Call screw scheduling and beg for a trip. If you can find one in open time with a nice long layover near a place you'd like to be, put in a 'yellow slip' (trip request) for that one. My first month on the line, November 1985, based in MIA, the head of crew scheduling gave me a trip with a 24 hour layover in BOS on Thanksgiving, just so I could go to my parents house in NH for T-day! I didn't even ask him for this trip, he saw it come open, he knew I was from NH, and personally called me up to offer it to me! It was a wonderful thing having small bases with crew schedulers you interacted with every day.
The terms; yellow slip, white slip, green slip all came about 30+ years ago, when Delta did everything with a pencil and a piece of paper. If you wanted to pick up a trip, if you were a line holder you used the white piece of paper to request the trip, reserves used the yellow piece of paper, and if you wanted to work 'overtime' you used the green piece of paper. These papers were only 1/3 sheets of a normal page, thus the 'slip' term came to be.
You had to be present, to physically write it out and submit it into a drop box at the crew scheduling desk, or if you were tight with a crew scheduler, you might be able to call him and have him submit it for you...and you'd buy him a bottle of something expensive come Christmas, of course!
BUT...back then, there were very few commuters, because Delta had a lot of small bases, and every base had it's own crew scheduling desk, where you physically signed in, on a piece of paper, for your trip (pre DL Technology and it's computer days, i.e. pre-2008
) so you were always in a place where you could submit your slips, or you called your "Friend" in crew scheduling.
I was 727 engineer on a trip one time when the copilot was complaining about a trip he'd been assigned. The Captain looked at him and said, "Who's your buddy in Crew Scheds?"
The F/O says, "I don't have buddy in crew scheds..."
The Captain said, "There's your problem."