Reading Habits of Aerial Doom

I've recently returned from a vacation to scenic Lake Tahoe. This involved flying on a big jet plane that make big, big noise high in mighty blue sky four times, with connecting flights through Denver both heading west and east, and I used this tedious time as an opportunity to check out the reading habits of those around me. Or, lack thereof. I saw a few books, a few magazines, and a few e-readers. Mostly people just sat staring straight ahead into the TV monitors on the plane, even the kind that just showed commercials for two hours if you didn't pay $7.99 for Direct TV. You could turn off the TVs but for some reason several folks did not, as if they could somehow blank out the screens about a foot from their faces or as if the visual stimuli they were absorbing simply did not matter.

Some people prefer to just sit there, bored as shit and proud, somehow, in their boredom, like Sacrificial Boredom Lambs. Me? I spent some time reading a New Yorker double issue, some time perusing the in-flights mags (they had my white noise machine listed!), but most of the time I listened to music on my iPod classic, which now has about 500 albums on it. The upper-middle age lady beside me on one flight, SHE OF THE PUSHY, INTRUSIVE ELBOWS, was playing Angry Birds on her phone while eating apple slices.

She was sending birds flying WHILST FLYING HERSELF!

Amazing.


(Lake Tahoe from space.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Belated happy birthday! Hope you had a good one.
N

David Oppegaard said...

Thanks dude! I did indeed.

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