Thursday, July 31, 2008

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.

1 comment:

aspiring recluse said...

everyone knows that the Japanese don't fart when packed in those trains!

i'm totally making that up. but i'm so agoraphobic i need the idea that somehow crowds of people that close together will be somewhat courteous.