It’s been an intense two weeks. 
I’ve flown across the world twice, visited family I haven’t spoken to in months because of a falling out and returned home to Easter, to another challenging family dynamic. Let’s just say teenage daughters and stepfather dynamics are not a picnic, particularly when you’re tired.
I’m achingly tired.
As I struggle to get over the jet lag (which seems to play out through depression and feeling low), I’m trying to refocus where I’m going with my life, career, and family. I know I wrote notes on the plane as I considered the shape of my life, my family relationships, parenting, my career, my writing, blogging, social media…. being alone on a plane for over twenty hours leaves you too much time to think. The worst thing is that the result of time alone to think isn’t break- through thinking, it’s circumlocuitous dead end thinking. The conclusions get recycled in the airplane’s airconditioning systems and tainted by a tiredness fringed with madness! The result of which is I always assume I will sort out my life, the universe and everything, yet I rarely reach that epiphany.
I tend to reach epiphanies about more mundane things – like how to crash (with or without seat) and whether to eat the food or not.
Reviewing those careful, wistful (wine enhanced and oxygen depleted) scribblings reveal that I didn’t manage the philosophical mile high this time either. These are the matters of utmost import that I managed to write down in my journal and sort out en route. Yeah, not so much philosophical, more a little unhinged.
1)The guy sitting behind you is a dick head. If he taps his pen on the back of your seat one more time I will be forced to take the pen and stick it up his nose – like the chips in the film Dangerous Creatures.
2) Your companion, is always the guy who has either marinated in garlic for the past 24 hours or has elbows that dislocate – so he can steal ALL of the armrest.
Have I always been this passive aggressive about other people or is it simply the 12th hour of being airborne that focusses it? When my sister told me that I always see the worst in people maybe this is what she was meaning.
3)Airplane food is crap. It bungs you up. With a great big concrete butt plug.
4)80% of passengers become more religious when the plane hits turbulence. 9/10 times the plane hits turbulence when the dinner service has begun. If that isn’t a sign from God – that we shouldn’t touch the food – I don’t know what is.
5) If that Exit door opened suddenly, would I be sucked out or would the seat belt restrain me? Or would my seatbelt restrain me to my seat which was itself sucked out? Would the seat provide a cushioned landing? Or would the seat blow apart amidst the clouds, on my way down? Or would my bum provide a cushioned landing? Though in truth the skull is the strongest part of the body, so would it be better if I fell on my head? But on the other hand the back end is quite granite-like (at the moment. Not that I have buns of steel), so maybe a back entrance would be preferable.
Why do we use the phrase ‘shitting bricks’ when we mean someone is anxious? When you’re anxious the problem is not constipation. As in, if I was to fall out of the plane surely the shock would remedy the constipation? So yes, if I was to be sucked out of the plane strapped to my seat, it would be preferable that I landed on my seat -the airline one – rather than the fleshy one.
Good to have that sorted. A girl can’t plan too much! Now, as for the life, and which country to live in and what to aim for with my career…surely my philosophical mile high epiphany is just around the next airborne corner.
Image: flickr CC
