getting there.

Oh, flying.

I know we’ve come a long way since the Wright brothers hung in the sky for a hot second and wowed the world, as they should, but man, either my legs are too long or budget cuts have resulted in not only five or six pretzels thrown your way during a flight across the country, but also enough space to keep a small seven year old quite comfortable. Not full, mind you, considering the rationing of food, but at least comfortable.

But right, I know. My legs are too long. I’ll work on that. That’s on my list of things to do and I think it’s number three, right after telling the world My Life Plan, down to the minute, as well as reliving the past six months cause that was fun.

But the funnny thing about that tiny bag of pretzels is the amount of joy it brings me. And when somebody nearby declines it? It’s like alarm bells go off in my head, something to signal that Something’s Terribly Wrong cause why would anyone turn down a bag of five miniature pretzels? When they are free (sort of)! And dinner!

In fact, my sister only ate half her bag, meaning there were roughly two and a half still in there. And when she said I could eat them, I was excited about it. Embarrassingly so.

And I also think it’s interesting being stuck together with a bunch of people for a pretty long time. You wouldn’t turn to fifty or so strangers and invite them on a road trip to Nova Scotia (can you even road trip to there? I don’t know), but that’s what we do when we fly. Except for the whole ending up in Nova Scotia part. Unless you’re flying there, which I’m not. But maybe I will. Unless it’s the kind of place that you can road trip to–then, I should probably do that. With fifty or so strangers. All of whom have legs that are too long and live off of tiny bags of even tinier pretzels and pretend that they’re free even though we just paid out the nose for the seat that doesn’t have enough leg room. But, I digress.

And today the guy across from our aisle pointedly looked at me and mouthed a word. I get nervous when people do this because I suspect I am not the best lip reader around and sometimes the ones doing the…what’s it called? lip speaking? Hmmm. Well, you know–when they mouth something to you, they get frustrated and impatient and start to act like they unfortunately chose the one idiot in their nearby vicinity to communicate with when you just can’t understand what they’re saying. But you’re trying, goodness knows, you’re trying with all your powers of comprehension.

Anyway.

This time I got it on his second try. “Pen,” he said, with an accompanying and handy flourish of his wrist that was hovering over imaginary paper. So I told him I’d look and then proceeded to not find one, which was disappointing because honestly? I really like to help people, even just by giving them a pen. It makes me happy to supply a need and maybe that is why I can sometimes stick around longer than I should because I believe that somebody needs me. But then I realize that you can be used dreadfully and hey, you should probably keep your own pen from now on, at least when it comes to some and at least when you’re not really talking about pens anymore.

So my sister Jenna then looks for something, finds a pencil, and hands it to him. He tells her thank you and then cranes his neck to thank me. Which was strange, since I didn’t actually do anything, but oh well. There are worse things than being thanked superfluously.

But then when he gave the pencil back to Jenna, he said thank you again. Jenna said you’re welcome and then he kept thanking her. She was like, “Yeah. You’re welcome.” At which point he was like, “No. I’m TRYING to thank her!” And motioned to me. Which is when I put his profuse gratitude to rest by saying you’re welcome. And then Jenna mentioned to me that he was really weird, that she was the one who was actually helping him, and that I had really done nothing. Good points, all of them. And then we laughed.

And now we’re all in Alanta, waiting to fly again and this time end up in Los Angeles and who knows what will happen between now and then? Something interesting, at the very least, because say what you want about life, but it is always interesting, I think.