About Me Before I Became Jaded

My first trip overseas (other than the usual semester abroad in Paris) was to Indonesia.  The client flew us business class.  It was way before I discovered Ambien so I was wide awake in a sleeping cabin, a few TV screens flickering in the dark.  I had my head covered with a blanket, looking out the window at the black sky and crystal clear stars.  Hey, there went a shooting star!  I pressed my nose and cheek to the cold window (upper deck 747 windows are kind of hard to see out) hunting for more.  And there were more there were dozens, a true meteor shower at 37,000 feet and I almost felt they might hit us, they seemed so close.  I turned back to the cabin, to tell people, to shout “hey look outside, this is amazing!” but no one else was paying any attention. At that moment, and for a few years in the beginning, I was enthralled with being in the sky, and I could never understand how no one else seemed to care to watch the long, long sunsets while we chase the sun west, or the northern lights you could always see on Asia trips, or staring down deep wells of enormous white clouds while we skirt thunderstorms.   Twelve years later, I am usually preoccupied with:

1.     Sleeping

2.     Eating – only when it’s a meal I haven’t eaten ten times before and I just left a country with low food security standards

3.     Deciding whether to eat or sleep and when to take my Ambien

4.     Avoiding conversation with my seatmate

5.     Reviewing movie listings to see whether there is anything tolerable that I haven’t seen yet

6.     Working or reading or playing EveryWord or Majong

7.     Watching bad movies

In roughly that order.  So this blog is partly a selfish attempt to rediscover some of that joy by writing about it.  And to help me remember to look out the window once in a while.