Travels

In terms of people watching, airports have got to be up there on the list of ideal locations. There's something freeing knowing that the person you spend a whole flight next to you may never see again. I know people who like to go on planes and put on a completely different persona just for fun. I have to say I've never gone quite so far but I can definitely see the appeal. If I were into theater I'm sure that would probably consist of most of my training.

Well, even though I didn't pretend to be someone else, I did end up befriending a few unlikely characters en route to Baltimore...

First, while standing in line we met a very friendly man who engineered satellites and told stories of his great aunt who had been a slave in the South. My mom ended up sitting next to him and I don't believe there was a single moment when they weren't talking. The two then proceeded to make friends with the man in the third seat, a young Indian man from Punjab who was on his way to a three-day wedding in New York.

With their incessant chatting going on across the aisle, I was in the meantime squashed between two other guys. The old man to my right ate his way through an entire bag of Hershey's kisses while reading "Seduce Me At Sunrise" for the entire duration of our five hour flight. 

On my left, the young guy who had been sleeping with his head against the window before I sat down woke up and was startled to find me there. After groggily rubbing his eyes a few times he introduced himself as Chris, the son of a retired Navy officer. I surprised myself by not being as judgmental of him as I would have expected. Normally if someone were to tell me they were in the army or that they just got inked and spent 700 dollars on the tatt, I would be more hesitant. But in this case, curiosity got the better of me. We spent the next three hours exchanging life stories and I learned about his home in Annapolis and his school in Monterey. He showed me how to write sentences in Arabic and told me the ins and outs of life on the base.

Then, on a bathroom break I met a So-Cal college football player whose neck must have been about four times as thick as mine. We talked about school and mostly about him: he spent twenty minutes talking about his model girlfriends, his football career, and his job at Vans. After being overdosed with information from this guy Gerard, I went back to my seat and spent the rest of the flight talking with Chris and the old man.

Finally in Baltimore we piled in the car with our luggage and drove through the city. All around cop cars had their lights on as snow began to fall and they collected the homeless to bring to shelters.

In one day, I got quite the spectrum.