I've really enjoyed working for Pearson. I love traveling on their budget, seeing new places, meeting new people. I've especially enjoyed the professional growth it's given me as a teacher: to observe classrooms from those nominated as "the best" teachers in the country for a week at a time.

Until Wyoming.

This was not a happy place.

Sure, the upside - as I mentioned last week - is that in a repressed culture like Cheyenne, Wyoming, one can find a large number of secret-gay-boys who like to connect with a traveler because the traveler will leave soon and nobody in town will know that the secret-gay-boy likes other gay men. Other than that... I can't think of a reason to return.

The whole place felt very closed. It is a state capital, and it only has 59,000 people living there. There is a lot of open, empty space. And not much else.

So you can imagine how happy I was to finally leave there and come back to LA. And what's on the menu for the rest of the month? Syracuse, New York; Las Vegas, Nevada; Newark, New Jersey.