Overboard

Suddenly, after more than a year or so, I have begun to write entries for this blog again, starting with this one.  Especially due to my resigning from my position at Curtis School, several people have told me that they wished I had a blog, and since I already had one, the solution was to go back to writing in it, and I have accepted that that is a good idea!   I am thankful and pleased that they would like to keep in touch, as I would them, and in a way, this might be keeping in touch in a deeper way than the stolen moments of camaraderie made during normal working days.

As I have been saying goodbye, I have had the feeling that I may actually be seeing some people more, now (meaning, that moving away from a frequent connection with people you know from your workplace and instead coming closer to them in an outside setting, it is like "travel"), similar to how in your normal routine of living in a city (because you feel you can do this at any time), you never get around to enjoying some of the aspects of your own city, such as going to the museums, or, in my case here in Los Angeles, going to the beach.  And isn't going to the beach one of the reasons we live here (along with the weather, and the high-paying job possibilities)?  I don't think I have been to the beach here for about five years!  My "beaching" has been in Maui, the Exuma Keys of the Bahamas, the Amalfi Coast in Italy and several amazingly gorgeous beaches in Sardinia, some hidden beaches in the island mazes of Palau, and most exposed to water on both sides, my vacation by the lagoon of Fakarava, a coral atoll in the Tuamotos of French Polynesia.  In fact the only recent time I have been in the ocean "here" was in the water at one of the Channel Islands across from Ventura, which required taking a boat to get over there.  As far as beaches go, I may as well be living in Kansas if all the beaches I go to I travel to!

Peculiarly, though, on this last trip that I took, a week-long Caribbean Cruise out of Miami to Nassau, Puerto Rico, and St. Maartin, I didn't actually get into the water at any beach on an excursion (I opted for city tours, instead), but I did swim in each of the three swimming pools that were on board the ship.  My favorite of the ship's three pools (there was a fourth one I didn't count that was off-limits except for extremely VIP passengers) was the adults only pool.  I didn't decide it was the best pool because it didn't have children; happy children enjoying a pool is an enhancement for me.  For example, when I was in Exuma several years ago and swimming in the hotel's swimming pool, there were always in the water a young brother and sister and their older sister (who, with all her maturity, could have been their mother, but she actually was in high school).  All three of them were extremely appealing, personality wise, and sort of artsy/genius in their demeanor.

Even though it was daytime, the swimming pool light was on all the time and the little boy, who wore a snorkeling mask whenever he would get into the pool, liked to dip under water and look at the lighted pool light and then rise up to announce what color he had seen, as the colors were changeable.  The younger of his sisters informed me that there was a rotation of three colors.  So the boy would slip under water, look at the light, and then pop back up to announce that it was red.  Then he would slide under again, inspect the light and then pop back up to let us know that it was now blue.  Then he went back to red, and then back to blue in his announcements.

After several rounds of this, I said to his little sister, "I thought you said there were three colors, but he only tells us about two."  The girl looked at her brother, who had a marvelous name, but I have now forgotten it, darn it, something like "Mergatroyd", I kid you not, and she said, "Mergatroyd,  tell him what the third color is."

He looked at her for a moment, as if to say, "Are you sure?", as if there were some reason that he should not tell me what the color was, and she nodded that he was to tell me, and then he looked at me and studied my face for a rather long moment as if he were attempting to divine whether or not he could actually reveal to me this precious piece of information.   After a while, he said, "bumble bee."

"Bumble bee?", I responded, "that is the third color, bumble bee, or are you saying that there is a bee under there?"  The boy nodded in affirmation, that's the color, and then sank down under the water to look at the light again, waited long enough for the colors to go through their rotations, and then popped back up and announced, "Yep, it is bumble bee."

The big sister said to me, "Mergatroyd has his own color scheme.  He observes the world with unwavering  accuracy; is completely honest and not given to a need to simplify his observations to conform with the expectations of others."

The next time I was in the pool, I brought along my scuba mask, which had lenses made in my glasses prescription.   The day before, I really couldn't have looked at the pool light myself because without my glasses, things are a blur and would especially be under the water.  I went straight for that underwater light and as I held by breath under water, I saw the red color, that completely turned every facet of the light's lenses into a brilliant and beautiful red.  The entire affect at the moment was one total redness.  Then the light clicked into blue, and it was similar to the red, only this time, every facet of the light's lenses burned a powerful blue light.  Then the color clicked again, but this time, only half of the lenses, every other one, were bathed in a brilliant yellow.  All the other, unlighted ones, seemed to shine out a diamond-like glistening and in the core of the those lenses was a metallic blackness that must have been the electronic components that plugged each facet into the fixture as a whole, which view was overpowered when the lenses were red or blue.

So there as plain as my eyes could make it, was an alteration of yellow and black, interspersed with a gossamer flicker of bumble-bee like wings; there could not possibly have been a different name for that "color" than the name Mergatroyd and given it, "bumble-bee"!  Oh how spectacular, oh Mergatroyd, how I salute you!

On the heels of this discovery of mine, the three children then happened to come out for their swim and the big sister took up her usual tanning spot on the chaise lounge near the water's edge, while the two younger kids slipped into the water.  I showed the big sister my goggles that I was now holding in my hand and said, "I saw the third color, and it was for sure bumble bee!" and she said, "Told ya."  As for Mergatroyd, his having fully gotten the pool light's number, was now deeper under water with his goggles, exploring whatever there was that was going on with the pool drain.

So children can add the spice that enhances the experience for me, but for the parents of children, it would be the adults only pool where finally they can rest, relax, and talk with me if they want, so I found I liked the adult pool the best, not because I wanted "no children", but because parents could enjoy the relief of not having to worry about their children and they were free to socialize with other adults.  So I made several friends in that pool.  The little kids had their own "Jungle" area on an upper deck which was replete with various slides, fountains, showers, and water canons that they could squirt each other with, all under professional shipboard staff supervision.

The problem with the biggest pool of the ship was that the crowd of people would take up nearly every chaise lounge.  I'd always easily find a vacant lounge at the adult's only pool.

There was a third pool, on yet another deck, one that could be indoors if the ceiling over it was closed, or half open, the way they had it when I tried it out.  Since I had gotten a second degree blistering sunburn on my face during the two hours in Miami that I had ridden on the upper deck of the "Big Bus" tour bus without a hat or any kind of sunblock (who knew I needed that, the day was overcast and almost no one else was wearing any kind of protection), I figured I would only use the pool that had a roof over it so that I could avoid even more sun.  But yikes, something about the water in that devil of a pool was like pouring acid into my eyeballs!  I guess maybe they had put in way too much chlorine, or something; whatever it was, I jumped back out of there and immediately went to one of the numerous fresh-water showers dotted all around and soaked my eyeballs better than if I were using an eyewash in a chemistry lab.  Never again did I use that pool, and saw to it that instead I wore my wide-brimmed hat that I bought in Nassau for when I was out in the sun anywhere on that cruise.

But the water that this blog entry is meant to be about is the Caribbean ocean that I would see, and enjoy from the various vantages of the ship.  Gloriously, I had a balcony cabin, the first time I have had that (instead of an "ocean view" cabin).

Speaking of water, I had made the mistake of buying a sparkling water drink package.  I had been avoiding for quite a while prior to the cruise (and still, today) plastic food and drink containers and will no longer drink out of a plastic water bottle unless there is absolutely no other choice. At home I got rid of all my plastic water bottles, using glass only, and for the office, I had only metallic water bottles.  What I am avoiding is the plastic that mimics estrogen and I have read several articles that said all plastic packaging will deposit much unwanted estrogen-mimmics into the bodies of men, and it is even dangerous to women who want estrogen in their bodies, but not too much.

The regular drink packages on this cruise ship were ridiculously expensive.  I'm too lazy at the moment to look up what the actual cost was, but for the unlimited drink package to be a good deal for me, I would have to drink something like 13 alcoholic drinks every single day.  Since I expected to drink maybe no more than two drinks a day, the cheapest option was to just pay full price for the drinks.  What ended up being my normal alcohol consumption was about two and a half drinks per day, which means two drinks one day and three drinks another day. But prior to seeing what my actual drinking quantity was, I figured that I mostly would be drinking water, and in order to avoid getting the plastic, I figured I would drink San Pellegrino, which I had only seen in glass bottles.

Wrong!  All the San Pellegrino they had on this ship was in plastic bottles, the very thing I wanted to avoid.  And as it all evolved, I found myself getting wine at dinner, instead of drinking the San Pellegrino.  And that damned sparkling water drinks package involved about 15 large size San Pellegrino bottles, so that meant two full bottles of sparkling water every day.  I figured I would be drinking water by the gallon like I do at home ("still" water that I purify and store in glass bottles), but somehow on the ship one bottle of sparkling water did for about two days for me, kept cool in the cabin refrigerator.

My table's waiter in the dining room had a remarkable memory, such as he always remembered that the woman sitting at our table wanted to order from the gluten-free menu, so every night he blessedly brought her the gluten free menu.  Me, he remembered as the man who drank the San Pellegrino, so the minute I sat down at the table, he would be over there with a big smile and a fresh new bottle of San Pellegrino, that he insisted on opening for me and then pouring with a flourish as if it were the finest wine, and he also had this little device that would process and then void the San Pellegrino bottle ticket from the drinks ticket booklet.

But then around the third or fourth day on the cruise, our table was given free champagne for each one of us and that did it, from then on, I had a taste for some kind of wine (or champagne) each dinner, which meant that I no longer really needed the San Pellegrino (that I had already paid for) as my dinner beverage.  The next day after the free champagne (clever trick, wasn't it--whetting our addiction like that!), the waiter brought my bottle of San Pellegrino (and his hand was out for the little ticket to void in his device), when I said, "No, I will have some wine tonight, instead, so no thank you for the bottled water this time."  Well, his understanding of English was not up to the standard of his memory...he thoroughly new me as the San Pellegrino man, and my saying, "No thank you, I don't want it tonight, you can take it away," or any other variation on that theme did not stop the opening of the bottle with a flourish and then his elegantly pouring it into my glass.  Okay, so the San Pellegrino is clearly an unchangeable "definite" and "always" in this waiter's routine with me.  And I swear, that MSC Cruise Ship (and truly I did and do very much LOVE it, so I am not really complaining) could have suddenly turned into a Disney Cruise Ship as far as I was concerned, and my waiter could have put on a Mickey Mouse robe with stars and galaxies emblazoned on it and donned the Sorceror's black and white pointed hat and commanded a platoon of enchanted broomsticks, because it got so that he was like "da dum dumpiti dumpti dumb de dumb dumpiti dumb de dumb" with that San Pellegrino water and soon enough the whole large dining room seemed to be awash with sparkling water and we all were floating away in a tsunami of relentless San Pellegrino!  I took to screwing the cap back onto the bottle and taking it to have during the big show later, but I still had so much of it left that I would sit outside on my balcony and watch the sea as I drank it, unless I went to a dance or a party or to a movie on the deck or to my favorite of all the lounges to hear the Bossa Nova music or to drink a martini, or, heaven forbid, go to the chocolate place and...but we won't talk about THE CHOCOLATE PLACE where I surely did very much sin, Father....

I alluded to this already.  From every vantage point, the ocean water was enchanting. Walking up on one of the high decks, the water below was entrancing.  And so it also was walking on the various glass walkways that curved off and out beyond the actual decks of the sides of the ship so that you were walking on glass directly over the water, the water below was mesmerizing, as was going to the very rear of the ship and up to the highest deck where they also had a clear glass curving walkway out and over the stern and walking over the water below, a feature they called "The Bridge of Sighs", which I think they figured most passengers would interpret romantically, such as the sighs of lovers and their mutual contentment, but I have been to Venice and I know that the Bridge of Sighs crosses over a quiet canal from the Doges's palace to a terrible dungeon and so the actual "sighs" of that bridge are the sighs of the prisoner who realizes that his one quick glance out the window on that bridge is the very last time he will see the outdoors for the rest of his life.  I marvel over the concept of designers who know the reality but purposely give a name to a feature that truly means nothing that applies to what they are trying to imply.  Still, in a actual use, the water below those over-water walkways was entrancing.

But even with all this, no view of the water was quite as alluring as the water you could see while sitting on your own private balcony with a bottle of San Pellegrino (or some other beverage) in your hand and a cool breeze gently blowing your hair as you watched the blue water swash by and periodically there would be little currents of white caps and other intricate pasterns that were like a siren's song, luring you into the cool embrace of the delicious and wonderful water below.  I literally would feel its pull, like it was calling "why don't you just jump right in, this water will feel so fantastic, it would be ecstasy to experience this floating embrace, just try it, you wouldn't regret it for the rest of your life...."

Then I would suddenly shudder and think, what are talking about, what are you thinking, this isn't like standing on the sandy ocean's edge in Maui where you can walk into knee deep refreshing water and feel the gentle surge and pull of the waves and then settle down in the incoming surf and ride the water movements back and forth like a baby swinging in a bathinette.  This beautiful water that you are looking at, splashing and sparkling so seductively, is fathoms deep and who knows what sea creatures with merciless jaws might be right under there, ready to chew you down in three razor-sharp bites.  That is HELL down there, especially at this hour when most people on this ship are partying somewhere not in their cabin until much later tonight and as you with panic realize what you had done, it would be way too late, nothing to grab onto as this immense ship, like an entire New York skyscraper lying down on its side on the water, plummets relentlessly forward with over 5,000 passengers, not one of them seeing you desperately treading water in this surging ocean next to the only chance you have at saving your life, with rapid knots speeding away from you, leaving you in an immense merciless sea, alone.

Shudder shudder shudder, I actually did have thoughst like that, like how there really was a siren call tempting me into a fantasy that at least I wasn't mentally ill enough to give into, but even the mere thought of such a thing calling like that made me make a pact with myself, promise me you don't do something foolish!  Well of course I wouldn't do it, I wouldn't climb overboard or take one fantastical leap without a thought of what would happen in two minutes after I finally came to my senses, too late, or too too too, oh God, what I am going to DO, too late?  This whole fantasy stream had one purpose, to warn me, to put me into alert so that nothing like that would ever happen.

I had even experienced that one time walking across the Golden Gate Bridge and stopping halfway to look over across the golden bay at the sparkling fairyland of San Francisco off in the near distance. Until I had stopped right there on the sidewalk of the very bridge where so many people actually do kill themeless by jumping off, I used to think the whole concept of it was horrifying, but being there on site, I could see that it doesn't seen horrifying at all.  The entire view is so glorious and wondrous.  the expected danger of the bay below instead looks benign, even friendly, gently inviting you to a fantastic angelic leap into space and then the cushioning softness of the water waiting below.  I had to literally push myself way away from the barricade, not that I was afraid that I would actually leap off the bridge, but that I could see how beautiful it seemed in contrast to the fear I would have imagined, and the awareness that it wasn't a suicide's misery at life so great that no potential or perceived danger was too horrible to trade for a final exit out of this life, but instead it could look so good to someone whose life is so bad that they couldn't contemplate another day of it.  If a person is in such a state, how can they fight it if they actually get up here to this spot?  It was that that scared me so.

There is a man I like to watch regularly on YouTube, Don, of Don's Family Vacations.  He specialty is cruises, what to do, what not to do, which cruise lines are better than others for the particular things you want to do, he is quirky and nice and I like him.  Well, tonight he talked about a woman who supposedly had "accidentally fallen" off the rear of a Norwegian Cruisline ship in the Mediterranean.  She did not have a life preserver of any kind, just her regular clothes, and she was out there for ten lone hours, treading water, without any reasonable hope of getting rescued.  How could somebody stand to be in a situation like that?

But she was ultimately rescued and claimed to be extremely thankful for that rescue.  But Don, telling this story, said it seemed to him that there have been more "accidentally falling overboard" on cruise ships than he had remembered happening before. He asked his audience if they felt that there were more overboard fallings than usual, and did his readers think people really were actually falling overboard, or were they really attempting suicide, but then regretted it as they struggled out there in the vast ocean, treading water, and therefore became grateful if they were rescued, never revealing that it was they, themselves, who had put themselves in that a situation.

Well, I don't know, of course, but the concept of the whole thing petrified me, because I think of the impossible to bear fear and misery you would feel if you did put yourself out there and then changed your mind once you had done it, with nothing to face, now, but the horrors of the vast, cruel ocean, no genuine hope of rescue, and no ability to stop the struggle to keep yourself alive, as exhausted and panicked as you now would be.

My question is, do more people "fall" overboard than have falls within the ship?  My view is that it is extremely difficult to actually "fall" overboard.  I don't think you can do it at all as an accident, unless you're seriously drunk and do something harebrained such as attempt to sit on the railing of your cabin's balcony and then accidentally slip off (trying to take a selfie!).  But just standing there on your balcony, or sitting in a chair with a drink in your hand, you aren't going to "fall" overboard any more than you would from your bed into the ocean from inside the cabin.  And if there happens to be more overboard fallings than "regular" falls such as on the various stairways, for example, inside the ship (if anyone is keeping track of such things), then I think that such overboard "accidents" would have to be suicide attempts that failed.

And that woman that Don was talking about, where she happened to fall, as she said, was at the stern of the ship (where, by the way, the churning of the ship's wake is particularly appealing, it looks like slipping into a huge benevolent Jacuzzi).  The special appeal of somehow going over the railing at the rear of the ship is that of all the places of a ship where you might be able to jump into the water, the area where there is the least chance that somebody would see you would be there at the rear, where its not like the sides where there are hundreds of balconies, many of which would have occupants who would see a body in the water and sound an alarm, the rear is where the least amount of people would be there to see anyone, and meanwhile, the ship is rapidly getting farther and farther away from the person the water.  I say that if a person truly wants to kill themselves by jumping off of a cruise ship and didn't want to be rescued, then the rear of the ship would be the best spot for that.

I think that woman did it on purpose, and how sad is that.  But she was rescued and she claimed to be very grateful.  I hope that is the truth.

Let me end on a positive note.  I think it is true that in moments of the worst danger, being stuck in what seems to be the most impossible situation, where there can't be any hope, instead of screaming one's head open in a moment of unbearable panic, there actually is a calm that washes over one and all time compacts and awareness tightly focusses on the most immediate tasks that have to be done.

Such as a man I read about who had been the only survivor of an airplane crash somewhere in Canada's Yukon.  He had never been anything like a Boy Scout and never even camped in his own backyard.  He was anything but an outdoorsman.  Yet he survived something like half a year out in the cold frozen North until the weather got to be better and somebody searching for him finally found him.

He was asked how he possibly could have survived this.  He explained this concentration of attention, where he focussed in on just one immediate step at a time and wasn't conscious of much of anything else.  It was almost animalistic:  "Warmth, need warmth," so he reasoned that parachute material that he was able to find in the crashed airplane could became his mobile shelter.  Water he needed, well, there was snow...you don't get a lot of water out of snow (I know all about that, trying to obtain water from snow when I was stuck in a blizzard in my house in the Sierra Nevada mountains for a week without electricity, telephone or water (because the water was electronically pumped up from a well).  I did have heat due to a word burning stove and many cords of split wood.  I joked that instead of the Zen principal of "chop wood, carry water", I said for me it was "carry wood and chop water".

The next thing in front of the man surviving northern Canada was food.  He could find lichens if he dug down under the snow.  It went on like this from day to day until his ultimate rescue.

For me, suddenly alone in a truly dangerous situation scuba diving in Australia (I was halfway down on my air so had to turn to go back to the boat, but my "dive buddy" refused to came back with me because she had plenty of air, so why waste the full amount of diving time that she had paid for?  She turned around to catch up with the rest of the divers, leaving me alone with no choice but to go back by myself.  But where exactly WAS the boat?

I had to rise up the surface so that I can see where the boat was, a shockingly large distance away, and I had discovered that there was a terrible storm up there on the surface of the ocean (which could not be felt 100 feet down below).  Very very dangerous.  But I kept the screaming panic at bay and did what the man in Canada had done...just one step at a time (in my case, one stroke at a time) whatever was in front of him to do.  For me, I had to get back to that boat.  I could not go back underwater like they tell you to do, because I was afraid I would lose sight of where the boat was.  So all I did was keep on swimming forward, no matter how many waves I had to fight and no matter how far it was.  The dive master had done an inexcusable thing and that was take the divers away from the boat with the current.  You are supposed to go against the current on your way out, so that you ride with the current when you are tired and lower on air and need to get back to the boat.  Well, this was just the opposite, so beyond the storm, I also had the strong current against me.  But I didn't analyze all the pieces, I just kept pressing on forward and not stopping until I got there.

I guess that woman alone out in the ocean for ten hours did the same thing...she just kept on swimming like her life depended on it...as it did depend on it.

The Noisening of America

Among all the other changes that we are enjoying or enduring these days, mostly somehow attached to technological changes, is what I am now thinking of as the "Noisening of America".  I do not know that that is intentionally detrimental, such as that the goal is to prevent the populace from having any thoughts of their own or to distract them from quieter, more private pursuits, but more and more that is the resultant affect.

What led me to determine this concept was that I took my car to my local Infiniti dealer for a major service, more than the usual and normal oil and oil filter change and tire rotation.  This one was going to be giving the car a thorough going over and changing a lot of things that do require changing, but less frequently, such as various belts and other filters, and who knows what other parts might be wearing out too soon.  Instead of being a, let's say, $40ish dollar service, it is more like a $700ish service, and, as it has turned out in my case, based on what additional parts need repairing, an extra $300ish, and then in addition to all that, an extra $1,700 repair that is most likely covered by the extended warranty (but, uh oh, maybe not, we will see), but even with the warranty coverage, involves a $50 deductible.

For my normal oil change type services, I have chosen to simply wait while they do the work.  That is not a situation that requires me being shuttled back home, or even worse, using a loaner car.  The dealer's waiting rooms were perfectly fine.

At the beginning of my using this dealer for my car service, they brilliantly had three different waiting rooms:  a "regular", what I call noisy, waiting room, with a TV and piles of magazines; a children's waiting room that had puzzles, games, and toys in it; and a third waiting room described as "the quiet" waiting room, which was, to me, a blessing found nowhere I else I have been to for waiting in quite a while, including doctor's offices, where what is king is always a TV being on.  To me, a TV is the brain killer, because while it makes noise, the noise isn't really quite loud enough for you to really hear it well enough to fully understand what is going on, so if, perhaps, it is a show you might actually want to watch, you can't actually enjoy it.  And beside that, you usually aren't going to be waiting in the waiting room for the complete duration of a program, which in order to enjoy properly, you would need to see from the beginning, and then stop waiting after it comes to an end.

But my Infiniti dealership had the choice of a quiet waiting room, so I could wait in peace, reading a book that I brought (what a concept, bringing a book with me, or even reading one at all; suddenly such a behavior seems to be an anachronism these days).

But, alas, three months ago, I had gone to my dealership for a more routine service and saw that they had gotten rid of the three-waiting rooms concept and now just had one large waiting room that not only had a brand new gigantic extremely high quality wide-screen TV, but some kind of "radio" playing music, a  WI-FI laptop bar (if you brought in your laptop or iPad) for doing work on your computer), and a free snack bar involving bottled water, different kids of coffee, and some sweet snacks.  This, they felt, was more appealing to "today's" Infiniti customer, who, apparently, isn't satisfied to sit quietly and read a book, but must have their eardrums vibrated and their gullet stimulated by food and drink constantly.

As for me, on that service visit three months ago, I found a quiet place in the main new car showroom to plop myself down and read the book that I brought.  Don't ask me why they had a seating arrangement in the car showroom; perhaps only one person in a couple would be interested in car shopping but not the other spouse, so they had a place to sit while their spouse was being shown all the features of the latest Infiniti models.  But for me, it was fine; I could sit there quietly and read and ignore all the shiny new Infiniti models.

Except that various salespeople kept coming over to me, thinking that I was a car-buying customer, cheerily asking if they could show me something.  When I said that I was there because my car was being serviced, their face would turn "crestfallen", no, I am not a sales prospect, and they would walk away downcast.  Nobody ever said, "Well, you know, you should be waiting in the service waiting room," they were too polite for that even if that was what they were thinking, but nevertheless, the "atmosphere" was that this was not a place where you were supposed to sit while getting your car serviced.  I am not describing this as being something wrong with this dealership, because I really do like this dealership and their service is excellent.  Instead, it is more of an issue of the economics involved with being a car salesman.  So it became uncomfortable to sit quietly and try to read when every ten minutes or so some car salesman would be getting his hopes up.

Also, it made finding me difficult for my service writer when my car was ready, who expected to see me in the (noisy) waiting room.

Well, today when I went there for what I should have known was going to be a longer service (three hours to be exact), I brought a new book I wanted to read, totally forgetting (or not quite believing) that they had gotten rid of the marvelous three-waiting-room concept.  After we discussed the service that I needed, my service writer asked me did I want a loaner car, or to have the shuttle take me back home, or was I simply going to wait in the waiting room.  I told him that first I was going to go across the street to get breakfast, and then I would come back and wait.  Then, suddenly, I remembered about the waiting room, so I asked him had they really gotten rid of the "quiet waiting room" (I hoped that they had brought it back...or that maybe they had created another one), but he officially confessed that, no, they had only the one.

After breakfast, when the time came for me to wait there, I realized that it was not going to be a relaxing experience.  I had not brought in a laptop, so I had no use for the WiFi laptop bar.  I did get a coffee from their machine, though.  I sat down on one the chairs in the waiting room, put my coffee on the end table next to me, and pulled out my book.  But the noise made it almost impossible to concentrate on the words. Yes, the TV was on, just enough to hear noise but not loud enough to understand what was being said.  The music playing otherwise (the radio, playing throughout the whole dealership) was louder than the TV volume, and loud enough to be distracting and conflicting (so you really couldn't enjoy either).

But, loudest of all (but the least objectionable of the three "noises") was a little boy.  Because, you see, not only was the quiet waiting room lost, but so was the children's room.  Now everybody was all together in the big room with the TV, the radio, and the snacks.

I first saw the little boy (and his dad) when I was getting my coffee.  The dad brought his little boy over to select for himself his choice of a cookie or a small doughnut.  The boy could barely stand tall enough to see these choices, but on tip-toe he did take a good long look at each offering until finally he proudly made his selection.  He held his chosen snack in his hands very carefully, and looked up at his father with utterly adorable and adoring eyes (my immediate thought was that the boy's mother must be one beautiful woman) and pronounced to his father what he had chosen, treating the treat as if it were a precious jewel.  It reminded me of a concept I developed from observing countless children at the school where I work, or flying on an airplane, or being at an amusement park--children like to have things in their hands.  It almost doesn't matter what it is, a stuffed toy, a ball, a cookie or a piece of candy, it seems that they aren't really "here", comfortable and secure, unless they have something in their hands.

The dad then wanted to get some coffee, waiting for me to get mine.  It was taking a while, so I said to the dad, "This machine not only brews the coffee, it picks it from the Colombian fields and roasts it for us."  He responded with something like, "It does it all for us," but then for some reason, his coffee came out instantly whereas mine had seemed to take forever.  Anyway, I sat down in the waiting room before they did, but soon after, they came and sat down right next to me.

The man also had a second little boy, but this one apparently wasn't feeling well, so he spent the entire time curled up in one of the waiting room chairs and never once made a single sound.

The man sat down and lifted the first boy up to hold him on his lap.  The boy had brought along with him a high-tech toy, a sort of child's iPad that played some kind of videos, had on it computer games, and I think some kind of basic educational content.  At any rate, it was enough to occupy this boy for nearly the three hours that we all sat there waiting for our cars to be serviced.  The boy talked the entire time, describing every single thing he saw on the iPad screen and every operation he was doing.  I never knew before that a child could and would do that, talk constantly for the entire time he is awake (and what a contrast to the other boy who never made a noise).  Continually punctuated among the boy's talking was the dad "shhhing" him, which was, of course, entirely ineffective.  It was actually so useless that I decided that it was not truly meant as a command, but that it was a display of fatherly embarrassment issued out to an anonymous crowd, as if to say "I am sorry that he is bothering you, but at least I realize that he is and am attempting to correct it."

I wanted so badly to say to the dad that the boy's talking is the least objectionable of all the noises that are going on in this waiting room.  Worse, to me, were the radio and the TV that were a constant noise, interfering with each other, while at least the boy's talk had a purpose and he was being so extremely cute and it was so great to see these moments between a little boy and his father, who clearly utterly loved each other and were having an essential interaction here on a Saturday morning.  The father's "shhhh" was more like the guards in the Sistine Chapel, shhhhh at all the tourists walking round with their heads craned up, looking at the Michelangelo-painted ceiling, the only difference being that in the Sistine Chapel, no tourist is saying a word, the only noise in there is all the guards saying "shhhh", whereas with the boy, listening to him was a pleasure.

I didn't get very far in my book.   Instead, my three hours was taken up reading a sentence, getting caught by something that appeared on the TV, and being entranced by how many times the little boy said the word "Daddy". That's got to be one of the most precious sounds that a father ever hears.

As it turned out, both the man with the boys, and I, needed more work than could be done in the three hours we had already waited.  The job the man needed required him to get a loaner car, since his car wouldn't be ready until Monday.  When it was my turn, my service writer said it would be another three hours due to the additional replacements they discovered I needed.  Well, I don't think I could endure the noisy waiting room for yet another three hours, so I chose having the shuttle take me home and then come pick me up again once my car is ready, later this afternoon.

Now that this shuttle service has been introduced to me, I think that is what I will be doing from now on, instead of waiting in the noisy waiting room.   The noisening of America has driven me out.  And this next generation, starting out so cute and with such adoring eyes, I wonder what kind of constant distraction they will be demanding?  I fear that no longer will "daddy", or even any human interaction, be enough to fill that potentially hungry maw.

Becoming a Minion

I realize today that I almost don't care what season it is, I just like the transformations. Summer, I am sure, really is my favorite season, but I enjoy so much this transformation into autumn and winter (they're kind of the same thing, here in Los Angeles). Maybe this past summer truly was too hot; certainly in Italy during Europe's heatwave it was unbearably hot (a co-worker of mine even complained that London was too hot this summer, so you know that heatwave was intense!). The heat in Italy would suck all the energy out of my body to the point where I could hardly even move by mid or late afternoon. To me the best example of that was what I am going to describe.

I was in the Vatican Museums, and that means that I was actually in the Vatican itself, and naturally one of the things I wanted to see in the Vatican was St. Peter's Square and the Basilica (those are like the main things to see there). I was even wearing long pants (in all that heat), because the Vatican will not allow you inside the Basilica wearing shorts. So I was certainly prepared, and suffering in that preparation for a visit to the Basilica.

I was in the Vatican Museums, because I was following the very accurate advice that if you want to get inside the museums without having to stand in a line outside for three hours in Saudi Arabian heat without one postage stamp of shade, you need to reserve your ticket in advance. So I figured I would see the Vatican Museums first, and then go the Saint Peter's afterwards.

"They say" that to follow the full Vatican Museums route is to end up walking five miles. They also have an abbreviated route that one can choose to follow, instead, that takes visitors to all the highlights. But I figured that since I was there, for heaven's sake, I would take the full route. And yes, I am glad I did. I think in what appears to be typical fashion for me, I end up enjoying something peculiar and off the beaten track, while the normal "highlights" can bore me.

I believe that there are some women at work who now subtly hate me, or at least have serious doubts about my standing as a human being, because I told them that seeing the Michelangelo statue of "David" in Florence was a "meh" experience for me. Well, that surprised me, too! After all, I had put Florence on my itinerary just to go see the statue of David. So I certainly expected to be bowled over by it. But honestly, I saw it at the end of the hall (surrounded by several thousand visitors) and I really just kind of shrugged my shoulders. I'm not sure why, but I think it is because I have already seen a picture of that statue ten thousand times, not to mention hundreds of reproductions everywhere. Really, seeing it in person was no big deal. It really felt no different than if I had seen a copy of it at the Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas (maybe I have seen that there, I don't remember). But yeah, there it was, pretty huge, and pretty solid marble, but it was still kind of a "so what". Okay, so I'm a Philistine (or some other kind of awful person).

There were some observations that I had upon looking at the statue of David, though, which I will share here.

People say that the statue is distorted, that David has a bigger head than he should have for the size of his body, and bigger hands, because Michelangelo was making a "statement", such as "the power of human intellect had now overtaken a simple faith in God," or something about "mankind's ability to remake the world" or whatever. And, yes, if you look at s straight-on photograph of the statue, you would think that the head was too large, and so on. But standing on the ground looking twenty feet up (or however tall that statue is) at his head, all the sizes are perfect. So I don't think Michelangelo had David's head "too big" to make a statement about human intellect, I think Michelangelo was an artist who understood visual perspective and ingeniously altered the more distant body part dimensions so that they looked perfect from where the viewer was standing.

This, by the way, was also helpful for the size of David's penis, that has long been considered shockingly small by people merely looking at a photo of the statue in an encyclopedia. But in person, that penis is closer to the eye than David's head (which had to be enlarged so that it would appear to be the right size when you see it from down below) and it is not a proportionally-too-small-penis at all, but one rather respectable for David, the Giant-killer.

Also, as long we are looking at that area (and who there isn't), I can't say that I am a huge fan of foreskins--sorry to all those people crying about how they were maimed when they were helpless little babies (although I thoroughly disagree with the concept of performing a circumcision without anesthetic, that's truly abusive) and now seek out surgery to make them "intact" again (isn't there something a whole lot more significant in life to worry about at this point than something like that?), so to my (Philistine) eye, a penis with a foreskin looks like the penis of an animal.

But Michelangelo, that artist! He made David's foreskin look like something truly lovely, like it was soft and sensitive and as pliable as a lily's petal, all wrinkled and kind of shy while at the same time manly and eager to please, how on earth did he do that by carving such delicateness out of marble! Now that amazed me, I will admit, and was actually well-worth seeing from an "art and skill appreciating" perspective. So I think if Michelangelo was making a statement about mankind with that statue, he was making it with that foreskin.

Or, even better than the foreskin, David's balls! Now, despite Michelangelo's skill with David's foreskin, I who was circumcised do not feel cheated, but I do feel cheated that I don't have those David balls. Those were like horse balls, or shotput balls; you could go bowling with those balls. They were as large as goose eggs and seemed to made of iron or steel. They seemed to be slung like pendulums swinging; I would almost go so far as to say that the slingshot-slung projectiles that killed Goliath were David's balls and all David had to do was stand there naked brandishing them and Goliath was a goner. That's how God helped David kill...he just gave him the best set of balls a man had ever had so that the lesser man simply gave up and said, "Okay, I give up, you, and all the people who come after you, win."

Okay, so maybe it looks like I got more out of seeing the statue of David than I was willing to admit, but my reaction wasn't like those two women at work, one of whom said the minute she saw David, she burst into tears, and the other one said that she thought the statue of David was the single most beautiful thing she had ever seen in her entire life and she just couldn't take her eyes off of him. Yeah, yeah, well, okay, it is a statue, don't go all Pygmalion on us or something. And I didn't think that a discussion on foreskin and balls would redeem myself in their eyes, so I just go on and let them hate me.

There were lots of other things in that museum in Florence that entranced me more, and I can say the same thing about the Vatican Museums, as well, where I really didn't have the patience to fully appreciate the Sistine Chapel ceiling (that Michelangelo actually hated painting), the seeing of which is the great climax of five miles of walking throughout museum corridors. And that was the hottest room of all, stuffy and suffocating, and kind of creepy in atmosphere. Filled with people craning their necks looking up at all the paintings (far too many of them, people or paintings), and benches filled with people studying all the details, all in perfect hushed silence, the only noise coming from the several guards that were constantly saying "shhhhhhhh!" If I lived in Rome, I would probably devote some more time to the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but somehow in that heat and with my legs tired and by then in agony, it just seemed silly to pretend. I can appreciate the historical value of it, and it was cool to see the actual things that Michelangelo painted or sculpted, and I am sure that there would be legions of things in all those paintings to understand and appreciate, but I just wanted to go back to a cool place and lie down.

When you leave the Vatican Museums, you actually come outside of the wall of the Vatican onto a street in Rome again, and so for me to go to see Saint Peters was a pretty long walk all the way around that wall to the main entrance into the plaza. At that point, that distance seemed immense, and looking at my map, I saw that the walking distance to the entrance to Saint Peter's Square was the same distance as the walk to the subway stop, and I figured I couldn't do both of them, so naturally I chose the walk to the subway and back to my hotel.

So that's my point about how hot it was in Italy...the heat sucks so much energy out of you that while I was actually there at the Vatican, I simply did not have the energy to walk the distance to the entrance to Saint Peter's Square. So I just have to save that for some other time. Probably not for a summer, though.

So, I have been enjoying the simple pleasure of cold air blowing on me, mostly from the sudden change in season, but also when I open a window, or even, like last Monday, feeling the cool air blowing on me while doing leg presses with my personal trainer, the breeze coming from the ceiling fan in his gym.

It's suddenly gotten darker, too, so that I notice it, anyway; it's dark when I get home from work and I find that I am liking that. It makes my apartment feel secure and cozy, which is how it feels when it becomes Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

Halloween is first. At work, the Headmaster and the COFO decide a "costume theme" for the administrative team, the idea of which I partially dislike and partially like. What I dislike about that is that you can't pick the exact costume you might want to wear. But what I like about it is that the entire realm of costume possibilities is narrowed-down for you, so it is easier to choose a costume that fits within that theme. This year, their choice is characters from the movie "Despicable Me", which I never saw but I understand is very cute and all the kids love it. So I guess it's a good choice for a costume theme, except there's not a lot of choices within that theme, which helps if otherwise you had no idea at all. The Headmaster, of course, chose to be Gru, the main character who starts out bad but becomes good. (He jokes that he thinks his job there at the school has made him go in the other direction.) The COFO has chosen to be Dr. Nefario, and their idea is that basically everybody else becomes a Minion. Are they trying to tell us something by that choice in Halloween costume theme? Are we to be reminded that we really are just their minions? Look at the synonyms for the word minion: underling, henchman, flunky, lackey, hanger-on, follower, servant, hireling, vassal, stooge, toady, sycophant, servant, yes-man, suck-up, and boot-licker. Well, as employees, I guess that's all we really are. (I don't think anyone else is thinking of what that word actually means. They seem to think it simply refers to funny little cartoon characters, as if we were to play the part of flying monkeys or something.)

I think, though (upon my reading up on Minions), that we, as employees, actually are pretty much like these characters in a good way. Our working world is quite different from the corporate world; we do have tons of work and we get it done, but in a very fun-loving and full-of-freedom way, so maybe these alter egos really are perfect expressions of us.

To become a Minion can be pretty straight-forward, I think, and at this point I now have almost all of the elements. I bought one of those full head and body-suits in yellow, and bought at a thrift shop some blue overalls. My hiking boots will make some good work shoes, and I have some black gloves. One can download from the Internet Minion eyes to cut out and incorporate into goggles. The trouble for me is that I can't see very well without my glasses, and with the yellow hood over my head, it is even harder to see. I realized today that maybe I could find some safety goggles that would fit over my regular eyeglasses that I could glue the Minion eyeballs in (they have places in the printed eyeballs where you poke holes so that you can see through the eyes).

Studying pictures of the characters, I see that they have a "Gru" company logo emblazoned on the bib of their overalls, and, of course, they all have mouths (with lips, teeth, and a tongue). But my real mouth will be covered by the yellow face hood, so I realized that I will have to make a mouth to put on the outside of the hood, and also outside of the hood is where I will wear my glasses and the goggles. I haven't figured out the hair yet, but I imagine something like nylon bristles cut from a little broom or something.

After work today, I went to a fabric shop to buy some felt squares--black, red, white, and yellow, for cutting out the logo and for cutting out the mouth, the tongue, and the teeth and some needles and thread to sew the pieces together and onto the hood and overalls. There at the fabric shop, I felt like I was "a woman", buying those things.

But directly next door was the Harbor Freight Tool store, so I went in there, now being "a man", to buy safety goggles for making the eyes. It's all for Halloween, but still it was fun seeing that tool store; lots of cool stuff in there. And yes, I liked the fabric shop, too. I can sew. I've made my own clothes sometimes. And I can make things like this:

So I guess it all evens out. Call me a "multi-task-ual".

When I came out of the tool store, the air had gotten chillier (cozier) and there were small leaves and seeds all over my car from the tree I was parked under--it's fall! In my car, I scrolled through the menu on my iPod and happened to land on some Christmas songs. So I listened to Christmas music on the way home, singing along with some of them. A month too early, maybe, but so what.

The Crazy, Amazing Travel Machine

I’m always up for a bit of nostalgia, and yesterday was drawn to read an article entitled Eleven Things We No Longer See On Airplanes (which you don't have to click on, I am only providing the link as a courtesy to its author), but it was all about stuff that was either before my time, or I never experienced even if I lived when it was available, so I couldn’t feel emotional about any of it. Most readers of that article who left comments were bemoaning how horrible air travel has become in the modern age, whereas my response would be to write about what I enjoy about air travel.

However, when I began to write this piece and search for illustrating photographs on the Internet, my eyes were opened to the fact that if people are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for first class travel on some airlines, they can have stuff like what this article mentions again, nowadays. So it's all about money now, and I am sure, always has been. That what people actually are bemoaning, if only they could see it, is that the general public is now able to fly when, a generation or two ago, it was only an elite portion of the populace who could afford to do so. And this broadening of the chance to fly most likely includes the majority of those moaning about it. As for me, despite the current availability of a lot of these luxuries, once again, I do expect that I will never experience any of them, even if I actually would want to.

Here's a run-down of those eleven items:

Sleeping Berths:

PLEASE CLICK ON ALL THESE PICTURES TO SEE THEM COMPLETELY; MAY REQUIRE A RIGHT CLICK AND SELECTING "OPEN IN NEW WINDOW"

I had had some vague notion that there were some airlines that offered sleeping berths in some past era, but I hadn't known that they were on a regular airliner and was also available for coach passengers. I think that this happened for a short time on what I admit is a pretty spectacular kind of plane I had never heard of, a Boeing "Stratocruiser", that, according to this website, existed in 1945, which was before I was born. It also wouldn't surprise me if PanAm Clippers also had sleeping births, but I don't know about that.

The Boeing "Stratocruiser" was a double-decker airplane, so built-in was a lot of room for their various features:

What I did know about was how amazingly luxurious the German dirigible, the Hindenberg was, the pictures of the interior of which really surprised me when I think of this as "air travel"! For example, here is a photo of the dining room on the Hindenberg (dining room? not just a tray table that you fold down?):

And here is a passenger lounge:

But one can see that travel on a dirigible was more like being on a cruise ship, not what we normally think of as travel on an airplane. For example, on the Hindenberg, passengers could promenade along large picture windows and even open them to the outer air.

This was in the late 1930s, so, of course, it was way before my time as well. And the tragic, spectacular explosion of the Hindenberg pretty much destroyed the dirigible as a method of passenger air travel. But I think that if something like this existed today, I very well might work hard to save my money to be able to pay for travel on it, at least once.

And of course, instead of sleeping berths, they had tiny private cabins:

This, in a way, reminds me more of train travel, that I have done, including sleeping compartments while traveling the length of Mexico and also traveling in Europe across the countries of Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The only time I ever had a sleeping compartment on a train in the United States was when I was a little boy, the family took a train trip from Asheville, North Carolina to St. Louis, Missouri. The only thing I remember about that trip was the train going on a bridge over the Mississippi River, and some vague memory of a canvas curtain that closed off the sleeping area.

I remember my adult sleeping compartment on a train experiences much better, of course, and it is a wonderful way to travel. But this blog piece is about air travel; nostalgia for trains is a different subject.

But no excuse for sleeping compartments aboard airplanes nostalgia if you have lots of money, since you could have something like this on Singapore Airlines:

If you can't afford an entire sleeping compartment, you nevertheless can have a sleeping berth on Quantas:

Or something a little less luxurious on Thai Airways:

I can't really sleep very well on an airplane, although perhaps if I were in a private compartment or at least a sleeping berth, maybe I could. However, I can sleep at home or at the hotel once I get there, and I am not so blasé about airplane travel that I am happy enough to simply sleep through it. My whole inner clock is kind of messed up, anyway, so it's not like I have some kind of strict schedule that I need to stick to. So I can read, or watch another movie on the "On Demand" entertainment system, or simply relax and listen to my iPod.

Passenger Lounges and Pianos

Those were two separate entries on the Eleven Things article, but I lump them into the same thing--a space on the airplane where passengers just hang around like they are in a cocktail lounge while drinking, conversing, playing video games, or singing along with a piano. Hummm...I don't think travelers these days would really want to do that unless they were traveling with a group of friends. Strangers don't seem to be too happy meeting one another in today's era. What is available today on Air New Zealand for a lot of extra money is this kind of thing:

Instead of singing along with strangers, the modern passenger seems to want to shut himself off from everybody else in a private area with his "On Demand", which provides movies, television shows, and video games. So if we are to have nostalgia, it would be for a certain social attitude among travelers, not the loss of a place to congregate on an airplane.

One of the typical complaints of those who commented in that article had to do with children...they spoke of strangers' children kicking their seat back the whole way across the Atlantic; that somehow the presence of children among the travelers was what made the experience intolerable and therefore these "cocktail lounges" of an earlier area were, in my view, by default an escape from traveling children. Well, maybe so, although I have traveled quite a bit (on vacations, not business travel) and rarely, if ever, have I found children to be a problem. And I have even traveled with sixty-six sixth graders (ah, there's a potential "666" for you!) when I chaperoned school trips, and found them to be more delightful than a lot of the adult travelers.

On my last several vacations, nearby children made the trip even more fun that it might have been. For example, when I flew back from Hawaii, there was a little girl sitting in the seat across the aisle from me. Mostly, she sat there quietly reading books that her mother had thoughtfully brought along for her (I've seen that good parents understand what accoutrements can help their children pass the time). Sometimes she would watch cartoons on the TV, all at her choice and command (she figured out how to master that remote control device pretty quickly!) and would laugh charmingly at all the antics. Other times, she would carefully munch on snacks that her mother furnished her with, not spilling very much and not making a mess. At other times, she and her mother conversed between themselves, taking the opportunity to share quality time with each other. When I finally decided to speak to them a little, I asked if they were going back home from a trip to Hawaii, or taking a trip from Hawaii. The mother said that they were going back home to Los Angeles. So I asked the little girl what she had liked best about Hawaii, and as quick as a wink, she answered with a smile, "Swimming!".

"Oh, of course swimming, I liked that, too!" I answered. "But you swim at home, don't you?"

"Oh yes, but the hotel had a big slide!" was her explanation. I have learned on my various travels that that is a must if you have children with you on a vacation--stay in a hotel with a pool and a good slide. I experienced this with my nephew and niece when we went on a cruise from Los Angeles to Mexico. Even though the swimming pool was full of ice-cold Pacific Ocean water and therefore useless (another reason to prefer swimming in Hawaii, the ocean water is wonderfully warm!), it had a long, convoluted slide that the kids loved and they spent most of their time on that cruise enjoying that slide over and over again.

Also on that trip to Kauai that I was coming back home from, I had taken a Zodiac raft cruise of the Na Pali Coast, which was, for the adults, more of an experience in brutality than it was seeing the beauty of that spectacular cost. It was six hours of intense bounce bounce bounce on the waves and getting the face smashed with splashes of wave water every few seconds, so it was impossible to actually see anything. Just holding on was a constant effort, so by the time the whole excursion was over, I felt that I had been waterskiing the entire distance from Los Angeles to Sacramento up Interstate 5.

The only person on board who was dry, in total comfort, and actually could see everything was a little boy who was given the king seat in the very center at the back of the raft, where he didn't need to hold on, where the ride was smooth, and no water ever splashed him in the face. (The captain of the raft explained that that seat was normally there for an elderly passenger, but since there were no one elderly in this tour group, the little boy could have it.) But this boy kept asking the captain how long we had before the trip was over. Finally in exasperation, the captain asked him why he wanted the trip to be over so fast, wasn't he enjoying the excursion. The boy answered that yes, he was enjoying it, but he was eager to get back to the hotel. "What's back at the hotel that you like so much?" the captain asked. The boy's mother answered, "He's eager to get back to the swimming pool slide. The hotel has a spectacular one."

On my flight to Tokyo, which was an extremely long one, there were several children on board, mostly Japanese, every one of them a delight who were either smiling or else laughing. Even their parents were laughing, with the children; a plane filled with families in which all the parents and children were having a ball being together, what's to complain about?

Last year, flying to Tahiti, sitting next to me on my left was a Frenchman who never once spoke one word to me or even acknowledged my presence in the slightest. Mostly he played some imbecilic road racing video game on his iPad that involved wildly steering his iPad as if it were the steering wheel of a race car. It was an effort to block him out of my awareness, but I managed to do it.

However, across the aisle from me, one row up, was a blonde woman holding a blonde baby boy. Although I never spoke to either of them, I determined that they were Norwegian, based on the near-whiteness of their blond hair and from whatever I could pick up from the Scandinavian-sounding language she used whenever she spoke to either the baby or to her husband to the right of her.

The baby boy simply relaxed quietly in the security of his mother's arms, but whenever he turned his head so that he saw me, he'd give me this huge, glowing smile, which, of course, I would return to him. He was a thousand times more pleasant to have as a neighbor than the man sitting next to me with his iPad video game. The boy had this very cute little plastic giraffe that his mother had pulled out of her purse which he grasped eagerly in his tiny fingers. This particular choice of a favorite or comforting toy amused me and made me like him even more. Every once in a while, he would drop it, as baby's would do, so I, who could easily reach down and pick it up (and it would have been difficult for his mother to), would put it back into his awaiting fingers. Whenever he did that, he would smile even more, which enchanted me so much that, of course, every time he dropped it, I'd pick it back up for him again. Only once or twice did his mother turn to look at me apologetically, but I simply smiled at her and gave an expression that I hoped communicated, "Oh well, what can we do!", and since I obviously didn't seem bothered, she wasn't going to be bothered, either. I am sure that if I got tired of this, I would just stop picking the giraffe up for him. However, as it was, I was so relaxed listening to songs in my iPod and feeling excited anticipation over my upcoming trip to French Polynesia, that playing this game with the baby was part of the pleasure. Ultimately, he fell asleep, dropped the giraffe one more time, and when I picked it back up, his mother took it and stuffed it away back into her purse.

Champagne In Coach:

Well hell, you can have champagne in coach, you just have to pay for it like you pay for wine or beer, or some other alcoholic drink (with the cute little bottles). I don't have to pay double my price of a ticket just to have a few glasses of free champagne. Too much alcohol on a plane makes me feel kind of woozy, anyway, so I'm actually happier with just a soft drink or maybe coffee.

Table-Side Meat Carving:

I guess the idea here is "fine dining". I certainly don't have to have a roving meat-carving station, I don't demand that at a restaurant, so why should I have to have it on airplane? And can you imaging how long the food service would be, then? The worst thing is that airlines discourage you from using the bathroom during food service, since there is no room for both the food cart and passengers trying to squeeze by. So anything that speeds up the food service is fine by me.

Maybe I am too plebeian instead of being a "fine diner", but I honestly don't really get all the people who complain about "airplane food". I guess my feeling is if somebody is going to hand me a tray of food, I'm going to eat it and enjoy it; I not only didn't have to prepare it, myself, I also didn't have to clean up afterwards. And anyway, I haven't seen what is so bad about it. I've enjoyed the airline meals that I have had and am kind of fascinated by all the little trays and compartments and everything is wrapped up and decorated with the airline's logo, and so on. It tastes fine to me.

However, if you want your meal on an airplane to be like eating out at Lawry's Prime Rib (admittedly, a fantastic restaurant), then please take the train or go on a cruise, or fly Qatar Airlines:

Flight Attendants In Hot Pants and Airline Fashion Shows:

These two were separate categories in that article, but they're more or less the same thing--nostalgia for a certain mode of dress among flight attendants. Honestly, I can't really care. They're all just uniforms--do I care how the meter maid who is giving me a parking ticket is dressed (do I even notice)? Should all the fight attendants be hired away from Hooters? And do you really want them taking up time having two or three costume changes mid-flight as apparently they did on one airline that is now no longer in business? (One uniform for the boarding phase, another uniform for the food-serving phase, and yet another uniform for the nighttime restful phase of the flight.) Hell, why not have stripper flights or nudist flights, or instead of putting in a piano bar, why not install some poles for stewardess pole dancing, or maybe some tables and chairs for lap dancing?

Looking at the stewardess uniforms in that Braniff ad, those are all clothes from the sixties. I could have nostalgia for the sixties that such clothing reminds me of. Now, if they only had stewardesses that had costume changes like Jayne Fonda had as the sexy 41st century astronaut super heroine in the movie Barbarella, which was from the same era as that Braniff ad, then I'm there!

Instead of working to beautify the stewardesses, the current version on Virgin Atlantic is providing beauty treatment for the passengers:

Peruvian Art:

I remember Braniff Airlines, they were the ones that had the noticeably bizarrely painted airplanes, as if they had all been designed by Joan Miro. They were kind of cool to see at the airport, but now in an era when you mostly get on board an airplane through a boarding bridge, you don't ever really get to see much of the outside of the plane you are getting into.

I did happen to ride Braniff once, from Los Angeles to the National Airport in Washington, D.C., and it was one of the most comfortable flights I have ever flown on. But that was due to a fortunate accident of the seat I was given. The configuration of that particular Braniff plane was that there was one row of seats at the very back, like you would see on a bus. I had the very middle seat, which meant that there was nothing in front of me but the entire long aisle of the plane. Never before on a plane had I had such legroom! Better than one could ever get in first class! I will never forget that particular flight, but the painting of the airplane had nothing to do with it. They did have cool leather seats, though, so I give (gave) Braniff points for being innovative instead of conforming to the "standard" of other airlines.

I guess if you want an innovatively decorated airplane nowadays, your best bet would be Virgin, who not only has an unusual purply-red interior, their color palette changes slowly with the time of day, from more energetic color to more restful. And this is available regardless of class.

A Window At The End Of Each Row Of Seats:

What they're really talking about here is how airlines have added more rows of seats to their airplane interiors than were originally designed, thus taking in more income per flight but screwing up the "one row, one window at the end of each row" original design. As I don't like being claustrophobically squeezed into a window seat (and especially not now that so many airlines have purchased those tiny short-hop jets for their localized flights, such as Los Angeles to San Francisco, where they're so small inside you feel that you are stepping into an MRI machine instead of an airplane fuselage), I haven't even noticed where the window is. You can't see too much out of them, anyway, except a bank of clouds or occasionally a dark mountain. Maybe coming in for a landing, you get a quick glance of some lights, buildings, and then squeak, you hit the runway. For me, it's the aisle, all the way.

That being said, I do remember quite fondly a day (once in my life) when there really were windows on an airplane that you could enjoy looking out of. It was on a prop plane on a now-defunct airline called Capital Airlines that used to fly around the eastern portion of the United States. I don't know whatever happened to them--that link shows several photos of crashed airplanes, so maybe they had too many airplane crashes.

But you can see in this picture how they had huge, oval windows from which you could enjoy watching in great detail the entire landscape as you flew over:

The very first time I ever went on a airplane flight, I was a junior in high school and the family went on ahead to our home town of Asheville, North Carolina, where we were going to be for our summer trip, but I had to stay behind a few days to finish a chemistry class I was taking in summer school that summer.

I remember as plain as day that the first flight was an American Airlines jet from San Francisco to Atlanta. I know I flew alone, but I have no idea how I got to the airport, or where I was staying just prior to that. Did I stay with the family of some friends during my parent's absence, and did those parents take me to the airport? I really just don't know, but I do know that I was alone on that airplane trip (and feeling very accomplished), that I could do this by myself and find my way to the flight change in Atlanta by myself, as well.

I remember how nice the stewardesses were on the American Airlines flight, and I was young enough to receive "first flight" gifts, such as "Captain's wings" and a beautiful photo of the kind of Boeing plane we were on.

In Atlanta, I had to change to this Capital Airlines prop plane, but that flight was even more fun than the American Airlines jet, because it really "felt" like flying--even the take-off felt different. I noticed that on a jet, the take-off was like being shot like an arrow, moving down the runway until it was all "full speed ahead" when the jet suddenly shot forward, tipped up, and was airborne. The prop plane, on the other hand, kept going faster and faster until suddenly it simply floated up, and then tipped higher to keep on climbing.

But the best part of it was looking out of that huge window where I could see everything. I think I was glued to that window the entire flight from Atlanta to Asheville, and coming into the Asheville area was completely beautiful. Coming in to a landing was more gradual than with the jet, too, so as the plane got lower, I could see more and more detail out of the window, until we got low enough, and especially as we began to circle around the Asheville airport, I could see people and their cars, and even watched a man mowing his lawn. Maybe it was because I was young, maybe because this was my first airplane trip, maybe because I knew it was going to a glorious vacation in a place that I loved, or maybe because I was alone, or maybe it was simply because of those huge windows like I have never had on a flight since, this one flight was the most wonderfully memorable one I have ever taken. All of these factors played a part, I am sure, but I am going to give the nod to the huge windows as being the most important factor of all.

A Seat Assignment In 22I:

Has anyone noticed that seat numbers are missing the letters "I", "O", and maybe also "Q" and "S"? Well, I never have and, more, I don't even really care. The author of that piece blames computers for that, in that there was confusion between "1" and "I", "0" and "O" and "Q", and "5" and "S", so those letters were removed from the "DEC" (Digital Electronic Corporation" alphabet. Well, I can see how those symbols would be confusing (and any change that would prevent my luggage from being lost is a big plus), but I wouldn't blame computers for that, but humans. Computers wouldn't mix any of those up at all, as the ASCII codes for them would be completely unique and not "mix-up-able", unless they are talking about some kind of visual recognition system that I don't know that they have (which, I suppose is possible, and maybe they do).

At any rate, this "change" is nothing to get upset about, unless those letters get removed from our alphabet entirely, but if so that wouldn't be the fault of the airline industry!

In the comment that I left at the end of that article, I mentioned that I had held onto my child-like excitement over airline travel, which I think is a good thing. Travel seems to be very stressful for people, and sometimes has been for me, but when I analyzed it, I realized that the worst stress is based on time. I don't like having to hurry, or to worry about not having enough time, or being late, or missing something. So my solution for that, when it is possible, is to allow myself a lot of time for each step. I am not interested in cutting it close. So, for example, my heart used to sink whenever I would see eternally long TSA lines. So now I allow a whole hour to get through security. I also allow all sorts of other cushions in my journey allowing for heavy traffic or other delays, so while sometime that means that I may end up at my boarding gate two hours ahead of time, that also means that I can relax and simply enjoy every step.

Often when a trip is over, or nearly over, I feel grief over how I had allowed certain stupid anxieties to block the full enjoyment of my trip. I had somehow allowed myself to be knocked out of the smooth flow. Fortunately, since I have become aware of this, I have gotten better, and have been better at letting myself go back to my child self where every detail is fascinating. My view of travel is an enhanced microcosmic view, which means that every detail is worth appreciating, so that the more I notice, the more enjoyment I have. And with travel, there are so many details you can see, so that I am surprised that people aren't fascinated, and thus happy, every second. Instead, they yearn for their established routine, whatever it is. I am not sure where their consciousness is if sleep is their main desired activity. But I have seen that...people who have gone with me on road trips who sleep until we get to some destination, missing everything on the road meanwhile.

Or one time I was on an excursion bus from Belize City to the Xunantunich pyramid complex that was almost on the border with Guatemala. We had a brilliant, highly educated, licensed tourguide who stood up in the front of the bus, facing backwards toward the row of seats and telling us about everything we passed along the way, including the flora and fauna, discussing Belize history and culture, and generally giving us a thorough overview on this country. She was very welcoming to questions, and so every once in a while, I would raise my hand and ask her one, which always led to a thorough answer. No one else seemed to be asking questions, so I kept on asking whenever I had a question (and there would be many), but began to feel a little guilty at, possibly, monopolizing her time. So after a while, I turned around to look back behind me from where I was sitting near the front, to see if I was possibly frustrating some other passengers, and to my shock, what I saw was that every single person on that bus except for me, the tourguide, and the bus driver, was sound asleep! For them, what this excursion was about was simply seeing the pyramid at the end of it, and the whole rest of the six-hour journey (round trip) was just the necessary "travel" to get there, but it, itself, was of no value at all. The actual truth was that most of what I got on that excursion came from the trip itself. Sure, the pyramid and other buildings were great to see, but the understanding of them had come from the tourguide's lecture beforehand. And, of course, now the people began asking their questions, very stupid ones, because whatever they asked about had already been discussed by the tourguide during the bus ride. I wondered what it must be like for her to be imparting all this knowledge to a bus full of sleeping people? Maybe I was a bother to her, for if I hadn't been there, she could have simply turned around, sat on the seat, and conversed with the bus driver; she wouldn't have had to work.

Actually, I am sure she enjoyed having someone who was interested in what she had to talk about.

Three random interesting things I saw on that bus ride: One was that every village we came to, children, chickens, dogs, people, bicyclists, elderly people, everything, might be out on the road, but the bus driver never honked his horn or slowed down from his rather fast speed. He simply plowed on ahead at full speed, to the extent that I was sure he was going to run someone down, but no, everybody simply got out of the way similar to how you may find crows pecking at a road kill and simply moving out of the way when cars come by. Second was I saw a full Amish man with a horse and buggy, with the Amish clothes, hat, and beard...the whole Amish regalia! I was like, whoa, and this, of course, was one of the questions I asked the tourguide. "You have Amish here?" She answered that yes, they did. That when the old-order Amish left Switzerland (this is why they speak German, by the way) in order to escape being burned at the stake because of their belief that they should not baptize children, but give them a choice to be baptized when they were old enough to understand what they were doing, they sought religious freedom in various places in the "New World"; America was just one of them, and here we had just seen how Belize was another one. Just this one sight alone broadened my worldview in a significant way. (It wasn't all America that was the haven for freedom.)

The third thing I saw...I said to her that I had heard that scientists in Belize were studying unique species in Belize's rainforest in search for a substance that may cure cancer. Did she know if they were having any progress with that. She answered that there was one particular plant that was very hopeful. "Here, I'll show it to you as we drive by," she said, and explained that it had a leaf with five "fingers" that looked like a hand. "There are several of them, now," she pointed out to me, and sure enough, there were several plants that looked like hands waving at us as we sped by. So I got to see a possible cure for cancer on that trip, while everyone else snored.

To show how stupid those fellow tourists were, at lunch I sat with a young man and a young woman who were from somewhere in Southern California, who wouldn't eat any of the food we were served. As I tucked into it, I was telling them how delicious it was. They said, "Oh, we won't eat that."

"Why not?" I asked

"It looks terrible; it doesn't look like Mexican food, to us."

"It's not Mexican food," I said.

"Well, it should be," they explained.

"Why should it look like Mexican food?" I asked. "We're not in Mexico, we're in Belize. It is Belizian food."

"Mexico, Belize, it's all the same," they said. "South of the border stuff."

People like that really need to just stay home.

But people who have to have "meat carving service" on an airplane are pretty much in that same category, in my view. "But you are on an airplane," I might argue.

Oh, another quick story about completely delicious food that some tourists will refuse to eat. I was on the magnificent two day Los Mochis to Chihuahua Copper Canyon Railroad trip, which takes you up into the Sierra Madre mountains where at the time, the only way in there was the train, or else on horseback. The Copper Canyon is nine times larger than the Grand Canyon, and except for Mexicans living in some of the little villages and towns along the way, such as Creel, where you stop for the night, the only inhabitants in that whole wild region are the Tarahumara Indians, who of all the indigenous people in North and Central America, are the least touched by the white man.

Nowadays, the Mexican government is starting to build roads up in there, but it is too dangerous to go on them because that region is also the hide-out of the Mexican drug gangs that smuggle drugs into the United States. This is terrible for the Tarahumara, who managed to survive the Spanish Conquistadors who wanted to enslave them (they escaped into this severely forbidding geography much in the same way that the Cherokee who escaped from the Trail of Tears forced journey from North Carolina to Oklahoma survived by going back to North Carolina and hiding out in unexplored coves in the Great Smoky Mountains), but now they have to contend with drug gangs.

Whenever the train would stop at a village, Mexican women and children would get on board and walk down the aisles of the railroad cars selling home-made tamales that they carried in buckets covered with cotton cloth. They also sold ice cold Coca Cola in small glass bottles. Those "Cocas", as they called them, were so refreshing, and the women and children were so sweet and the tamales smelled so good that I had to get them. They had pork, chicken, and sweet corn filled tamales, so I bought all three kinds. I ate my fill on that trip of fantastic village-made food, where they had even grown the corn that was used to make the masa harina. The people selling this food were doing well...most of the people on the train were enjoying these treats, but there were several American tourists who kept yammering, "I wouldn't eat that if I were you, you will be getting sick for sure."

You know where I got sick on that trip to Mexico? Not from eating tamales hand-made by Sierra Madre village women, but from having a margarita made in a very elegant American-clientel hotel in artistic San Miguel Allende, a town famous for wealthy American expatriates.

One of the things I like about myself is that I like so many things. I felt a resonance with "lecturer on love" Leo Buscalia when he said that you should like things. "People are always talking about how much they hate," he said. "They hate this and they hate that. Stop hating everything so much. Love things, instead." He said that like it is a choice, and I think it is. And a smart choice, at that, because hating everything just makes you unhappy. So why do it? Change your standard, and your expectations.

I'll end with mentioning one of my favorite travel pieces I had ever read. It was a newspaper column by writer Bob Green, who was among the frustrated and stressed crowd of travelers at Washington, D.C.'s Dulles International Airport, riding one those big-wheeled shuttle buses that cross from one terminal to another. Mostly people stand in those shuttles, there are very few seats (not enough for the crowd), so they are standing there, hanging from straps or an overhead bar like on a crowded subway in New York.

Green noticed a casually-dressed black man up front with his little boy. They didn't seem like all the other passengers at all, who were business men, lobbyists, various government types, and so on whom you might expect to see in the Washington, D.C. urban area. The boy was beside himself with excitement over all the activities surrounding them, planes going by, other shuttles, baggage carts loaded to the gills with suitcases.

What's that man with that hose coming out of that truck doing, Daddy?"

"Oh, he's giving that plan fuel. Look what it says on the side of that plane, 'British Airways', why that plane is going all the way across the ocean to England, they're going to have to load up with plenty of fuel for that trip."

"Look at that plane moving way over there, Daddy!"

"Oh, let's watch him, he looks like he is ready take off. Wow look at that, see how fast he is going!"

The boy starts clapping with excitement as the jet lifts up off the ground with a roar. "Daddy, where do you think it's going?"

"No telling son, it says 'United Airlines' on it. It could be anywhere in the whole world. Maybe China, maybe Africa."

Green realized that these two weren't passengers at all, but that the father was spending his Saturday to take his boy on an excursion that didn't even cost anything at all...that to them, the airport was like an amusement park filled with fascinating wonder and the shuttle bus, a nuisance for most of the passengers, was actually like a Disneyland ride for the little boy.

Someday, that boy will be taking a plane somewhere, maybe to China, maybe to Africa, and I imagine that he will still have the same attitude of excitement that he had riding that shuttle. Because he learned how to see it with all with wondrous eyes, so every piece of it is a pleasure and a fascination.

I feel that way about all the steps that I will have to go through for my upcoming trip to Italy. The quick neighborhood drive to the LAX Van Nuys Freeway Flyer facility, where I will park my car in the huge parking garage there. Then there will be the hour-long (sometimes 45-minutes!) smooth ride in the Freeway Flyer bus down the diamond lane on the 405 to the terminal, getting there way faster than I could in my car, and way cheaper than even if I parked at one of the off-site parking lots.

I will be getting off at Terminal 2, one I have never been in before, where Air Canada is, an airline I have never flown before. Presumably I will have my home-computer printed boarding pass with me, and when I check my baggage either with a skycap or inside at the ticket counter, I will find out that my luggage will be sent all the way to Venice, instead of me having to get it and take it through customs at each of the plane changes I've got ahead, one in Montreal and the other one in Frankfort.

Now knowing my gate assignment, I will then go upstairs to go through security. There may be a long line, but I have allowed time. Surrounding me will be other passengers, and if they seem friendly, I may ask them where they are going and we can talk about our various destinations. If it's a vacation, we all should be excited.

Sure, people hate the TSA, but I will joke with them (usually say something like "That's the ugliest photo you will see all day" when I hand them my passport, and they will laugh and say something like, "Well, you know, that is pretty ugly, but I have seen worse, much worse!" And then we'll laugh again. They'll probably say something like, "So, you're flying to Venice," so I'll have a chance to share my excitement over my upcoming trip, and then ask them, "So how about you, any travel plans for this summer?" Being treated like a human being instead of a despised obstacle, they will actually be part of the fun of the trip. And when I ask them to let me opt-out of the "naked" x-ray machine and have the pat-down, instead (because I don't want more of the radiation), they will call for a person to do that quickly instead of making me wait around, even though I do have the time even if I do have to wait.

But usually this gets you a kind of "first class" service...yes, you still have to take off your shoes and belt and everything metal and empty your pockets and fill up the trays, but if you do it without complaint or mouthing off (the TSA operator can't change the rules), they will catch all your stuff at the other side and take it over to a safe place where you can watch it while they give you the "the machine is safe" lecture, and then very politely give you the pat-down, explaining it to you every step of the way. It's pretty quick and then I am back to being dressed and with my stuff and on my way into the gate area.

By this time it is likely that I will be very early, which is fine, so I will look to see everything they have up there, what kind of gift shops, what kind of places to eat. I usually like to eat up at the boarding gate areas, even though the selections sometimes aren't very good (they aren't over in the Delta terminal in Los Angeles, but fantastic in the Delta terminal at the San Francisco airport), but maybe the Air Canada one will be better. It's part of the fun. Either way, I will relax and enjoy and have a meal and maybe buy something in one of the shops. It's my vacation, I can have whatever treats I want.

Ultimately, I will find a place to sit at my boarding area where I can read or people watch or listen to my iPod until boarding time. All this will be part of the fun. I mean, really, just think, I am on my way to two weeks in Italy! What's to not be happy about?

So, there's a lot to enjoy on the flight (flight attendants to be friendly to, snacks and food to eat, whatever I want to drink, tons of things to watch and enjoy on the entertainment system, maybe friendly passengers near me, and so on), and then there will be the plane change in Montreal. I have never been to Canada at all, and this doesn't really count, but it will be fun to at least see the airport in Montreal.

After the flight from Montreal, there will be the plane change in Frankfort, and while I have been to Germany, I have never been to a German airport. I wonder how it will strike me as different. Their train stations are certainly different (I love the beautiful chimes they have when announcing the arrival and departure of trains, so what unique things will I see at the Frankfort airport?).

And then there is landing in Venice, and taking a ferry boat from the airport to wherever in Venice I want to go, probably my hotel, even though I will be there way earlier than check-in time, but maybe they will take my luggage, at least, so I won't be burdened as I begin my exploration of this beautiful city. In Venice, I imagine every second will be filled with surprise and delight, and there certainly will be unique ways of getting around, such as the vaporettos and maybe even a gondola if I decide I can afford it, plus, certainly, walking along tiny inner canals and crossing over bridges and generally exploring all the unique possibilities of a place as unusual as this.

After Venice will come the high speed train to Florence. The only high speed train I have ever ridden was the Intercity 125 from London to Darlington in the Midlands, but now there are trains that go much faster than the 125's 125 miles an hour. So right there there is more than just being in Florence, there is the getting there on a super high speed train!

And all this was just the tip of the iceberg, because there is Seina and Rome and the Vatican and Naples and Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast and the island of Sardinia; all this getting around and seeing and eating and staying in beautiful places. So much to enjoy, explore, learn, and go crazy over.

All that is part of what I think of as "the crazy, amazing travel machine," all these things that are set up to get us from one place to another, everywhere in the world. It could be a supersonic jet, it could be some kind of a boat, it could be two feet. Me, and my little boy self, will be having a total blast. He and I have chosen to, and so we will.