Much to the incredible disappointment of my mother, who loves air travel – words cannot truly express how much I hate flying. It seems to bring out the worst in people, myself included. Of course it doesn’t’ help that no matter how tired I am I can’t sleep on planes, I can try everything from black out pills to sleep tapes, nothing works. And if I ever do manage it, the person behind me inevitably chooses that moment to use the back of my seat as a lever to get up or some such and I’m awake again…
The truth is, the reason I hate flying is that I’m actually truly afraid of it. The idea of being shot through the sky in a compressed metal tube that I cannot get out of is my idea of a nightmare. It took me a long time to realize this, for ages I thought I was just a grumpy flier. Not so, I’m grumpy yes, but I’m a grumpy flier because I’m a terrified one. I’m that one who sits there staring at the clock willing it to be later than it is just so that the flight will be over…
And, because of the job, I fly every six months…at least. That’s the flights home, the flights out are usually shorter in between than that.
Thankfully, at least the planes now allow you to pull out your laptop while you’re at cruising altitude, so I can write, and even go online (for a price of course). Really quite amazing when you consider that we’re several thousand miles above the ground and moving at an incredibly fast speed.
I…shouldn’t have thought about that sentence so much as I typed it.