Airports

I'm hanging out in the san jose airport. In the past six days I've been in the following airports - Atlanta, LAX, Ontario (California - not Canada), Charlottesville VA, and here, San Jose. I swear, I should get a job as a flight attendant...

I like airports because I'm in this world that's kind of like a video game or Second Life or something. It's semi-real - the stores are recognizable, the people look human, the bathrooms are usually clean, and the environment is a super-sterilized version of the normal world. At the same time, everyone in an airport is in their own world, coming and going, wishing they were somewhere else, anywhere else besides a sterilized airport. I like looking at the departure screens and imagining all the places that I could go. I could accidentally stow away on a flight to Singapore, and the next time I smelled fresh air, it would be Singaporean air.

A few years ago I was in Norway, and after a horrible week that included the worst heat-wave they've ever had (in a non-airconditioned hotel, of course), sickness, and a ridiculously busy work schedule, I was in the airport, which looked like an Ikea showroom, and got ready for the second half of my work-trip, in the UK. I was boarding a flight to Heathrow, which, under any other circumstances, would have made me ever so happy. But all I could do was sit under the departure screens staring at the flight to New York, longingly, wishing more than anything that I could be going home. And the funny thing was that the gates were next to each other. Going down one gangway would have taken me to Newark. The other took me to Slough (the most miserable city in the UK according to a recent study).

I like airport time, and plane time, because I'm pretty much un-get-a-hold-of and the world moves in slow motion for me. Plus there's expensive sodas and Cinnabon, which normally I would never go near, but Airport Calories don't count (they apparently get taken away when you go above 30,000 feet). So it's a good day.