Earlier this week, I visited my high school. Which is kind of a terrible way to kick off adulthood, but whatever. It was something that I hadn’t done yet and felt like I needed to do. You know, for symbolic closure. And besides triggering a lightweight existential crisis about the passage of time and whatnot, it was pretty underwhelming and mostly unhelpful, but hey, I’m willing to exhaust any and all options for a some kind of direction to take my life in, or even an inkling of what I’m supposed to be doing as an adult.
I did say mostly. While we were there, I ended up talking to a teacher I never had and told him that I was traveling in response to the Dreaded Question (if you’re a recent college grad, you’ll know what I mean). And to keep it short, he suggested that I write it all down. That I start the second I sit down on the plane so when I look back at the end, I’ll remember exactly how I felt and who I was when we began this traverse and be able to see how much my time traveling has changed me.
That sounds a lot more profound than what’s probably going to happen with this. I did not, in fact, start writing about my feelings and thoughts the minute I settled into my seat. I didn’t even try to write on my first flight. There hasn’t been a lot of higher thought process going on for me. Three hours of sleep will do that to a man, and I am deeply out of practice with thinking on a mental budget. I haven’t even really processed that I’m about to spend almost a month out traversing the land. I could be using this time to think about how we haven’t really planned anything or that we still have things to book or the cool new diseases I learned about at the Travel Clinic that I am definitely not vaccinated against. It just feels like I’m sitting somewhere for 12 hours, watching movies and having people bring me food and then we will land and my mom will come pick me up from the airport.
But I’m not really thinking about any of that though.
Mostly, I’ve been alternating between peeling my forehead off of the seat back tray because it keeps ending up there and watching Marisa peacefully snooze the hours away. I know what I said before about movies and food sounds super lit. And don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing that I love more in this world than watching movies and eating food.
But airplanes are also tubes in the sky that you can’t escape from. The zest of 12 hours of movies and food comes from knowing that you could be outside doing something productive and choosing to do sit and eat anyway. The plane is not like that.
Air Canada is rad though. The windows don’t have shades. You push a button and it self tints. Like. Okay, that definitely doesn’t sound cool written out. It’s like the future, and you’re zooming over a metropolis, Blade Runner style. And then the sun will come up. Instead of throwing on some sunglasses, you just hit a button and the window goes from completely clear to a nice dark purple and you’re free to carry on with your cool hover car adventure.
Air Canada is also very liberal with the alcohol. The guy we were sharing our row with kept getting wine bottles and I thought he was just balling out in economy. And then when we asked the flight attendant which drinks were available, the list included literally every alcohol imaginable. Marisa and I, used to the stinginess of American airlines, sort of started to sense that something wasn’t quite the same and we ended up asking how much it cost to get a bottle. And you know what they said?
That it was free.
Let that sink in. Free. This was an impossible concept to Marisa and I and our disbelief definitely showed, but we were assured that this was real and very true. We were referred to as the party row after that by the flight attendants. Anyways, we’re still in the air. Who knows when we will land, but I have a nice personal sized bottle of wine and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle to get back to. Self reflection and deep personal analysis can wait.
Marisa and I, directly after The Yeet
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