Of course, now that I am leaving I am having a great time.   I would chalk this up to Murphy’s law of business travel but this has happened enough that I should at least consider it to be behavioral.   The most likely explanation is that  leaving a place changes my behavior enough that I get out of whatever unseen rut I was in.  This would explain why the first and last months in a city are always the best.      This last month is a bit tense since I am leaving some good friends.

And there is this other matter too:  All this new activity has forced me to manage my time, which is something I rarely have to do.

Normally, the only decision I make after work is what workout to do, and where to eat.  If mundane conversations with restaurant-bartenders weren’t the most interesting  part of my day-to-day life, I promise you I wouldn’t write about them so much.  But that’s not the apology I have set out to make.    No,  I guess what I am trying to say is that now that I have had to plan each remaining day carefully, and in doing so I have be clumsily uncommittal.  I have no doubt that there is a gracious and polite way to say that I am too busy to hang out with someone, but I can never seem to come up with it on the fly.    Half the time they aren’t even asking to hang out with me, we are just reaching the point of the conversation where I would normally ask to hang out with THEM, and since I can’t I start to stammer about having something better to do.

I own couth, I have just misplaced it.