1. I take the subway to the airport, even though my client pays for things like taxicabs. This is how engrained in my head being cheap really is: I have convinced myself that I prefer dragging my rolling luggage through transfer stations to getting picked up at my front door.
2. Meg Ryan cuts me in the security line. This doesn’t bother me because her lips are freakishly big and I wouldn’t want to be her, anyway. The woman in front of me whispers to her young children, “That’s Meg Ryan.” Both of the kids have no idea who she is. This makes me feel old.
3. I peruse the options of overpriced food at Cibo Express, a sort-of-healthy food kiosk at JFK. I grab a tiny jar of hummus, some soy chips, and a plastic bowl of veggie crudités. This, too, can be yours for a mere $15.
4. With about an hour to kill, I sit down to my cornucopia of bullshit airport food and watch Michael J. Fox talk to some asshole on CNN about his battle with Parkinson’s disease for the billionth time. I know I get sick of telling the same story, even if it’s a good one, after about the fourth, so I would imagine this must suck for him. Yet another reason why being famous blows. I dip a carrot in hummus and crunch crunch crunch all to myself.
5. Boarding time approaches and I walk to my gate, noting that most of the people traveling to Paris are vomitously fashionable.
6. I pop the remaining half of my unprescribed anti-anxiety pill as I settle down in my window seat on the airplane. I am forced to take another quarter of one when I realize that for the duration of the flight I will not be at liberty to use the bathroom: the woman next to me is a whale that makes the armrests creak as she seats down and the woman next to her is less a woman these days and more a corpse – she moves like TiVo in frame-by-frame rewind.
7. Somewhere around twenty thousand feet in the air, I pass out, deliberately and gratefully. Not even the enticing smell of airplane dinner can lure me out of my slumber; I’m out cold for the next five hours.
8. With an hour left on the flight, I wake up, dying to pee and debating how to best get across my two human obstacles. The solution – which does not involve peeing in my pants – requires that I use the armrests to step over them both like a trapeze artist. On the return, the old lady wakes up and I fear I have prompted heart palpitations in her shrunken, shriveled chest.
9. I watch the ancient woman struggle to open a banana, a problem she solves with a shaky hand and a dull plastic knife. Then I watch her futz around with the wrapper of her blueberry muffin, her hands tugging and pulling to no avail. I debate offering her a hand, but instead opt to stare out the window instead. Both moments serve to depress me infinitely.
10. We arrive in Paris, which means I’ve survived yet another not so terrifying flight across the Atlantic Ocean.
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