Thrills

I love airports. Give me a place where thousands upon thousands of people, cultures, and classes are thrust together in a melting pot of ticket stubs and adventure and lost luggage and single servinging. This morning I saw a distraught Indian man trying to catch his flight home, a weathered, important-looking businessman who could not stop stressing the fact that he travels this route 4 times a week (I am currently eavesdropping on his conversation in the row over). I had to take my shoes off. They had to take their shoes off. I love that, everyone has to do that, even the hotshot business man. Very humbling. I always imagine where each person is going, who they’ll be seeing, what kind of bed or floor or motel or vagina they’ll be sleeping in, whether they’re excited or annoyed, who dropped them off at the airport, and if they now owe that person a favor.
The first class/economy class division on my plane is nothing, and I can’t help but wonder why anyone would pay such an extravagant amount of money for their orange juice to be served before everyone else.
I’m wondering if it’s just me, or if everyone does this: whenever I’m boarding a plane, I look at the people in the seats I walk past to my own seat and try to deduce what they will be like when our plane starts to crash. I pick out the screamer, the crier, the calm one that tries to comfort everyone, who would whip out their cell phone and who they would call. I think of each of them dead (not in the morbid sense), of me dead with them, and how we would bond on our last moments on (above) the world. That first jolt of turbulence right off the runway and my brain starts working out how these pre-defined reactions are starting. That jolt always gets me, and it’s thrilling really. My mind goes to what I’ll miss the most when I’m dead, and I have that fleeting realization I don’t really matter in the world, and all of these people really don’t either. I’m pretty calm about it anyway.
This airport business is getting me really excited about the Fiji idea that’s evolving. The plan, as of now, includes Junetime adventure to my long lost sister in Taiwan with travel associate, Carey. A plane ticket possibly to Singapore, for travel writing/photos/adventure. August comes that little group of islands a [somewhat] know and [most definitely] love for however long I can handle the absence of seasons and circumvent the tropical diseases that seem to enjoy picking on me. I want to eat indo-Fijian concoctions on street corners and touch an eel and make Roti from scratch. I want to get kava drunk and have beach fires and jam out to traditional drumming. I want to enjoy life before that 9-5 job thing envelops my being, which I tell myself is imminent as to not be let down in case my life purpose changes and I fall into that monotonous trap (though really, I hope that doesn’t happen… I just already see it happening to my friends and can’t stand the thought of it).
I’m bad at wrapping things up. There, I said it (unless it’s burritos. Ha.)

on the headphones: NMH-The King of Carrot Flowers pt. 1