West Side
Y'all probably heard by now that I'm not in Chattanooga and in fact I snuck away to California on Sunday. Well, it's true.
I do not like to fly. I don't like feeling cramped, crowded into a giant metal tube next to people I don't know having to eat food I don't like. I realize in the grand scheme of discomforts this is trivial, but it's a discomfort nonetheless.
I had a layover in Phoenix. The flight was delayed an hour and a half. I got to finish watching LSU beat Oklahoma in the airport bar, which was enjoyable. I spent the remaining hour crusing around in a wheelchair, which were for some odd reason strewn around the Phoenix airport as if suddenly, at any time, hundreds of people would need a wheelchair, and we must be prepared.
My wife enjoys airports. I find them odd. They're in their very nature violently transitional space. Beyond the cement and plaster and a thousand uncomfortable chairs, there's anything but a sense of permanence to them, and perhaps that's why it's bothersome to me. For the many dozen times I've been to the Sacramento airport it still feels wholley alien. I'm certain the world is different for those who work at the airport, but how bizarre would it be for you to have thousands of strangers each day walk through your workplace? I get annoyed enough at Lang for pulling inconsistent hours, nonetheless entire different people being there everyday. No wonder we feel like we don't exist when we walk into airports: in essence we don't.
Time with the family has been good thus far. Late night conversations with my sisters till the wee hours. Good to be back in a land of real mountains and something approximating a real winter. I love Chattanooga in the Spring & Fall, but there's not a season I don't love in California.
In fact, today I think I'm gonna head up into the hills.
Josiah Q. Roe | By Josiah Roe | 12:40 PM
Comments
Enjoy the hills, babe. Good to see you blogging from your Motherland.
Posted by: mesh at January 7, 2004 03:19 PM
How do I put videos and pictures on my blog site? I got a camcorder for Christmans and I want to make a bunch of movies of pranks and Infradig concerts and stuff and put them on my site somehow.
Posted by: Tim at January 7, 2004 03:26 PM
Hey!! We miss you come back soon and safe.
(Airports are great for people watching)
Posted by: Charity at January 7, 2004 04:34 PM
I think Douglas Adams said it best:
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport".
Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports ane full of
people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller for ever
from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.
Posted by: skip at January 7, 2004 05:18 PM
I love Douglas Adams. I have to completely agree, airports make me depressed. I feel like I'm trapped and sufocating.
Posted by: zach at January 9, 2004 07:20 PM
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