Scenes from an airport

Two "signs of the times" at Chicago O'Hare:

• The first was one of those self-aggrandizing billboards, unabashedly proclaiming "Once you've come to Chicago, you may never want to leave!" Cheesy or no, I had to say Amen, sister.
• The second was yet another satisfied customer, storming out of an airport door in his suit and tie, cursing the city using his baseball-stadium voice: "I hope the Cubs never win another game! This place is such a shithole!" I kid you not. His distress caused much merriment in the International Departures line.

You know, I am not much for roller coasters, but gosh, do I love airplanes. Even after countless dozens of take-offs and landings, I still watch with childlike glee as the plane races down the runway, gathering speed, lifting off gracefully. It always prompts in me the same philosophical reflection: if this beastly metal thing with its entrails full of suitcases and skis and books and yapping pets can fly, what can't we do when we put our minds to it?

But on the other hand, my sense of wonderment only goes so far. Every time I am paraded ceremoniously past the first- and business-class seats on my way to Economyland, I can practically feel the plane smirking: "poor Jess... If you hadn't chosen the non-profit world, maybe you'd be flying in these nice, comfortable leather seats with footrests and multiple movie channels and happier flight attendants and cute little pressure socks." Well, first-class, I've made my tiny, upright little bed, and now I must lie in it (or sit ramrod straight, as the case may be). For many, many hours, getting swollen feet and having to endure my dozing neighbor's head bobbing up and down on my shoulder. Sigh.

But there is one thing I'll say for economy class: it sure helps you want to go home. I may have been bawling in the airport, but by the time we'd entered European airspace I was craving nothing more or less than my very own flaccid foam mattress, where I enjoy horizontal unconsciousness, the possibility of reaching REM phase, and the complete lack of drooling neighbors. I am with the Indigo Girls, who say "but I'd rather have a real pillow/ Underneath my head/ Lying in my bed/ Which is in my hometown/ Which is on the ground/ Far from an airplane"!

And that's where I am, more or less. It's back to work already, with but a slip of a night to make up for a week's worth of lost sleep. I look, if you'll pardon the expression, as if I've taken the Red-Eye Express straight out of hell. I sit, I work, I dream of the horizontal adventures that await me tonight. :-)