I Hate People.

Give me most any person, and, I can at least find something to like about them, but people roaming anonymously in public get on my nerves. I had to deal with a lot of strangers, yesterday.

As I was sitting in my middle seat on my flight from Chicago to Seattle (the middle leg of a three leg journey out to visit my dad) and trying to pretend I was anywhere else, the thought struck me that something had changed. I used to love flying. It was exciting and adventurous and fun. Now it is this thing to be endured in order to get where I want to go. It is still worth it because I really like going to those other places, but it sure isn't fun, anymore.

I'll go on a tangent, here, to add the caveat that I do like to fly on Jet Blue. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say I get excited about it, but it is a far more pleasant experience. Actually kind of nice. Worth going all the way out to Dulles for. (And I hate Dulles more than I hate people.) Somehow, and I don't really understand how they do this given how much of it is out of their control, they make the experience not stressful and... polite isn't quite the right word, but close.

Anyway, I think my main problem with flying is that there are too many people who don't know each other and are under too much stress in too small an area. They all get too self-centered. I mention that they don't know each other because, in my experience, the more detached you are from someone, the easier it is to be mean to them. (You'll take much more abuse working at a call center than in a grocery store and more there than in a place where you just have a few regular clients.) So the airlines cram as many of us as possible into a small, noisy spaces like cattle and make us pay for tiny bags of stale peanuts. It's really a wonder there isn't more violence in air travel!

For example, some guy had a weird shaped carry-on that occupied an entire overhead bin (that should have held 3 people's bags). I wasn't seeing any place to put mine, so I was trying to re-angle his so mine would fit in some weird way, and the guy snaps at me that it isn't going to turn (instead of maybe apologizing for taking up so much space or explaining why it needed to be in that position) and I snapped back that they shouldn't have let him take it on the plane (instead of maybe apologizing for messing with his stuff or explaining what I was doing). Of course, it didn't help that I had been talking on the phone to financial institutions before getting on the plane. There isn't much to make a person crankier than that :( Sometimes it is such a pain to have a life! Anyway, I was super grumpy all day.

Now, this has all been true during the entire time I've been flying. I think the big change is that flying is no longer new and novel and it is no longer associated with such good things. Before the last year, I flew maybe once a year on my way to my big, fun, relaxing, exciting vacation. Now I fly more to visit family and for business - which I enjoy, don't get me wrong, but it isn't exactly fun vacations - so it has less of the happy glow about it. Sad. One more thing growing up has ruined for me.

On that note, I'm going to sign off and contemplate getting behind Ep's plan to indiscriminately kill half the population of the world...