Why I Like Flying

The following entry was written off-line on:
Wednesday, 5-25-05 at 6:30 AM

Some people hate flying.
I love it.
I love having free time with nothing expected of me and no one knowing me. I used to enjoy long conversations with strangers on planes. (Later after writing this entry I enjoyed joining a fellow passenger in heckling or “guiding” a person in rearranging the bags in the overhead bins.)
I hate the way people stress out in airports. Once I saw a man so angry about a delayed flight that he yelled and woke up his baby until it was screaming.
But while people stress out I enjoy my separateness from them. I love being calm and low-key when others aren’t.
Coming and going is often hard for me. But flying provides a netherworld transition between the coming and the going.
I’m writing this in the Vancouver airport. It’s fairly quiet, not too many people are here. So I’m tormenting myself with worry about how this airport will be DIFFERENT from the one in Phoenix or JFK, the two other airports I’ll visit today. I sure can’t look forward to an enormous stuffed moose with an RCMP hat in any of those U.S. places. (Of course, I didn’t see one here either. But if I were to see it, this is where.)
Goodbye smug Canadian pride.
Hello noisy American arrogance.

I’m reminding myself that every person I’ll see today is an individual.