Drama on a Plane

I take my seat on the aisle of the exit row and stretch out my legs. Tall men walking to the back of the plane glare at me. It can't be fun to see a 5'4" person taking up the seat with all the leg room. I smile and swing my legs back and forth like the childish brat that I am. I stop smiling when the man in the middle seat arrives. He has terrible body odor.

The flight attendant shows up to make sure that we all understand we're sitting in an exit row. "I'll need a verbal from each of you," she says. "Are you willing and able to help in case of an emergency?"

"Yes," 5 people say. Body Odor Man grins happily, but says nothing.

"Sir?" she asks him. "Can you assist in an emergency? I need you to say yes."

"I don't speak English," he says with a heavy accent that I can't place because I'm not good at that.

"Uh oh," she says. "I'm going to have to reseat you."

Of course, he doesn't understand what she's saying. He's still smiling like she's teasing him, and meanwhile, she's really looking around for someone who wants to move to an exit row. One of the tall guys raises his hand. Body Odor Man starts to look confused. "Why?" he keeps asking, as she gestures for him to get up. The man in the window seat and I try to explain. "You must speak English to sit in this seat," we say several times. He still doesn't understand. Finally, he gets up and walks sadly away. He looks at me one more time and says, "Why?"

"Because of English!" I say too loudly. I really want him to understand, but I basically end up sounding like a terrible, short xenophobe in a desirable plane seat.

Which is when karma decides to bite me in the ass.

Several hours into the plane ride, I have to go to the bathroom and I need Pringles. I head to the back of the plane. After I flush the toilet, I notice the toilet seat cover has not made it all the way down. I decide I don't care and walk out the door. A spectacled bald man is waiting to go next, and I have the slight feeling of embarrassment that I did not double flush the toilet.

I get my Pringles from the flight attendant and when I turn around to head back to my seat, I come face to face with what can only be described as the German Bathroom Police (this accent I did recognize.) The spectacled man is standing in the aisle, a line forming behind him, waiting to get my attention.

"I sink you forgot somesing!" he yells. I look into the bathroom and sure enough, the toilet seat liner is peeking over the edge of the toilet. This man thinks I did not flush the toilet at all, and he wants the entire plane to know.

"No," I say firmly. "I didn't forget to flush. That's just some tissue that didn't get flushed down." I mean seriously, this is the worst conversation I have ever had on a plane. I would rather go sit on Body Odor Man's lap for the rest of the flight than have this crazy German guy yelling at me anymore. He makes a huge show of walking into the bathroom with the door still open and flushing the toilet himself with a sigh of utter disgust. I walk back and take my seat, and for the rest of the flight I fight with that guy in my head, thinking of all the things I should have said. And really also thinking that I probably should have just flushed the toilet. I swing my legs, but it's just not the same. Then I eat my Pringles and feel better.

Canada is not in the US

Tuesday morning. 10am. We are leaving for a ski trip to Canada on Friday. I receive an email from Rob with the following message: "Don't forget our passports for Canada!"

Panic sets in. My passport expired on Nov 24. It did not occur to me that this would make it difficult to get into another country. I call Rob. "I'm screwed!" I yell, wondering what the people in my office are thinking.

"It will be ok," he says.

"How will it be ok?" Still yelling.

We get off the phone, me assigned to figuring out how to fix this. I make calls. Many, many calls. I speak to several people at the US passport office, dial into an automated appointment line at the New York City Passport Agency and discover that the next available appointment they have is 2 hours after we are scheduled to leave for Vancouver.

I panic some more. I call the Connecticut Passport Agency and make an appointment for Wednesday morning. In Connecticut.

I call Rob and am mean to him. "This is not going to work out," I say. "Even if I go to Connecticut tomorrow, there's no way they can get me a passport in time. They're closed on New Year's Day and we leave at 7am on Friday."

"Just go to the New York office," he says.

"I can't!" I am yelling again. "I just talked to 4 people who told me I need an appointment. And there are no appointments!"

"Stop yelling," Rob says. "Go to the office. You have to try."

My meltdown continues as I complain that I have work to do, that I could very well spend 4 hours waiting in line at the passport office when I should be at work PLUS if I don't succeed, I still need to go to Connecticut in the morning, thus missing another day of work.

"Well," Rob points out, "if you don't get a passport, you can be at work instead of going on vacation."

I make some more noises into the phone and hang up.

There are at least 3 more phone calls that repeat the above conversation, and I finally agree to go to the New York Passport Agency, which is in the West Village. I must first go home, get my passport, fill out forms, get photos of myself, and print out proof of travel.

Is it anticlimactic to report that when I got to the passport agency, it took less than 10 minutes to renew my passport?

Later...

"What is the lesson we learned today?" Rob asks.

Resisting the urge to punch him for talking to me like I'm a 4-year-old, I dutifully respond, "Always be prepared."

"What else?" he says.

"Um...don't panic?"

"That's a good one. What else?"

"Don't be mean to Rob?" I guess.

"That's a very good one."

"What's the one you were thinking of?" I ask, since clearly I have not answered the question correctly yet.

"Leave no stone unturned," he says wisely, at which point I do punch him. In my mind.

Ground control

Rob and I returned from Arizona late last night, and it was a long day of travel. We left Phoenix around 2pm, connected to another flight in Salt Lake City, and rolled into our apartment after midnight. Here's what happened in between:

At the security gate in Phoenix, an attendant checked our IDs and boarding passes, then nodded towards a line of people to our right. "This one's actually shorter," she said, comparing it to the line we would have headed for, which looked shorter.
"It just looks longer, but there are two belts, so it's fast."

We got into the shorter line. The woman was either stupid or a liar. Or maybe she has some kind of reverse sense of time. We stood there, unmoving, watching people breeze through the other line. Several times, Rob turned to look directly at the woman, who would not meet his gaze. I believe he was debating how good it might feel to walk back to her and ask her to define "shorter." And then spell it.

As we finally approached the front of the line, where it still split into two more lines, another airline employee was yelling, "All laptops need to be taken out of their cases. This is NOT a suggestion!" Opening with excessive aggression, I thought, is certainly one method for dealing with the masses of holiday travelers. We heaved our bags onto the belt and as soon as my oversized yellow tote disappeared, I realized that I was the bonehead who had just sent two bottles of water through security.

"Bag check!" screamed the woman at the screen.

"I'm sorry," I said to her."I forgot I had water. I can throw it out. Or you can throw it out. Either way."

"It won't be me," she snapped. "It will be someone else."

Apparently I had offended her by suggesting that her status at the airport was that of a lowly liquid tosser. I stayed quiet.

"Bag check!" she yelled again, and I had a flash of Frau Farbissina from Austin Powers, screaming "SCOTT!"

Slowly, an old man ambled over, seemingly walking straight out of 18 years of retirement to check my bags. "Are you aware," he asked accusingly, "of our policy on liquids and gels?"

"Yes," I said, "I'm sorry. I forgot I had water. You can throw it out."

"What is this?" he asked suddenly, pulling hand lotion out of my bag.

"That's hand lotion."

"It's too big to carry on. You can't take it."

My hand lotion, which has been back and forth across the country several times, and has also traveled internationally, is 3.5 ounces. Perhaps 1/3 of that is left.

"How big can it be?" I asked.

"3.4 ounces," he recited.

Ok, it's no big deal. The lotion had a good life and it wasn't very pricey. But it's moments like these when I really have to question the arbitrary liquid/gel rules put in place after 9/11. That point one ounce of lotion that isn't even in the bottle anymore is somehow a danger to homeland security? Preoccupied with this thought, I absentmindedly moved to put the lotion back into the plastic quart-sized freezer bag I never go to the airport without.

"Ma'am," the Airport Octogenarian admonished. "I just told you that is too large to travel."

"Sorry," I repeated for the 27th time. "I guess I'm still working through my disbelief."

Next he grabbed a small--I mean miniscule--container of lip balm I had taken from our hotel room in Venice. The thing is the size of a quarter and I don't even want it.

"This needs to be in a plastic bag," he said.

Do not ask me why I then said, "Why? It's not a liquid or a gel."

"Yes, it is," he said.

"Noooo," I said slowly. "It's chapstick. It's just not in a tube. I thought chapstick was ok."

Let me interrupt myself for a moment to say that if I was the person in line behind this conversation, I would have killed me.

"It's a salve," he said, secure in his authority.

"Fine," I sighed wearily and put it in my quart bag. "I'm sorry that I wasted your time. I don't usually carry on, as you can tell."

"You aren't wasting my time, ma'am," he replied. "I get paid to be here."

I had a sudden rush of gratitude that I did not get paid to be at the airport, and that I would very soon be leaving. I applied some lip salve, and saluted the man who had just rifled through my underwear.

Does anyone have a cough drop?

I've been sick for a week. Not sick enough to skip work, or to sleep all day on the weekend, but sick enough that I can't remember what it feels like to not have a cough.

It started with a sore throat and now it just feels like golf ball-sized chunks of concrete are stuck in my lungs and every so often they release pieces of dust that float up my throat and make me hack in a way that causes others to look around thinking "Someone help that old man. He is clearly dying."

And instead of staying in and concentrating on breathing normally, I drove up to Cooperstown, New York, home to The Baseball Hall of Fame, to watch Rob's nephew play in a Little League tournament. We saw a home run derby, one game, and the Hall of Fame itself before heading back to the city. We also played a rousing game of Spoons with 11 people and that alone probably extended my recovery time by several days. I am not exaggerating when I say that people ended up in piles on the floor on top of each other, on the table (Rob's 6'5" brother in law), missing skin, and bleeding. Spoons. A family game. We laughed until we cried. It did not help my cough.

On the way home yesterday, I finally just succumbed to it and coughed for about 2 hours straight. I draped myself over the passenger seat, facing the back of the car and asked Rob to hit me on the back just to try to dislodge one of the concrete chunks. It didn't work, but I think it might have been entertaining for the people driving by.

At one point I announced that I felt like I had that disease, you know that one, where you cough up loads of junk and people have to help you by pounding on your back and basically it's awful and it's extra awful that I was actually comparing my cough to that disease.

"Oh, I know what you're talking about," said Rob. "Boomer Esiason's son had that."

And then I stopped coughing for a minute while we tried to remember what it was called. And when that failed, we busted out the IPhone and I Googled "Boomer Esiason son" and the Wikipedia page told me that the disease I was thinking of is a really terrible one and it's called Cystic Fibrosis.

And I know--I know--I'm going to hell for making that particular comparison, but isn't technology impressive?