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livingdebI forgot to mention that during this trip I am not making it a priority to find wireless internet connections. I will write an entry each day, and I will backdate them if necessary. But my priorities will be elsewhere.
I am happy to report that my plane flights were fabulously uneventful. There was no deciding whether to obey the terrorists or fight them back. There was no trying to remember whether to put the dangling mask on myself first or the kid first. There was not even any explaining how there could be residues from explosives on our shoes (fiery shows at Las Vegas).
Which doesn’t mean I have nothing to say.
My first flight was to Chicago on a plane that was so small that they had a thing to do with your baggage between checking it and carrying it on. First they let you think you’re carrying it on. Then at the gate, as you’re boarding the plane, you get a ticket for your rolling suitcase and as you get to the plane a guy whisks it out of your hand, attaches it to your bag, tears off the stub and hands it to you, and then runs off with your bag.
It’s that thing where they put it in the bottom of the plane, but then it’s waiting for you right where you get off the plane, not at the baggage claim area. That’s good. But had I known, I would have packed my munchies in my other bag. Fortunately, all my (other) breakables were in the other bag.
I got a seat in the very back, which is supposedly safer if your plane crashes and the tail falls off and then the rest of it explodes. Well, you have to make a decision somehow, don’t you?
The problem with these seats is that when the people in front of you lean their seats back, you have nowhere to go. So if you are at all claustrophobic, think twice about taking these seats if you have a choice. Fortunately, no one did that to us.
My seatmate and his wife were sitting on opposite sides of the aisle from each other. When he first came to sit down, he moved his seatbelt from the middle of the seat to the edge of the seat, but I decided it would be better to move it completely off the seat until he sat down, so I held it and then gave it to him.
And that’s all it takes to start a conversation. It would have been more fun if I could have heard him better, but oh well. He was reading a book with a title something like Foundation Prelude or Before Foundation which he said was an old book that tried to explain a lot of a certain kind of physics. He felt it did a good job. Or at least he feels he understands this physics better after reading this. I asked him about it because it had odd chapter headings. One was “Mathematics” or “Mathematicians” and the other was equally odd sounding for a popular fiction book.
It was only then that I noticed he had no thumb. There was no scar. And there was no thumb on the other hand, either, so I’m guessing he’s never had thumbs.
I don’t feel comfortable calling it a birth “defect,” although in this case I think it was. Can you think of a situation where it would be better not to have thumbs? I’d still rather just call it different genetics.
This may partly be because I have flat feet. (Huh?) See, flat feet are inferior to regular feet. I know this because of rumors that they won’t let you join the military if you have flat feet (until they get desperate) and because I’ve read that people with flat feet have trouble walking long distances comfortably. Now, as a 21st-century white-collar American female, I never need to walk long distances. But you could see how this might be a problem for soldiers. Also, I once met someone with flat feet who could walk long distances only with shoe inserts that supported his (lack of) arches.
So, one could call this a bad mutation or even (extremely mild) birth defect. However, I have theorized that in addition to the flat-foot mutation, I also have another mutation that lets me walk long distances comfortably anyway. So it’s not a birth defect for me at all. It’s just another shape to have a foot be.
Well, unlike foot arches, opposable thumbs have become almost mythic as a symbol of mankind. And, you know, other primates. And they are very, very handy. So then I wanted to watch this guy and see how he did things.
I only saw him do two things. First was reading a book. He didn’t seem at all handicapped in this ability. I didn’t even notice that he was missing both his thumbs for a long time. (And if you’ve seen that movie they show with the lady with no arms where they film her going about her day as she does all this amazing stuff with her feet, including writing checks, you’ll know how I could miss missing thumbs, because it just looks so natural.)
But then came the bottles of water. He tried a couple of times to open it, holding the lid between two fingers from the same hand, but it wasn’t working. He tried to hand it to his wife, but she was busy, so I offered to open the bottle. But then his wife couldn’t open her bottle either (I’m guessing arthritis). So I opened hers, too. And that made me very, very sad.
Later I thought that if I had no thumbs I would probably have held the bottle between my legs and then grasped the lid between the two heels of my hands to open it. That would probably work, right?
But then what would they do about the kinds of jars that I can’t open, even though I have two perfectly good thumbs, unless I have one of those rubber grippers and/or hot water and/or hit the edge of the lid against the counter? Very sad.
So I was reading my New England book and I decided that I want to go to Maine. I had kind of wanted to visit the LLBean bricks-and-mortar store, but then I was thinking that might just be a dumb waste of time. Yes, they have stuff that you can actually try on, and it’s not just a regular store because it has a big rock in the middle of it that you can climb to test the grip on the shoes you’re thinking of buying. But really, it’s just a store, right?
But then I was reading about Rockport, which is almost all the way to Freeport, and they have so many interesting things I want to do. Like tour a huge, out-of-control Victorian mansion. And go to the Portland Public Market. And walk along the 3.5-mile Back Cove pathway. So, anyway, I’m going.
Then I got tired of reading about New England and pulled my own old sci fi book, Snow Crash. So I felt a little cool next to the guy with the learning-physics-from-fiction book.
In the Chicago airport, there were a lot of very tempting smells. It all started with the fries. Then the waffle cones. The Chinese food. And the popcorn. Finally, I allowed myself the indulgence of an egg, ham, and cheese croissant. It was not the best croissant I ever tasted (especially the cheese), but it was good, with the added pleasant surprise of being warm.
I also got to watch a 19-month old and almost got to hear her mother and another lady get to know each other because one had noticed the other on the flight from Austin. (I didn’t butt in.) Apparently they were both from Vermont, visiting various cities in Texas. They both agreed that Austin was very different from the other cities they had visited, which included San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston. One actually said that if she ever moved back to Texas, she would move to Austin. That is how cool my town is. If you think two Vermonters are cool.
On the plane to Burlington, I was supposed to be in a middle seat, but the two people on either side of me were together and had already taken the window and aisle seats. However, this fact did not lead to including me in their talks.
I did get a little jealous of them though. They looked like artsy passionate hippie types, which I admire. I could actually pass for this type if I were taller, had more cooperative hair, had a light, delicate voice, and I don’t know, maybe better posture. One was reading a Georgia O’Keefe book, actually just looking at the pictures. The other was reading a book called Art of Possibility, a beautiful yellow Penguin paperback. That is, until they traded! The book had a chapter on Becoming Change or something.
I’ve never really thought in terms of me, personally, doing anything to bring about change to the world. Not like Harriet Tubman or Martin Luther King. It occurred to me that my goal in life is probably to not get bored. As a kid I was bored a lot, and now I am no longer a person who gets bored. (Of course, I think this happens naturally to grown-ups as they acquire more responsibilities.) So, I was feeling a little bit like a pathetic excuse for a human being.
One also had a journal she was writing in. One had an iPod and a cell phone, and these two items were so slender and elegant that I wanted shiny, expensive things, too. Next to them I felt like a clod reading my Snow Crash. But, dang, that’s a really fun book. It’s a total read-aloud book (well, most of it). I like to think how I would read it if I were creating a book on tape. Especially all the Deliverator parts. So macho, unlike any other writing I’ve read.
So anyway, another guy a couple of seats over also had an iPod, which I wouldn’t have noticed except that it was taking him a while to wind the cord around it. Then I figured out that he was keeping his left fingers awfully stiff. Then finally I realized those weren’t actually his fingers; it was a fake hand! And since the guy I had sat next to on the last plane was also on this plane, I thought to myself that there are at least three fewer thumbs on this flight than one might normally expect. And thus the title for this entry.
So, in Burlington I picked up my rental car. Often when you reserve the tiniest thing they have, they are out of them when you get there so they give you a better car for the same money. That did not happen this time. I have a Kia Rio. It’s an ugly beige color, even uglier than my own car, but it drives just fine. And it has a big trunk. And maybe being so small, it gets good gas mileage.
So I confirm about where the cheap hotels are. The problem is that it’s graduation weekend here, just like it is in my town, so the hotels are not all sitting around open and cheap. First I stop at the same chain I used in San Antonio. $140. I was hoping for more like $40, so I said thanks, but no thanks. Then a cheaper looking hotel that said $40 on the outside but turned out to have only one room left that cost $65. I thought about that for a while.
Then I decided to start driving toward Boston. I wasn’t sleepy yet. And surely in the middle of nowhere, there will be better deals. Montpelier is about 40 miles away, and I remembered reading about a string of hotels between that town and Barre. But I don’t think I found the right street. I saw a Comfort Inn, which had only one room left, a smoking room, and which was $125 or something. But then when I was going to leave, they were going to try to get it down to $85. Then I left anyway.
Then I found the Hilltop Inn. It was $65. I thought about it. And I took it. All of my paranoid (normal) friends will be very happy that I didn’t decide to just sleep in a rest stop in my car or something. I was starting to get sleepy. That short distance was a bit difficult because there was a sign that said “Moose crossing, next 15 miles.” That’s a lot of miles of being very alert because you really do not want to be the one to teach a moose to be more careful in crossing the road.
You are supposed to slow down and pay attention. The first car that zoomed by me did not have Vermont plates, or at least they weren’t green, they were white. But plenty of green-plated cars passed me too. Of course moose are mostly about and about at dawn and dusk, and dusk was long gone, so maybe it wasn’t so scary.
But then there was a sign that said “Moose 1 mile.” That sounded much more urgent. Not just a moose crossing, but an actual moose. Didn’t see him or the other moose living further on.
And also there were signs of driving through beautiful mountains in the darkness, which I’d rather not miss. So, now I’m in a hotel.
It’s exactly the same floorplan as the one I stayed at in San Antonio, so it feels just like home! It will be fun to see how everything looks outside in the daylight.
This took one hour and ten minutes to write. Goodnight.
I am happy to report that my plane flights were fabulously uneventful. There was no deciding whether to obey the terrorists or fight them back. There was no trying to remember whether to put the dangling mask on myself first or the kid first. There was not even any explaining how there could be residues from explosives on our shoes (fiery shows at Las Vegas).
Which doesn’t mean I have nothing to say.
My first flight was to Chicago on a plane that was so small that they had a thing to do with your baggage between checking it and carrying it on. First they let you think you’re carrying it on. Then at the gate, as you’re boarding the plane, you get a ticket for your rolling suitcase and as you get to the plane a guy whisks it out of your hand, attaches it to your bag, tears off the stub and hands it to you, and then runs off with your bag.
It’s that thing where they put it in the bottom of the plane, but then it’s waiting for you right where you get off the plane, not at the baggage claim area. That’s good. But had I known, I would have packed my munchies in my other bag. Fortunately, all my (other) breakables were in the other bag.
I got a seat in the very back, which is supposedly safer if your plane crashes and the tail falls off and then the rest of it explodes. Well, you have to make a decision somehow, don’t you?
The problem with these seats is that when the people in front of you lean their seats back, you have nowhere to go. So if you are at all claustrophobic, think twice about taking these seats if you have a choice. Fortunately, no one did that to us.
My seatmate and his wife were sitting on opposite sides of the aisle from each other. When he first came to sit down, he moved his seatbelt from the middle of the seat to the edge of the seat, but I decided it would be better to move it completely off the seat until he sat down, so I held it and then gave it to him.
And that’s all it takes to start a conversation. It would have been more fun if I could have heard him better, but oh well. He was reading a book with a title something like Foundation Prelude or Before Foundation which he said was an old book that tried to explain a lot of a certain kind of physics. He felt it did a good job. Or at least he feels he understands this physics better after reading this. I asked him about it because it had odd chapter headings. One was “Mathematics” or “Mathematicians” and the other was equally odd sounding for a popular fiction book.
It was only then that I noticed he had no thumb. There was no scar. And there was no thumb on the other hand, either, so I’m guessing he’s never had thumbs.
I don’t feel comfortable calling it a birth “defect,” although in this case I think it was. Can you think of a situation where it would be better not to have thumbs? I’d still rather just call it different genetics.
This may partly be because I have flat feet. (Huh?) See, flat feet are inferior to regular feet. I know this because of rumors that they won’t let you join the military if you have flat feet (until they get desperate) and because I’ve read that people with flat feet have trouble walking long distances comfortably. Now, as a 21st-century white-collar American female, I never need to walk long distances. But you could see how this might be a problem for soldiers. Also, I once met someone with flat feet who could walk long distances only with shoe inserts that supported his (lack of) arches.
So, one could call this a bad mutation or even (extremely mild) birth defect. However, I have theorized that in addition to the flat-foot mutation, I also have another mutation that lets me walk long distances comfortably anyway. So it’s not a birth defect for me at all. It’s just another shape to have a foot be.
Well, unlike foot arches, opposable thumbs have become almost mythic as a symbol of mankind. And, you know, other primates. And they are very, very handy. So then I wanted to watch this guy and see how he did things.
I only saw him do two things. First was reading a book. He didn’t seem at all handicapped in this ability. I didn’t even notice that he was missing both his thumbs for a long time. (And if you’ve seen that movie they show with the lady with no arms where they film her going about her day as she does all this amazing stuff with her feet, including writing checks, you’ll know how I could miss missing thumbs, because it just looks so natural.)
But then came the bottles of water. He tried a couple of times to open it, holding the lid between two fingers from the same hand, but it wasn’t working. He tried to hand it to his wife, but she was busy, so I offered to open the bottle. But then his wife couldn’t open her bottle either (I’m guessing arthritis). So I opened hers, too. And that made me very, very sad.
Later I thought that if I had no thumbs I would probably have held the bottle between my legs and then grasped the lid between the two heels of my hands to open it. That would probably work, right?
But then what would they do about the kinds of jars that I can’t open, even though I have two perfectly good thumbs, unless I have one of those rubber grippers and/or hot water and/or hit the edge of the lid against the counter? Very sad.
So I was reading my New England book and I decided that I want to go to Maine. I had kind of wanted to visit the LLBean bricks-and-mortar store, but then I was thinking that might just be a dumb waste of time. Yes, they have stuff that you can actually try on, and it’s not just a regular store because it has a big rock in the middle of it that you can climb to test the grip on the shoes you’re thinking of buying. But really, it’s just a store, right?
But then I was reading about Rockport, which is almost all the way to Freeport, and they have so many interesting things I want to do. Like tour a huge, out-of-control Victorian mansion. And go to the Portland Public Market. And walk along the 3.5-mile Back Cove pathway. So, anyway, I’m going.
Then I got tired of reading about New England and pulled my own old sci fi book, Snow Crash. So I felt a little cool next to the guy with the learning-physics-from-fiction book.
In the Chicago airport, there were a lot of very tempting smells. It all started with the fries. Then the waffle cones. The Chinese food. And the popcorn. Finally, I allowed myself the indulgence of an egg, ham, and cheese croissant. It was not the best croissant I ever tasted (especially the cheese), but it was good, with the added pleasant surprise of being warm.
I also got to watch a 19-month old and almost got to hear her mother and another lady get to know each other because one had noticed the other on the flight from Austin. (I didn’t butt in.) Apparently they were both from Vermont, visiting various cities in Texas. They both agreed that Austin was very different from the other cities they had visited, which included San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston. One actually said that if she ever moved back to Texas, she would move to Austin. That is how cool my town is. If you think two Vermonters are cool.
On the plane to Burlington, I was supposed to be in a middle seat, but the two people on either side of me were together and had already taken the window and aisle seats. However, this fact did not lead to including me in their talks.
I did get a little jealous of them though. They looked like artsy passionate hippie types, which I admire. I could actually pass for this type if I were taller, had more cooperative hair, had a light, delicate voice, and I don’t know, maybe better posture. One was reading a Georgia O’Keefe book, actually just looking at the pictures. The other was reading a book called Art of Possibility, a beautiful yellow Penguin paperback. That is, until they traded! The book had a chapter on Becoming Change or something.
I’ve never really thought in terms of me, personally, doing anything to bring about change to the world. Not like Harriet Tubman or Martin Luther King. It occurred to me that my goal in life is probably to not get bored. As a kid I was bored a lot, and now I am no longer a person who gets bored. (Of course, I think this happens naturally to grown-ups as they acquire more responsibilities.) So, I was feeling a little bit like a pathetic excuse for a human being.
One also had a journal she was writing in. One had an iPod and a cell phone, and these two items were so slender and elegant that I wanted shiny, expensive things, too. Next to them I felt like a clod reading my Snow Crash. But, dang, that’s a really fun book. It’s a total read-aloud book (well, most of it). I like to think how I would read it if I were creating a book on tape. Especially all the Deliverator parts. So macho, unlike any other writing I’ve read.
So anyway, another guy a couple of seats over also had an iPod, which I wouldn’t have noticed except that it was taking him a while to wind the cord around it. Then I figured out that he was keeping his left fingers awfully stiff. Then finally I realized those weren’t actually his fingers; it was a fake hand! And since the guy I had sat next to on the last plane was also on this plane, I thought to myself that there are at least three fewer thumbs on this flight than one might normally expect. And thus the title for this entry.
So, in Burlington I picked up my rental car. Often when you reserve the tiniest thing they have, they are out of them when you get there so they give you a better car for the same money. That did not happen this time. I have a Kia Rio. It’s an ugly beige color, even uglier than my own car, but it drives just fine. And it has a big trunk. And maybe being so small, it gets good gas mileage.
So I confirm about where the cheap hotels are. The problem is that it’s graduation weekend here, just like it is in my town, so the hotels are not all sitting around open and cheap. First I stop at the same chain I used in San Antonio. $140. I was hoping for more like $40, so I said thanks, but no thanks. Then a cheaper looking hotel that said $40 on the outside but turned out to have only one room left that cost $65. I thought about that for a while.
Then I decided to start driving toward Boston. I wasn’t sleepy yet. And surely in the middle of nowhere, there will be better deals. Montpelier is about 40 miles away, and I remembered reading about a string of hotels between that town and Barre. But I don’t think I found the right street. I saw a Comfort Inn, which had only one room left, a smoking room, and which was $125 or something. But then when I was going to leave, they were going to try to get it down to $85. Then I left anyway.
Then I found the Hilltop Inn. It was $65. I thought about it. And I took it. All of my paranoid (normal) friends will be very happy that I didn’t decide to just sleep in a rest stop in my car or something. I was starting to get sleepy. That short distance was a bit difficult because there was a sign that said “Moose crossing, next 15 miles.” That’s a lot of miles of being very alert because you really do not want to be the one to teach a moose to be more careful in crossing the road.
You are supposed to slow down and pay attention. The first car that zoomed by me did not have Vermont plates, or at least they weren’t green, they were white. But plenty of green-plated cars passed me too. Of course moose are mostly about and about at dawn and dusk, and dusk was long gone, so maybe it wasn’t so scary.
But then there was a sign that said “Moose 1 mile.” That sounded much more urgent. Not just a moose crossing, but an actual moose. Didn’t see him or the other moose living further on.
And also there were signs of driving through beautiful mountains in the darkness, which I’d rather not miss. So, now I’m in a hotel.
It’s exactly the same floorplan as the one I stayed at in San Antonio, so it feels just like home! It will be fun to see how everything looks outside in the daylight.
This took one hour and ten minutes to write. Goodnight.
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no subject
on 2006-05-21 06:56 pm (UTC)I had an entire dream about that last night.
I think the dream started with packing for the trip. International. I don't know to where. I was traveling alone. I was in one of those big planes, with two seats, five seats in the middle, and then two seats. I was in one of the middle five, one seat from the end. After the plane took off and the captain said we could lean our seats back, the guy in front of me did. So far back, that it touched my chest. Not hard, I could still breath, but I couldn't really move or get out of my seat or anything. I started feeling really claustrophobic and asked him to lean forward (not like he was too far to ask or anything, what with kinda leaning on my chest). But he didn't respond. He didn't acknowledge me at all. I started freaking out. Really freaking. I started small, but worked up to complete screaming fit with doing my best to shove his chair off of me by brute force. Of course, the steward(esse)s came and dragged me out of my seat and pulled me to the back of the plane to talk to me. I was scared they would put me off the plane for crazy behavior (obviously a US-based flight). I tried to explain that it was a claustrophobia thing. They asked me if I had considered leaning my own chair back. I had not. They asked me if I had considered moving to the empty aisle seat next to me. I had not. They put me back in the seat next to mine and told me to behave. The dream ended as I was going through my luggage looking for entertainment and trying to pretend not to notice the strange looks from the people around me.
Have I mentioned that I hate flying?
Glad your flights went well and that you had good food karma.
no subject
on 2006-05-23 04:37 pm (UTC)In your defense, though, I don't think you could have moved one seat over, perhaps not even with your seat leaned back. Also, it's true that when you ask people to move up, they often get very, very defensive of their pathetic extra amount of space. It's creepy.