NEVER travel without one work outfit, a lesson learned very early on in my training), arriving at the airport extra early, triple checking my seats and boarding passes, my out-of-place anxiety was getting to the point where I was considering just 86ing the entire trip and going home. I followed the sage advice of my longtime pal Phil and visited our favored card-carrying frequent flier location for moments like these: The Holy Sanctuary of the Delta Sky Club.

If you’re trundling down the D gates at PDX, there’s a hallway next to an ATM by the headphones store. Blink and you’ll miss it. Turn instead and there’s an elevator. Go up, then a sweet little lounge awaits with a view over the whole D concourse. The PDX Delta Sky Club and I are good old friends. I got my first Delta card with SkyClub access in 2012, the lowest level where entry wasn’t free but one could enter the Hallowed Sky Club Halls for $29 a day back then, a high price for a tech/grad student but sometimes very handy on long layovers. One time I had to hurriedly rewrite a whole mandatory section of a grant at one of its tables before takeoff because something had gone haywire with the first draft. The first time I had to pump milk for Hudson while I was on a work trip was in the PDX Club bathroom and I was so nervous but I felt safe there. One time, after not having seen him for months, an awful former mentor greeted me passive-aggressively and I had a victorious high ground moment facing him down while enormously pregnant, decaf coffee in hand. I have good memories in that space, and they have fantastic staff, including the lifeblood of these places: the bartender.

The cheerful bartender didn’t miss a beat when I asked for a cranberry mimosa and then blurted out that I was never nervous but today I was. “Do you want heavy on the champagne?” “No, I’ll get a second one if it comes to that.” The first one helped, but it became apparent that a second one was in order. Good bartenders know when to ask questions, and when you work at an airport, you probably have to calm down a lot of jumpy dumb-dumbs who are having stupid days and could use a nice word with their booze. She was happy to pour me a second while she asked, “Did you have a bad dream? Did you watch a movie with a plane crash or something lately?” I thought about it. “I saw a movie with plane stunts. And I have a small child and I’ve been traveling a lot lately. But it’s a new conference I’m going to and I think I’m just nervous.” She nodded and pointed. “That’s it. What does your gut tell you? Should you get on the plane?” I thought about it for a second. “Yeah.” “There you go. Listen to your gut. It’s going to be okay.”

On my way out, she waved. “Fly safe. You’re going to do great at the conference. Have a great time.”

If the Delta Sky Club is a sanctuary, then I think that makes the bartenders monks or some kind of holy practitioners, and honestly, that tracks.

I get it. Economy seats are small as hell. I am pleased that my seatbelt buckles without an extender and my tray table goes all the way down, though if the guy in front of me reclines his seat it might look like a magician’s trick where the lady gets sawed in half but for real and with blunt force tray table.

But if you see someone coming down the aisle, and you have manspread your legs all the way into it, don’t look at me/the flight attendant/whoever as though it is an imposition to pull your big stupid leg back into your seat so they can get by. It sucks. I know. But I am not jumping your leg on this moving plane like it’s the 2028 Olympics and my name is Lorna Doone Faverhaven and I’m on a show pony going for gold. Act right.

Plane lands in MSP. Everyone around me stands up quickly and starts comparing how short their layovers are and who needs to go first. It turns out we’re all boarding within about 20 minutes of each other, and we have pulled into the opposite side of the airport from where we were supposed to, so we all gotta book it. I blow kisses towards my godparents in Apple Valley, and towards the board that says Minot and Portland as I haul butt past my favorite liminal space and for a moment can be in four places at once.

This travelogue entry in particular is inspired by and dedicated to my friend Dave The Great, who has just arrived home after two weeks serving as an emergency services worker in Ukraine, driving ambulances while wearing body armor and avoiding drone strikes. I am glad he is home safe. He is one of the bravest humans I have ever met in my life. I convinced a mentor to let Dave volunteer in our lab for a while years ago. We lit a whole lab bench on fire once for scientific reasons. Dave is the perfect person you want on an emergency services team where impossible things and miracles will be asked for in ever changing scenarios, because he will, somehow, come through. It’s going to be made of every single marker and clamp in your lab and be disturbingly labeled “Mouseapult,” but my goodness, it’ll get the job done.

I boarded the plane for BWI. My brain says BWEEEEE because anxiety is still high. I’m in Comfort Plus but there’s a weird sort of flat seat ahead of me, which is great for extra leg room because I twisted my knee hauling ass across MSP. The middle seat between me and the guy in the window is empty. He seems to take this as an invitation to take off his shoes and start rubbing his socked feet on the center tray table. His socks have planets on them. He knows this behavior is inappropriate because when I side-eye him, he puts his foot back down, but then it’s back up again a few minutes later. The flight attendant has to ask him twice before takeoff to put his seat back up.

He’s probably a manspreader when he’s on an aisle.

I arrive in BWEEEEE. They are very proud that we have arrived two minutes early and then we taxi for 15 minutes. Nothing is open, so dinner will be luggage snacks. I am already cranky about how far I have to walk to baggage claim on my ouchie knee, so I decide to take a taxi rather than deal with whatever nonsense this airport has probably done to make it impossible to take rideshares.

The taxi driver asks me where I’m going. I tell him which hotel, on which street. “Where is that?” I blink at him. It is after midnight in a city I do not live. He has GPS, and a phone. He touches neither. “I…do not know.” “Can you check?” “It’s near the Convention Center.” He says he thinks he knows where it is. I think that Lyft at least uses GPS.

The hotel has my reservation but seems momentarily confused because it shows I’ve already checked in. They hesitantly give me my key and some water (because here you have to ask for it for the room, a precious commodity here), and then send me to a room with a blaring red neon sign for another hotel directly outside my window. Charm City, indeed. I do not run into my doppelgänger, so I have only checked in once, thank goodness.

I can’t sleep for hours. The bed feels empty without a toddler and dog crowding me out and the time change is weird. I finally get ready and wonder if I will see anyone I know here until dinner, or if I will just have to wing it and try to make new friends and collaborators. The moment I step into the hotel elevator, an old trainee colleague I haven’t seen in five years hugs me. “I didn’t know you were going to be here!” And I think it’s going to be okay.