Airplanes and a few notes.

I was on one of those flights from Boston to Philadelphia where everyone is a business traveler. It was delayed, and then the plane had to drive around for a while before we took off, and there was turbulence, and then after we landed the jetway was too far away because the pilot hadn't hit just the right mark, etc. ad nauseum. It's US Air, it's air travel in general, these things happen. (I tend to take a bizarrely Buddhist approach to airflight. I know it's hard to imagine.)

This time, though, I was near to choking someone. It wasn't the delays. It was the rolling jokes. One business person way up in first class would say something incredibly urbane like "Hey, are we going to drive there?" About thirty seconds later, having somehow missed this first iteration, another person would make the same joke. And so on, and so forth, back to the last seats of the airplane. I heard the same complaints thinly disguised as witty comments from the front of the plane, working back to the rows in front of me, next to me, and behind me, movnig back to the end of the plane, rolling like waves. Not as cooling or refreshing as waves, though. Just annoying.

I was seated next to a man who works on flu vaccines. Apparently the vaccines are made in the summer before they're needed, and there's a lot of business around guessing exactly how much flu vaccine they'll need. The science is sort of neat, especially since I hadn't thought about it before; there's a new strain or a different strain of flu every year (which is why you have to get the shot every year), and they use things like the experiences of other countries in order to predict what strain they'll have to deal with and how problematic it will be. After that, he asked me what the journal article I was reading was about, and then very sweetly segued into a conversation about women's basketball when it became apparent that I study complete horseradish. (I was reading an article on the intersection between Badiou's concept of the event and Lacan's definition of the object a. Hell, I don't even understand it.)

In the flight from Buffalo to Boston, our flight attendant was very new. She was very sweet, very polished looking, older. Her nails were absolutely perfect, but her shoes were just a little bit too big, like she'd had to buy them last minute. She forgot where we were travelling from at first while she was on the intercom, then stumbled over the rest of the speech and said something like "I hope you enjoyed your fright with us."

The visit to Buffalo was informative, high-intensity, and only made my decision harder. That's all I'll say about that for now.

I wanted to post to say good luck at Nashville to my teammates, and I hope you kick butt and enjoy yourselves. Don't forget sunscreen.