Over the past 168 hours of my life, I've slept for about 43 of those hours and logged about 103 hours of work. This leaves just over three hours each day where I have had free time; but unfortunately for me, at least an hour or so of said free time was put toward my commute to and from whichever work I happened to be heading to and from.
Which is probably why, when I woke up at the Kansas City airport this evening, I thought my plane was still patiently waiting its turn, grounded on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport in New York City. Actually, that's a bit of an exaggeration of how tired I was, for I didn't sleep through the entire flight, but bear with me for the truth is quite possibly worse; I woke up with about an hour left to go in the flight and only after 20 minutes had passed did I realize that we were not in fact just "sitting there" and that we were in fact flying. I guess I had lost my sense of kinetic motion.
To my credit, it was pitch black outside and the windows were fogged, and it was also a buttery smooth flight. To my discredit, I couldn't for the life of me figure out why my phone service (up there at 25,000 ft) was so horrendous, so much for not interfering with airline communication signals and such... I'm sure someone up there intercepted the text that I was trying to send my mother: "It is 9:20 and we are STILL on the tarmac. They are trying to appease us by serving us the fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies early. I won't forgive so easily." The text also contained the following photo of my tray table.
I figured out we were in the air when the flight attendant informed us we were about to begin our descent into Kansas City. A startling revelation to sleepy little me.
I am happy to say that I am in bed now in Kansas City, and without having sustained too much grief from my mother. So far, she has told me to take my vitamins, to not be single at the age of 40, to try to be more photogenic in pictures, and to eat some pie leftover from the Thanksgiving that I missed--apple and pumpkin with some whip cream from a can. Mmmm.
Being away from work has given me time to look up a couple of things online that I have been meaning to look up. Mostly, they've been vocabulary words that I had run across in my reading renaissance (reading is making a comeback for me... I've basically been illiterate for the past year). But the most important search query was to satisfy a hunch I've had since my commute to work this morning. I was standing next to a guy that resembled the picture that Junot Diaz had provided on the back of his book, The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, which is the most recent book to fatally convince me that I should attempt a career as a sci-fi/fantasy novelist. I observed him typing away on his mobile device, typing something too voluble to be a mere text; plus, it couldn't be a text, because we were underground where there is no service (contrast this to me typing furiously on MY mobile device 25,000 ft in the air, where the girl sitting next to me must have been wondering the same thing).
Well, after searching for his photos online, I have concluded, without question, that I was in fact standing right next to Junot Diaz this morning for a good five minutes, which in hindsight, I can treat as really inspiring or really depressing. For the difference between writers like him and writers like me is that while Junot Diaz, my new sci-fi idol was covering the face of his mobile device with the blood, sweat and oil from the tips of his fingers, I, idle-handed, stared at the side of his head and just wondered if he was who I thought he was. Well, he was, and now I feel like a fool. Junot Diaz may not think me a fool, but I know that I have made a fool of myself in front of Junot Diaz.
Time to sleep off the humiliation, here in the heartland, where my mother can entertain me with all sorts of different filial humiliation rites in the morning. It will get all my real concerns and anxieties off my mind, for at least the weekend.
No comments:
Post a Comment