Airplane Reading.

Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich are moderating over at Airplane Reading.

***

Here’s how I feel about planes. Don’t fall. Don’t fall. Don’t fall.

Otherwise the view is fine, except when there are clouds which are not light and not fluffy and not shaped like anything whatsoever.

Also, it’s good they have those sliding things that block the windows because otherwise the view is either way too bright or overly depressing except for when there aren’t any clouds and you are low enough to look straight down and see things.

Why don’t they have a camera in the nose of the plane? A pointable camera, with a joystick that allows you to point it, natch. Then you could zoom and pan without having to look over the person sitting next to the window and make sure your shoulders don’t touch.

They have Modern Family, after all. And they have games. And sometimes they have Internet service, but I think you still have to pay by sliding your card through one of those things like the ones they use in European restaurants.

I do think it’s a good idea to make you pay in whole numbers though. Change is a bad thing in an airplane because you have to slide around and twist to get your hand in your pocket. And sometimes if you bang the bottom part of your thumb just right it makes you unclench your fist and the change drops and then what.

Have you ever had to look for a dropped contact lens on an airplane? It’s like you have to clear out three rows and there’s always someone sleeping under a blanket. A contact lens can get caught on one of those fuzzy blankets and get carried off the plane.

I usually take the blankets with me, by the way.

I like those back-of-the-seat elastic compartments because you can push your trash way down to the bottom and then nobody knows it’s there when they ask you to put your trash in the plastic bag, which they do way too early since they have to do it like six times including when everyone is supposed to be buckled in.

Do you leave your seatbelt loosely buckled in case of turbulence like the pilots in the cockpit do?

I don’t.

Do you believe that cops give you a ticket now for not wearing a seatbelt in your own car? It’s an authoritarian country basically.

I never tilt my seat back. It’s not like it goes very far anyway, like two inches or something. But you can seriously wreck somebody’s knees in those two inches. It’s a privilege I’m not willing to take and I frown upon those who do, but they never see because of course they are not looking.

WHACK! Right into the knees.

If I get a good seat, I’m usually happy. It is so good to be waiting, sitting on the carpeted terminal floor with a zillion other people, with every single plug-in taken, and you can maybe get a bathroom stall only after standing in an awkward line with your little rollaway thing, and then you do the little miniature zigzag that allows you to get inside the little stall, and you shut the door and you lock the door just to get away from all the people, and then you get on the plane and you are like so lucky to have an aisle seat with nobody in the middle.

You have an aisle seat with nobody in the middle!

And there’s some person at the window who is propped up on an elbow at the window and looking the other way with no bags and your bag can go in the middle and your legs can stretch out and even stretch further into the aisle because it looks like nobody else is coming down the aisle.

It is all so good.

Like the nightmare of all time would then be if right before the doors close this huge fat guy in a tank top with upper-arm shoulder hair sort of like that sidekick guy in My Name is Earl but much much bigger comes in with two big shopping bags like from Macy’s or Ikea or something and gives that little grin and nod that means would you unstretch your legs please and let my hugeass thighs bump through your knees to my middle seat which I bought with some kind of groupon offer so that I can auction cars in New Jersey and oh is this your bag where my flipflop feet would otherwise go and oh I forgot to put my bags in the overhead so the stewardess can take them after they pass right by your nose and oh I got lunch in there which is something like a melted cheese something sandwich in a see-through plastic container with a plastic fork and a salt packet from some godawful place like Hardee’s.

Live that nightmare once or twice.

I drink ginger ale. Every single time. I don’t drink ginger ale anywhere else, but on a plane that’s what I do.

Advertisement