The totally brilliant thing about traveling with a laptop is
that I can write out my future blog posts in transit. Well, on the airplane at
the very least. In the past, I took notes on my iPod of what I was doing during
the day or jotted things down in a notebook, but being able to express my
feelings at 60 wph (I assume that I type at least that fast – I was the fastest
typer in my fifth grade class at 34 words per minute and I’d like to believe
that I’ve improved in the past 12 years) during a five-hour flight without a
movie or any other form of entertainment is pretty great.
The first flight of the day departed at 5:30 am and brought
me to Philly. As previously documented, one of my greatest fears is airplanes
(strangely enough, ebola is another one of my greatest fears, but that predates
the current epidemic by about eight years) and do you know what is better than
putting me 40,000 feet in the air? Putting in an exit row! “Are you ok with
being in an exit row, ma’am?” Well, considering the fact that there is nowhere
else to go, then yes, I guess I am.
I was supposed to be in seat 11B, meaning the middle seat. I
was almost ok with this because being
in the middle seat meant that there would be at least one person between me and
this civic duty. So, I’m sitting in my seat, about to partake some serious
masochism by actually looking at the safety packet (because let’s face it, even
when I’m petrified, I’m an overachiever) when a tiny Korean couple comes up the
aisle and I can just tell – I’m destined to be the deli meat in their airplane
sandwich. This would be the point where I truly doubted my sanity as I
immediately offered to let them sit next to each other, putting me up close and
personal with the emergency exit. Given the obvious lack of any breaking news
reports, I think anyone reading this can tell that my plane made it and I was
not required to jump through an airplane window or save any lives today, but
still.
I spent a good portion of the flight wondering why people
give toddlers iPads. While waiting to board, I saw a kid that couldn’t be older
than three totally engrossed in one while he was trying to walk with him mom.
The child almost got left behind! Does this actually make sense to anyone? On
the plane, I sat behind a woman and her son and immediately after sitting down,
the mom asked him if he wanted “his iPad.” This was a child who wasn’t even old
enough to buckle his own seatbelt, but apparently he has his very own iPad. I
DON’T EVEN HAVE AN IPAD! What exactly are these babies doing with all of this
technology? It’s not like they’re on Twitter because they haven’t even learned
the basic 26 characters in our alphabet, much less how to make a succinct,
grammatically correct, witty post in 140 characters or less. One time, Whitney
and I spent the majority of a 5 hour flight playing with pillows. Just regular
pillows! And we were WAY older than these kids… Hell, even on our flight to
Europe, Whitney’s turtle pillow pet occupied a good half hour of our time.
After landing in Philly, I had to find my way to my next
flight. Mid-flight to Philly, I realized that I didn’t have any headphones with
me, so I bought some in case there was a movie on the plane (there wasn’t, so
now I have some spiffy pink headphones and absolutely nothing to do with them).
I was also on a hunt for the latest Vanity Fair which has Jennifer Lawrence on
the cover, but nope, my hunt was in vain. I got a little bit lost which doesn’t
make any sense because all I needed to do was walk in a straight line and then
I had a pretzel for breakfast. Go ahead and judge me, I don’t care! Pretzels
are delicious.
I really believe that traveling brings out the worst in many
people. Case and point: Despite the questionable hygiene of these things, I
think that lying down on one’s tray table is one of the more comfortable ways
to sleep on a plane. Unless you’re sitting behind a jerk like the guy in front
of me who really wanted to recline
in his chair. I will admit that my preferred sleeping position might impede a
fellow traveler from partaking in this luxury but how many times are you going
to wake me up by slamming your back into your chair? I’m sure we could come up
with a compromise that would include a traumatic brain injury! In case you
think I’m being hypersensitive/paranoid (which are most traits that I most
certainly possess in spades), I caught this guy looking at me as clearly as I
caught the guy who was “just trying to read my shirt” earlier in the day. I
truly hope that these guys have great moms because I can’t see how they’ll ever
get another woman to love them when they act like this.
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