on flying

Over Thanksgiving break, I flew for the first time since coming home from study abroad the previous December. In the interim, I've driven a ton of miles on a car that feels and sounds like it's coming apart, but I'd managed to avoid the ushering in of the era of Having To Check Your Luggage Because You Brought Shampoo on Your Trip for nearly a year. Following my flight home, I was prepared to write a rant of probably 1000 - 1200 words about how much I hated flying. After I got sick over the holiday and flew home with probably the worst sinus/pressure headache I've ever had at 5:55am, I was prepared to write probably 40 words about how awful air travel was, about half of which would have been profanity.

But flying home for winter break changed that a little bit. As a (sometimes) rational person, using domestic airlines as a mode of transportation is pretty awful. In fact, really awful--they didn't even give me a full can of ginger ale this time. My flight to Denver on Friday was full, I had a middle seat cause I booked it late, the tv-monitor programming was EXACTLY THE SAME as what I'd seen over Thanksgiving (which is a different calendar month, United), and they even took a step down from pretzels to give us this assorted snack mixture of bad pretzels (since good pretzels can only be produced by a company that specializes in their production alone), these weird orange things (according the the label, they were somehow made from corn, and flavored with some kind of flavorless powder that discolors your fingers), and the absolute worst soy nuts I have ever seen--lacking texture, flavor, or substance, they seemed to be part of a conspiracy to keep Americans convinced that soy products are for evil hippies and Asian people and thus inedible by the average McDonalds/frozen pizza consumer. I love soy, I enjoy tofu (it's 1/3 the cost of meat per pound, if I've never mentioned it before in this space), and I think it's crazy that it's somehow been relegated to a "specialty food" designation. But that's neither here nor there.

I kept trying to doze off on the flight, but kept waking up because I had leaned almost into the seat-space of the person next to me, and since I really hate when other people do that, I tried to stay awake or at least sleep sitting upright. The airport was crowded and we got dropped off at the farthest end of the longest concourse at the airport (if you've been to DIA, you know what the layout's like). The bags from our flight arrived in two waves spaced 15 minutes apart (my two were split, one in each). And so on.

But, somehow, there's a part of me that still enjoyed it. And it's not just the going home part, although that's still nice. It's not that I got to meet some other students from the colleges, who I may see next semester randomly and have that little moment of semi-recognition with, although that was nice, too. I realized why I enjoy taking trips by plane because of that moment right at the beginning of everything. I pulled out a book to read as soon as I got to my seat, ignored the safety briefing, and was prepared to keep on going through til we landed, but as the plane finished taxiing, I couldn't help but set it down, and look out the window, the way I realized I look out the window every time I get on a plane, even though I normally try to get an aisle seat. With the last colors of the sunset out our window, the plane did it's thing--extending flaps, revving the engines, accelerating down the runway... and just as the nose tilted upward and I felt us lose contact with the ground, I felt a kind like all the negative energy I'd been carrying at the base of my skull, in my shoulders drained down out of me. It was a great feeling, and the moment that makes the rest of the flying experience bearable: the feeling that anything, *anything* is possible.