travelogues: san diego, #1 -- tales from the whale's vagina

as i said yesterday, i recently went on a vacation to san diego. it was my first time on a plane. and, come to think of it, my first time inside an airport.

jackie and i woke up around 4:30 a.m. on a sunday and left for o'hare right away. as it happened, it was the first day of daylight savings time, so it was actually 3:30. that's usually about when i'm going to bed on saturday night/sunday mornings, so i was pretty disoriented.

o'hare is huge and labyrinthine and complicated. it's kind of amazing that people can design and operate something on such a large scale and make it work within reasonably acceptable margins. especially when you consider people also do things like this.

i've heard so many horror stories about aiport security that i was braced for the worst, but it was surprisingly painless. the whole thing took maybe 15 minutes, likely due to the ungodly hour at which we were passing through.

the real horror was the airport starbucks, where a medium chai tea and a blueberry scone somehow cost $9.

we walked around for a while before boarding. i browsed an airport shop and found precisely zero items i wanted to read on the plane (other than "twilight" *swoon*). also, i never realized pornos are actually sold at airports. i always thought that was just a joke and it seems really unfunny and sad now that i know it's true.

i'd be lying if i said i wasn't a little nervous while the plane maneuvered toward the runway before taking off. but i found the tremendous speed of taking off and the weird feeling when the front of the plane lifted from the ground to be kind of exhilarating.

it was extremely cloudy when we took off and all i could see was just heavy, opaque whiteness. it felt oddly claustrophobic considering that in reality there was nothing there except open sky. i really liked looking out the window once things cleared up... it gives you an interesting sense of perspective and scope when you can see how things are laid out.

even so, flying was a weird experience. you're inside a relatively fragile aluminum tube 35,000 feet above the ground traveling at 600 miles per hour. the idea that some minor thing could go wrong and send me plummeting to a fiery and inescapable death was often in the back of my mind... but it's difficult to feel nervous when small children are calmly coloring right behind you, so i was ok.

that being said, the scariest part of the flight by far was when an older man sitting in the aisle seat reached over to shake jackie's hand and introduce himself as "don."

"what the hell is he doing?" i thought. "is it normal for people to introduce themselves on planes?"

i then noticed don was wearing a baseball cap that said "JESUS is my boss." my eyes moved down to his bright green t-shirt, which was stretched tight across his huge pot belly and had a bastardized sprite logo that said something about the holy spirit. one would think copyright infringement is a sin, but whatever.

"oh no... oh fuck..." i thought, as don turned his attention toward me. "is he going to try to talk to us? is he going to proseltyze to me for the entire four hour flight?! i'll throw myself out the hatch."

my listless handshake and frigid greeting must have broadcast that i didn't want conversation. i immediately shrank away, put on my ipod and buried my face in my book.

fortunately, don seemed unperturbed and occupied himself with the in-flight presentation of the keanu reeves version of "the day the earth stood still" and an entire box of cheez-its. i didn't hear from him for the rest of the flight, but he apparently kept stealing jackie's arm rest.