New Neighbors

“Andy” and I recently cleaned the house to a deep, molecular level, 

Just exactly like this.

including me doing all my laundry (which is now clean, and in a pile next to the bed looking much like it looked when it was dirty).  It was a deeply satisfying, exhaustive event, but it comes with blow back.  Namely that in my head, the house is now clean.  Clean things don’t need to be cleaned.  That means clutter doesn’t need to be put away, counters don’t need to be wiped down, junk mail does not need to be gone through, the kitty litter box does not need to be scooped—because we’re already there.  

Guess which one is "Andy."

It’s already clean because we cleaned it. 

I imagine you see the flaws in my logic.  

Luckily, this delusion has an end in sight because I am basically trashing the kitchen today making ginger beer and Bad Bread, so don’t worry, the bubble will burst.

How to make Bad Bread:
Find a regular sourdough recipe, and do that,
except with the following ingredients:

- A non-specific quantity of flour

- Whey from kefir instead of water

- Salt

- Peach Bug juice from homemade peach

  ferment which is presumably full of

  yeast so maybe this will work

- Low expectations

It already started to crack when I finally gave in and took out my compost.  I keep a ceramic jar by the sink and put food waste in there, then dump it in the compost pile in the yard.  People have more complicated systems for this but here’s the thing:  We didn’t invent composting.  “Composting” is the name we came up with for the already-occurring, natural process of soil happening.  You can buy a $250 compost bin that has both bells and whistles, but that tool is not the thing that makes compost happen.  It might make it happen faster, and in a very contained space, and maybe your final compost is supposed to smell like roses and attract unicorns, but for no monies you can also just throw your food and yard trimmings in a pile in the yard. 

I don't know if I'm going to
make it, Reader....

Which I finally did today.  It’s an easy chore but is not my favorite—not because it’s smelly (which it can be) and slimy (which it can be) but because I have to walk the full container a daunting 60 feet, all the way from my kitchen counter out the back door to the corner of the yard.  It is amazing what the addition of a walk will do to my perception of a chore’s burden on my day. 

And today, while hurling my load into the pile, I encountered a spider web.  “Oh!” I thought. “How nice, a new friend!”

Then I looked only very slightly to my right, and discovered that my new friend was really very close to me, and she is huge.  I mean the kind of huge that she had a packed lunch up there with her the size of a sparrow.  She’s gorgeous, mind you, I just…wasn’t totally prepared to be so close to something large enough to mug me.  She’s a garden spider, aka writing spider, 

She looks like this, but more menacing.

so she has long spindly legs and bright Rorschach-test yellow and black markings all over her and her web is big enough to catch low flying air traffic. 

I took a deep breath, told myself to calm down, and turned my head only very slightly to the left and discovered there are two of them.  Two webs, two hawk-sized spiders, two new neighbors who probably deserve a welcome basket and maybe a guided tour but I won’t be available for that because I broke the laws of time and space getting back inside.

Captured footage from my brush with
New Neighbors.

I just…I wasn’t ready.

I have a long and storied history with spiders.  When I was a young goblin, living my life exploring the woods behind our house and slogging through the ponds and creeks, I didn’t care about spiders.  I mean, they can look creepy but also they are not interested in me. 

Then one year, I had climbed over the wall onto where they were building a new highway spur behind where we lived (like you do) to muck around in the construction equipment and climb through those big cement pipes and whatever.  I’m walking down through the young trees they have planted all along the hill beside the highway itself to reduce erosion, like I have been doing every weekend since they started building this magnificent playground for me.  

The historical records suggests that
Miss Muffet was, by all accounts,
a complete bad ass who just
startles easily before coffee.

There I am minding my own when I realize there is a garden spider web in front of me, stretched between two of the trees.  The Lady Herself is holding court in the center, right where I’m walking, and I get very close before I realize she is there.  As mentioned above, they are big, and suddenly realizing how close you are to one can be arresting.  Close call, but fine, my heart pounds, I go a different way.  There’s another one.  I readjust again—another one.  I am feeling panicky now because they really are huge and they are all around me and I start to move maybe just a little too fast navigating this complex maze system and then obviously I walk through a web and get a spider the size of my face on my chest, and I lose my mind. 

I bolt—not back up the hill, but to the unfinished, flat, barren expanse of spider free pre-highway, where I stop drop and roll like a person on fire and hyperventilate for a while.  Rather than go back the way I came, I go the long way home which is about three miles but involves no proximity to trees or bushes of any kind. 

When I get home, there is a garden spider web across our front stoop. 

I did not go outside again for years.  This literally ended my outside-goblin days, and began my bookish-nerd phase. 

Well....Goodbye. 

I love you, Caraballo!

Then, in college, I went on a study abroad trip to the Dominican Republic.  It was great, and I kept going back to visit or volunteer for years.  One of those trips, I lived in a small rural community nestled deep in a sugar cane field, about 3 miles from the closest paved road. 

Two important spider-related incidents happened on this trip.  First, my very first morning, I wake up in my new, strange bed in a new, strange house in this tiny remote village, and look outside of my new, strange mosquito net to see not one, but two softball-sized wolf spiders crawling down my bedroom wall.   Just, right there.  I have hated spiders ever since the Summer of Infestation I told you about above, so I am frozen in panic.  They are not remotely frozen, they are casually walking to work or whatever.  Living their creepy, huge, hairy lives.  I look around to assess the rest of the room and my proximity-to-weapons situation.  I look back…and they are both gone.

Sorta.

I think my panic, in this moment, crested me into a transcendent space.  I had so much adrenaline I went calm and crystal clear.  And the thought that rang out in my head was, you cannot find the spiders, you cannot prevent the spiders, and if you remain in panic you are not going to be able to function.  You have months left here; you have to stop it.  I couldn’t get out of bed, get dressed, go to work while holding my fear with both hands, so I had to put it down. 

So I did. 

Not entirely, and about a week later, in the little preschool I was working in, there was another, even bigger wolf spider on the ceiling.  I was visibly unhappy about it, and one of the little kids noticed and thought it was funny.  So he—no kidding—got a rock, knocked poor Wolfie off the ceiling, grabbed her, and chased me in circles with her in his outstretched hand.  

And ooo lordy I ran—until it became clear that he wasn’t going to stop chasing me as long as this was fun.  So stop I did, and while he approached me menacingly, I just took a deep breath and let it happen.  His face fell, he looked confused—and then he looked angry cuz Wolfie got her bearings and bit the crap out of him.   Wolfie died that day, the boy turned into one of my favorite, sweetest kids, but the lesson of “just let the fear go” stuck.  (This does not apply on airplanes, obviously.)

Also this.

Since then, spiders don’t bother me.  I mean there’s a web in our kitchen on the outlet by the sink, doing a brisk business in the fruit flies that are constantly after the compost bin.  She is welcome, she can live there forever.  When I was in Peace Corps, in Madagascar, I was stalking a roach with a flip flop when a giant wolf spider leaped out from behind a stool, pounced on it from behind, ripped its head off and carried its body away in victory.  I immediately went from “goodness that is big and scary” to “GO GIRL I LOVE YOU BRING YOUR FRIENDS.”  We are on the same side. 

So I had thought I made peace with my eight legged friends…riiiiight up until there were two garden spiders within inches of my face.  Perhaps letting my fear go is just a code phrase for repressing childhood trauma, but whatever.  Ima try to live and let live.  I looked it up—they’re not poisonous, they are a sign of a balanced ecosystem, they kindly put zig-zag patterns in their webs so that birds and I will not run into them, and from a bug-management perspective, we’re on the same side. (Mostly.  They will eat mosquitoes and flies but are big enough to eat butterflies and bees and the second there’s a dragon fly in the web I will rip their world apart.)  They could be less close to the thing I walk over to every time I dump my compost, but fine.  My real concern is some sort of spider bloom like the one those many summers ago that consumed the entire world and turned me into an indoor cat…but I looked up their babies and honestly, they’re kinda cute.  Also alllllmost all of them die before they stop being cute.  And worst-case scenario, the internet says a natural spider predator is a monkey, so if things get out of hand I’ll just get me one of those. 

Look at how cute they are!

Undies!

I bought new underwear!

I’m not supposed to be excited about this, this is supposed to just be a thing that you do.  But for me, it’s not.  It’s more like a thing you should do, but if you didn’t do, like for a really long time, I mean who really cares?  V few people see my underwear, and they have….already made their choices.

This has been my attitude for a long time.  I remember being in my 20s, and at Dragon Con, a beloved nerd convention that, at the time, me and all my friends treated as family reunion.  We stuffed ourselves into hotel rooms and slept on top of each other like puppies to be able to afford the enriching experience of just being a loud and proud nerd for a long weekend, plus on top of that midnight dance parties, dorm rooms of doom, and epic elevator rides.  

Plus creepy clowns! It's Con!!

Here's a hint:
this was not my aesthetic.

And there I am one day, my younger self who cared about things like dressing for Con.  So I’m getting dressed in the hotel room (I was already dressed, but I was changing from Day-Con to Night-Con clothes.  It’s a thing.) My bestie and her mom are in the room, and I just live my life and put on clothes that I totally don’t regret, you’re only young once. 

And then like 3 weeks later I get a package and it’s from my friend’s mom, and she sent me underwear because she was sad that my underclothes are in such sad state compared to my carefully selected and totally not regrettable overclothes.

I think at that time the issue was that I had found an underwear I liked, and wore it often enough that it was worn.  Plus it was too big/I really have nothing going on out back, so a little bit of baggy-butt was happening too.  All of this was fine with me but a discerning outside eye was like, “Mm, baby, no.”

Today that is not the issue.  The issue is that I have not bought new undies since I was on the farm, and so all of those are farm undies, which means all of them are--- distressed?  Sagging under the distress of their lives.  Dingy under the dirt they sat in and were washed with.  Not…..pretty.

I mean, ok, I have lots of other undies (because clean underwear is the line between just continuing to live my life and having to do the worst of chores, laundry), but they are:

Nobody wants this.

•         The undies I never wore on the farm, so I’ve had them since I was thin and less invested in crotch comfort (those are two separate categories.  I have  both).
•         The undies I bought one time when, under much duress and a critical reckoning with the true real state of the world, I finally got a new bra (this is a whole separate issue), and the lady convinced me to get matching undies, which are…scant.
•           The undies I desperation-bought one time which are so big and slippery (no seriously though) that they will just walk right off of me if I am in a skirt.  In pants, they will merely cause a situation similar to when your socks slide down in your shoe but more dire and less publicly fixable.

Pretty sure.

To be clear, I desperation-bought those underwear because I was like, all your underwear are terrible and you are an adult, get new underwear.  But then I did, and I got burned, and I resented it.  Bitter me was like, I guess I never buy underwear again.

But seriously though.  All those movies and TV shows from my youth that were like, be sure you’re wearing clean underwear, you might be in an accident!  Those fake moms were having nightmares about me specifically.  My undies left clean behind like 160 washer cycles ago.  My crotch is often scantily clad in the lacy remains of what was once rock solid granny panties, and I’m not sorry.

But I have been drafty, so I decided to look into it.

Here’s the thing when you are a cheap ass like me.  Lady’s undies cost like $8 per, for cheap ones.  That’s normal, but also….so effing ridiculous.  

I was googling images to go with
the concept of, "can't you
 just DIY underwear,
 I'm crafty af"
and I stumbled upon this image
 of homemade underwear

 that makes it look

 like you pooped yourself

and I love it so much
I had to share.

Hats off, mystery internet underwear maker.
Hats off. 

I bough a whole dress last week for $18.  A whole dress.  That I can wear to work, no problem.  And it covers my joyous sex pot, and no one even needs to know what’s going on under there anyway.  $18, which is precisely two point no-one-cares times more than any pair of underwear (which covers like 1/8 of the same space) than I’ve ever seen that didn’t come in a 6 pack from Target.  So I get mad about the price of underwear. 

For years, my mom would throw a pack of Target granny panties into our Christmas.  She was just quietly being like, ok but have clean underwear.  And thank God, cuz now I’ve worn them and worn them out. When I was young I didn’t—no one wants high waisted white cotton panties.  Until you’re on a farm, sitting in dirt and sweating to a degree you didn’t think possible.  And then you’re like, oh, I see the practical side of this.  And then you look at pretty underwear, and think, mmmm but you’re dumb tho.... 

And expensive!  And no one knows if I’m wearing them but me!

Anyway, that was my life for a rrrrrrrl long time.  Like from the farm til last week.  I was sort of getting to a crisis situation, and was tired of looking in the mirror at my XL body in M undies from 2001.   Annnnnnnd allllllllsoooooo…Prime Day.

Prime day, which as a true progressive I was supposed to boycott but as a person with limited income and a serious wardrobe situation was all about, gave me an opportunity.  The opportunity to bulk buy undies, new, in my size, that were cheaper than usual (I’m still mad at the price but, again, crisis time), that could come to my house without me having to do more than hit “place order.”

So I did!  I bought...all the underwear.  I have like 100 new pairs of underwear now.  They fit.  They are cute-ish.  They are comfy.  They are FINE, they are perfect, they are doomed to being worn into the ground, and I am wearing them now.

Or am I?
Still no one's business.

 

Showhole

I am in a showhole.  

I learned that word from whenever...I think?...I last watched network television, which was probably on accident or under duress. I used to never watch TV, for hundreds of years.  When I was wee, I watched enough TV to counterbalance the whole rest of my life, and I can tell you anything you need to know about 80’s cartoon classics.  

Also I watched the Princess Bride on repeat—like no kidding two or three times a day—for about three weeks straight at one point.  Best decision I ever made.  

Young me going outside.

And then…I stopped.  Idk, maybe I took my short fat kid self outside, maybe I got grounded from TV.  Who knows—but it stuck.  I didn’t go back.  Time passed and I didn't get TiVo. (You remember TiVo, Reader?)  I didn’t own a TV.  It wasn’t some political statement, I just didn’t care, and commercials make me want to rip my eyeballs out and eat them. 

But sometime in there streaming started happening, and I must have been in front of something, and this ad came on about the feeling of emptiness when you are out of one show and don’t have a replacement, and now, years later, (evidence of how insidious 

I have no idea what this image is about
but it is what happens when you Google "Showhole".

commercials are) I remember the phrase “showhole” even though I don’t remember the content I was watching.    (I assume this memory exists for everyone and you know what that means, Reader.  Right?  Not just me?  RIGHT?)

So I missed a lot of things, much of which I do not miss missing.  A few statements that people have strong opinions about but are none the less are true for me:  I do not like Seinfeld.  I do not like Always Sunny.  I do not like That 70’s Show.

Archer is still perfect.

Much of the regular faves that people adore just didn’t do it for me, and then I would ruin other people’s nights because I am super sensitive and I can’t get over the ridiculous two-dimensional nature of the characters and the issues they faced and it makes me angry.  Like, I’m not just bored watching, I am mad about it.  No one has a good time with me and network TV.  I have opinions—I’m not saying they are right, but they are mine, and I am loud.

So I didn’t watch TV.

I love The Wire like Danny Trejo loves puppies.

That....has changed significantly.  I think this started when a friend of mine, we’ll call her “Kendra”, sat me down to marathon The Wire.  I was hooked on that show from the intro scene before the intro credits of S1E1.  The Wire gave me hope for television.  

(Then I sang its praises to everyone I know and love, and it turns out, it didn’t land like that for everyone.  Makes no sense at all.)

Also, I moved in with someone who had a TV and watched it regularly, and had very different taste than me.  This is why I know how much I dislike That 70’s Show.  

Originally, I had a That 70s Show pic here
but really, Miss Fisher is worth
so much more of your time.

It also pushed me out of the house, into the back yard with my own device and Netflix access, right when another friend, we’ll call her “Jen”, recommended Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. That show is solid gold, and I got hooked on television.

Or rather, hooked on Netflix, and the ability to watch TV commercial-free, and pick from an extensive list not limited to “what’s on Thursday nights these days” or whatever.  Game changer.  

The game was changed.

Then, about two years ago, I was wasting my life on facebook and I kept stumbling across people talking about their media diet.  What is a media diet, I said.  Well!  It is when you are intentional about the content you take in, specifically about watching things made by (not just staring) women and people of color.  And all these facebook people—sane, rational people I know and respect—were like, doing this changed my life. 

And I was like, “That’s obviously ridiculous.”  Good content is good content, right?   I had feelings about it...but I did respect these people.  So rather than than knee jerk, I was like, meh, let me give it a try…because this seems ridiculous. 

It is not ridiculous. 

It is super serious.

 It is difficult—you have to look all these shows up, and there is good content that doesn’t make the cut.  What’s left is slim pickings—there just aren’t that many show runners who aren’t white men.  Which is it’s own thing, but not the topic of this post.  I’m sitting there thinking “good content is good content” and then I start curating and....everything changes. 

Do not base your life choices on this woman.

I started with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and like…you could tell it was made by a woman.  Not because of some cosmic, uterine resonance, just the way they handled the characters. The way they were depicted, the jokes, the way they handled topics…most importantly, the things that were normal.  The things I recognize from my entire life and the lives of my lady friends that I suddenly realized I had never seen ever ever never ever on TV.  

The normal things.  Not some rant against the patriarchy, just the acknowledgement that your boobs change size when you’re on the pill.  WHICH THEY DO.  And seeing it in a TV show—not some episode about the pill or reproductive health or a women’s right to choose, just as a throw-away line because it’s not a big deal, it’s just normal—made me realize two things:  How normal it is, and how it doesn’t feel normal to talk about in public because the thing that comes into our lives to show us what “normal people” are like never talk about it.

I am not suggesting that the characters of Peaky Blinders, a show I greatly enjoyed, are intended to seem normal. I am suggesting that the everyday-life-ness of characters in any show, no matter how not-everyday-life their lives are, has never included some basic normalcy that is just a part of ladyhuman’s lives.  There’s a scene in How to Get Away with Murder where the lead is getting ready to go out, there’s a whole montage of her getting ready, and she plucks a hair off her chin.  Just for a moment, it’s part of a montage, but it’s there. 

Holler if you hear me, ladies. 

This lady hears me.

 This diet has been incredibly beneficial for me, in ways I never expected.  But, like any diet, it’s hard.  Who “creates” a show?  Is it writers or directors or producers?  Does it count if someone on the team isn’t a white man, even if someone else is?  Do gay or non-CIS creators count? (Spoiler alert, for me they do.)  Baz Luhrmann is weird, and Australiannnnnnnnnnnn does that count?  

I watched it.  You should watch it. 

Because The Get Down is amazing.

Also.   This.  Is amazing. 

 I am watching Handmaid’s Tale, presumably because I am a masochist who hates happiness, and does Margaret Atwood’s co-producer status count?  Or is this a cheat show?  Is it problematic that June is played by a member of a cult that isn't great to people in general and women specifically?  Doesn’t matter, I hate happiness, I am watching it.  

 (Full disclosure, I also watched the first 5 seasons of Supernatural because I am a nerd, and I liked the creepiness and then I was sucked in, and I’m not sorry.  But only 5 seasons; like what do you even do after everyone has died and come back so often; dear God they’re on season 127 now and still going strong; they get no more of my life but I still love you Dean even when you are being dumb af.)  

Also while we're cheating, Stranger Things.

Anyway, I recommend the diet; it has changed my life.  If you doubt as I doubted—give it a try.  There’s lots of good content out there to get you started, see how it goes.

BUT. 

I just finished season two of Wynona Earp.  And now I don’t know what to do with myself.  I spend most of my evenings on the back patio, either here with you, Beloved Reader, or watching something.  Real life is constantly teetering on the edge of  “nothing is fine, everything is terrible, I didn't want to have to be part of a revolution, it's getting worse and worse.” So.  Now I’m on a bit of a more nuanced media diet.  I would like a show that is (on my diet and) light and ridiculous enough that it is escapism and counterbalances Handmaid’s Tale (self-inflicted, but cathartic) and the New York Times Morning Briefing (internal screaming with the occasional rare opportunity to dance on Scott Pruitt’s stupid garbage dumb career-grave). 

And I’m still picky—like I don’t love something just because it is on my diet.  

Its unavailability is a crime against humanity.

Scandal was flawless riiiight up until it was too silly to take any more (okay crack DC fixer team, everyone just calm down, you are all doing the most all of the time, nothing is that extra).  Cable Girls, a period Spanish show based in the late 1920s, is lovely but way heavy.   Golden Girls isn’t on Netflix.  I can’t mainline Glow because “Andy” and I are watching it together and he has made it clear to me that that is betrayal.

So now I’m in a stupid showhole. 

Bye, Felicia

Suck it, Scott.

I say Good Day, Sir.

Up in the Air

I had to fly again. 

Vomit.

It’s a very introspective time, flight.  One internal voice is all, everything dies and that’s sad, what is the nature of fear, what is the value of my life, blah blah blah.  The other is all, science and the 

Like this but with hyperventilation

universe are amazing, how does this even work, the same laws of physics that keep me in the air take people to space and move the planets and the stars.  One piece is all wide-eyed joy at the view, the experience, the world, the universe. The other is crouched in a tight, slobbery ball just….screaming.  It’s fine.

Some thoughts that have profound meaning when terrified: isn’t it interesting that your fear will neither keep you in the air nor make you fall?  This thing that moves you so profoundly has nothing to do with whether the plane works, or physics, or how your pilots are doing.  It completely permeates your interior world.  

But it is just you.  (This awareness, in a slightly bolder shade, is like the jet fuel for everything I’ve ever brought myself to do that I was soul-quakingly insecure of.)

Related concept, because it is just you, and interior, it is approximately the only thing you have control over in the situation.  And like…all these other people are doing fine (ok, most of them).  These pilots and flight attendants do this 

This is how that realization feels.

100 times a day and look at them, just living their lives and being at work and not just NOT being terrified, but being kind of bored about it.

Which means being in this situation without consuming, heart racing, spontaneous-crying-creating anxiety is an option. 

“So maybe,” wise interior voice, we'll call her "Stan", counsels, “consider giving that a try.”  Which I do!  And I learn an interesting thing about myself: 

I don’t want to give my fear up.  

Uh huh.  I feel safer when I am living in the grips of panic about how unsafe I think I am.  The paradox there is, frankly, a deeply infuriating mess of betrayal and pig snot.  

I'm mad about it.

WTF even is that.  I mean, what are we saying here?  That the fear is better—the terrible and useless ruination of my morning (and often the night before) is better than NOT that?  As though if I let the fear go, I would—what?  Fall out of the sky?  Asked and answered.  Be unable to react to a situation that might occur like a plane crash that I have no control over or hope of surviving?  But that also doesn’t make sense, because even terrified me can do things like make sure I still get cookies from the in-flight snack cart guy, or consider ways to show Red Pants how much I love him (I love you so much, Red Pants), or make a to do list.  But somewhere inside me I clutch desperately to the same anxiety that makes me miserable.  As though if I just let it go and chilled out, this would be worse. 

Are you effing kidding me?

Also, staring into the abyss of mortality and the nature of life and death is really just exhausting, answers no questions, and does not inspire me to, once on the ground, make healthier life choices or commit more to my dreams or whatever.  Kiiiiiinda one hell of a bait and switch, universe.

Other things I have noticed over the years:  taking off is a billion million times worse than landing.  Landing is fun!  Landing….feels different.  Even in turbulence, I’d rather be plummeting back to earth than moving away from it.  Maybe there are physical reasons having to do with how ascending vs descending feel in my body, or maybe it’s more of a 

Scientific imaging of my brain
 choosing anger as a fear response.

“at least we’re going down on purpose” thing.  


Maybe we’re close enough to the end of the horror show that I can get impatient about it, and annoyance creates an inhospitable environment for fear.  Who knows.

Going somewhere is worse than coming home.  I assume this is related to knowing, when I go somewhere, that I have another return flight on the horizon.  Or maybe the unknown of whatever trip I am on is also low key stressful and while that stress seems negligible to my conscious mind, my lizard back-brain is perfectly happy to let that anxiety in to the general anxiety fiesta going on in-flight.  In for a penny, in for a pound, that type of thing.  (Thanks, lizard back-brain, you’re REALLY GOOD AT THIS.)

Sometimes, it’s totally fine.  What is this?  Why is this even allowed to happen?  Sometimes, it’s just like “right, flight, whatever, fine” and other times I am reduced to only being able to breath and freak out.  Which goes back to the whole “all this is internal, there is nothing objectively terrible about this, oh and by the way the science just works, so maybe calm down.”  Which is true and also complete bs.  

While rare, plane crashes happen.  They’re terrible, and on the list of ways to die, it would be pretty bad.  You’d have way too long to think about it.  I sort of imagine that if I actually fell out of the sky, once I realized the mere sensation of falling wasn’t going to kill me, I’d be soooooo pissed.  I would like to never find out if that is true.  But irl crashes are quite rare, especially if you are making choices like going on a reputable airline that follows safety regulations, etc., not going toodling about with your posh friends on their prop-plane flying lessons.   

How about I just meet you there?

(Dear potential posh friends, I do not want to go on your flying lesson.  But, if you were to invite me to your villa in Costa Rica, I would absolutely suck it up, take Delta, and catch up with you in tropical paradise.  Just…think about it.)  






But then you look at things like the piper cubs from WWII and those just WORKED, Air Force One just WORKS—planes work.  Flying works. 

My unresolved fear, caring not at all.

Sometimes I can talk myself down from the fear—I can choose to let it go.  That is a weird feeling akin to thinking you are not clenching your back muscles until a masseuse pushes on you and is like, you should take a deep breath and relax that…and then you do, and realize you can, and in fact you were the one clenching it the whole time.  V strange.  Similar to flying: both cool and unsettling.

The thing is, the trip is worth it.  While I’m safely on the ground I can decide things like “I’m going to Family Camp” or “I’m going to my friend’s wedding” and get that flight.  And once you’re on, it doesn’t matter how much you hate it or if you’re psychologically ready or not—you’re going up.   And then you get to see other parts of the world and learn the landscape of your interior world and, sometimes, do Red Pants photo shoots.

Ready for his adventure!

This...is not helping.

These in flight entertainment options
 are either boring or expensive.

Is that guy snoring?

Dance Party in the lavatory!  We are OCCUPIED!

Cruising altitude achieved.

Somebody is way chiller about this than I am.