Fight or Flight

Okay, so I was coming back from Florida and was not in the best of spirits. My dad is battling cancer, and it sucks and I just wanted to listen to my ipod and stare out the window.

Lo and behold, the following stereotypical items all happened to me:
1. The 6- year old child behind me kept kicking my seat. Hard. Apparently grandma thought was ok for little precious to do this, unbuckle her seatbelt during takeoff, put her feet up on the window, and jump up and down on the seat mid-flight. Now I have a lot of respect for parents when they bring their little ones onto a plane. It’s challenging, I know. So I was proud of myself at first for putting up with it quietly. When I did start making the passive-aggressive head motion of looking behind me, grandma started glaring at me. And that’s when I started to get pissed. But apparently not as much as the flight attendant, who came by every five minutes to tell the girl to get in her seat because, as she put it the third time, "the plane can hit turbulence and you'd hit your head".

2. Really tall guy sits next to me. That’s fine, airplane seats suck, not his fault. But it was his fault that he had to read the paper like he was sitting in a booth getting his shoes shined. He was so in my bubble. It’s not the Bible, dude; fold those pages.

3. Every 20 minutes, somebody let loose with an obnoxious fart that wafted over the cabin like a storm that never ends.

They say that we Americans are the worst with having to have personal space. I don’t know how other cultures do it. The Japanese people pretty much are crammed like sardines into trains. Maybe I need to go to one of these highly populated small countries, come back, and I’ll feel like I have a seat in first class.

Making Peace

I am terrified of spiders. I don't know what it is; if they had 2 or 4 less legs they would be just like every other bug. I think it's the mobility that scares me. They are sort of like the Navy seals of bugs. After a rather alarming hiking incident a few years back I made a pact with them. The incident was this: I was hiking, I turned around and saw a daddy-long leg spider. I hiked a little more, and now there were 3, and they were PURSUING me. I stopped, they stopped. I went on a little, so did they. When I turned back around I could have sworn they were looking around whistling. When I told people about it, even my hiking companion (you know who you are), they didn't believe me. Well, I like a good joke as much as the next person. If I was a spider, and could tell human fear (which I think they can) I would probably gather my friends up and say, "Let's run after this chick. It'll be HILARIOUS." Not to mention the joke later where they all perched on top of the tent and their shadows looked giant on my sleeping bag. Yup, good times, daddy-os. Anyway, my pact was this...I will leave them alone. I will not kill their kind. Spiders have popped up in my life all over the place. When I was a kid they were on my pillow. In the bathroom? Scuttling across the floor. In a house, in a boat, in a car, with a goat. In school and in the pool. Trying to kill them is a hunt of unimaginable proportions. It's like a horror movie where the bad guy just won't die. The most dire situation is when you simply injure the spider and it runs away to gather ammunition for revenge. I decided it wasn't worth it. I'm not keen on killing things anyway. So I was not surprised to see two suddenly with no warning take up residence in the corner of my bedroom. And here is the thing. Have you seen a microscopic view of a daddy-long-leg? I was going to display one to show the horror. So I googled it. And I find myself strangely at peace seeing it's little wee turtle-shaped head. But if you look at it, it's really got quite a cute little face. (It's the tiny head poking out of the giant pink horrible sack). So my friend/savior Angela came to my rescue and scooped them up in a cup and threw them outside. And I felt a bit more at peace about it.

Picture Surprise

Do you remember that episode of the Twilight Zone where the fellow was flying on a plane and he looks out and there is some weird monster dude hanging out on the wing mid-flight? This episode always freaked me out but I also think it's a concept that's kind of funny. On SNL, Andy Samburg did a great sketch of the suddenly-appearing person.

Well another aspect of this phenomenon is when you take pictures and realize later there is a random person in the background. And usually, they are looking at the camera with possession-like intensity. So this happened to me this past weekend. My friends and I had a girl's weekend for my cousin's birthday. Here they are in Blue Ridge, GA enjoying lunch:

Nice pic, if it wasn't for chilling Frau Helga peering from the bushes. Let's look more up close, shall we?


Frau Helga stared at the group of girls, enraged. "Why, those little tarties didn't even smile at me when they passed," she's thinking, " I'm going to make them into a stew."