So this is kinda old. I'm not a professional blogger: I don't get this stuff down "right away" like I'm supposed to. I wouldn't have been able to post it at the time anyway, because as great as the hotel was, it didn't have free internet (you'll see.) Be that as it may, I have a chance to post it now, so I'm posting it. Also, and this ties into the whole "not a professional blogger" (or a writer) thing, and it's also important because I'm only going to say it once: I'm going to freely switch between past and present tense in the coming paragraphs, because sometimes I was writing what was immediately in front of me, and sometimes I was writing about what I just did in terms of what I was doing as I was doing it, and sometimes I was remembering it like it was a past event. This is clearly confusing and random, but I don't care.
Let me repeat: I. Don't. Care.
Ever since I got in my head to try to start documenting my life a little better, a part of my brain has been mentally keeping tabs on everything I do, trying to think about how I was going to write it down. As such, I have about a million things I want to spew out onto the screen right now, but I need to take a detour first and talk about shitty internet for a second.
The short of it is that I'm really looking forward to the day when the Internet (with a capital I) finally becomes ubiquitous. I say this now because while my fiancee is sleeping in bed trying to adjust to the time change, I'm sitting at the desk in our hotel room writing this....
offline. The hotel has wifi access of course...provided you have an account with T-Mobile.
"Not to worry," I told myself, "they also have hardlines in each of the rooms so I'll just plug in." Like most wifi spots, as soon as you open your browser, you're redirected to a TOS page, and this one kindly states that each day your room will be charged $9.95 for access. That's not exactly the "complimentary internet access" they advertise on their website. To get back to my point, I seriously can't wait for the day when there's no monetary value left in charging for internet access because everybody just expects to be entitled to it, like being able to use public streets for your car.
Besides the crappy internet service though, this has got to be the nicest hotel room I've ever stayed in. Jenn booked a corner suite for us, which is essentially a sitting room with a nice big plasma TV and a desk in it, a hallway to the bedroom with a huge and beautiful bathroom off of it, and a bedroom with a king bed and another 60 inch plasma TV. The windows are floor to ceiling, and from our corner on the 23rd floor, the view is just great. In fact, we can see straight down into the skyway where the main door to the PAX LAN party is located! The blinds are even motorized, so flip a light switch and BRRRRRRRRR, the blinds go up or the blinds go down. Of course, technology can go to far too. The little guest services book sitting on the desk next to me warns that if you take something out of the minibar, the electric pressure sensors underneath each item will immediately and automatically bill the item to your room account. You can't even pick anything up! I wonder how many people they bamboozle with that little trick who don't read the book first.
I'm working out of order here, because there's a fair bit to talk about from yesterday's "travel" day too. Jenn and I both worked half-days, because our flight wasn't until 5:45 pm. Admittedly, it was hard to concentrate on anything at work with the anticipation of this weekend on my mind. Jenn swung by the office around quarter to noon to help make sure I made a timely escape from the office, and we headed back to my parents' place to finish packing up and meet Chris, who had foolishly agree to be our chauffeur. (Someday I'll know how to spell that word without auto-correct helping me.) We loaded our stuff up and went for lunch at PotBelly. (I grew up in suburbia, and while I am aware that there are far better places out there to eat, I'm used to the huge restaurant chains.) We still had enough time afterward to stop by Best Buy and see if there were any last minute game purchases we wanted to indulge in before coming to the new mecca of all gaming. I've been eyeing The World Ends With You and Super Dodgeball Brawlers for a while now, but I thought of the 70 bucks those two games would set me back, and I imagined of all the swag and collectibles that were waiting for us on the west coast and I managed to keep my anorexic wallet in my back pocket. We walked out empty handed and got back on the road.
I don't travel often, and I can't claim any great expertise in it, so forgive me if any of this ends up sounding naive. I like flying. I like flying out of O'Hare too. The airport is nice, and modern technology allows us to bypass the ticket counter entirely by using pre-printed boarding passes from home. With no baggage to check, we walked with to Chris up to security and said goodbye.
As much as I like flying, I'm not a big fan of the security checkpoint. When I was in eighth grade, I went with my class on a trip to Washington DC. That was the first time I ever flew on a plane, and I had a good time. While we were there, I bought a couple bottles of what eventually became Mountain Dew Code Red. At the time, it was still in trials in select areas of the country, because nobody from my class had ever seen it before. The effect that this stuff had on me at that age is an entirely different tale, and I might be tempted to leave it to Chris to tell since he was there all the way back then. His memory of the evening might be far more accurate than mine too...
At the end of the trip though, I still had one plastic 20 oz. bottle left, which I had packed in my carry-on for the trip home. When it went through the x-ray machine though, this smooth, solid-colored, cylindrical object must have caught their attention, because they pulled me and the bag aside and asked me to open it. I was more confused than anything because I knew there wasn't anything dangerous in my own bag, and I couldn't figure out what item they were talking about from their descriptions to me. They kept saying, "do you have something round in your bag?" which just didn't make any damn sense to me until we opened the bag and they saw the bottle of Mountain Dew in there. I remember the security guy doing kind of a scoff and rolling his eyes before sending me on my way.
The point of this sidetrack is that since then I have a very slight, almost imperceptible nervousness associated with going through that process. To be fair, my fear is probably far less than most other people's to begin with, but even though I know I have nothing dangerous and they have no reason to stop me, I always worry whether something they see on their screen is going to look like something else. None of this is terribly important I guess though, because Jenn and I both went through the checkpoint without so much as a second glance, and we proceeded to our gate. Well, we proceeded to what we thought was our gate. When we checked in online the previous night, the boarding passes we printed said B19. While we were walking through the terminal though, Jenn got a status update email from whichever online service she used to book the tickets, letting us know the gate had been changed to B21. "Not a big deal," we told ourselves, since we were headed in the right direction anyway. The funny thing is though, that the "Departure" monitors all over the place all still say B19, so that's where we took a seat.
We are ridiculously early. Like almost 3 hours early, because even with lunch and Best Buy and travel to the airport, getting through security was easy and our gate wasn't very far away. The big monitors that United have at their gates are pretty slick: they tell you which flight is currently boarding or arriving, which passengers have checked in, which are waiting on standby, and which flight is next "on deck." As we're keeping an eye on the monitor though, the next flight keeps coming up as Montreal, not Seattle. I walk down the terminal and check the board for gate B21: Rochester is on deck there. Eventually, with less than an hour to go before boarding, I check the Departures board again on my way back from the Starbucks (with a grande, iced, skim, no-whip white mocha in hand for my soon-to-be-wife) and find that we're now leaving from C21. I relate this to Jenn, and we shoulder our bags and march off towards the underground tunnel connecting to the remote terminal. I remember this tunnel from trips here as a kid-- back when you could still walk with your party all the way up to their boarding ramp. The tunnel has funky 70's (I'm assuming they are 70's: I wasn't actually alive at the time) neon lights on the ceiling and these long "people mover" conveyors to walk on. The kid in me enjoys these immensely, but don't tell anybody that, especially not Jenn, who would probably roll her eyes. When we emerge, we once again find our gate and take a seat. This time, the board does say Seattle, so we figure this time we might be in the right place.
While we still had time, I run off to the restroom while Jenn stays with the bags. When I get back, Jenn says she's not feeling so hot and takes her turn. I'm documenting it here folks: my wife is no longer allowed to drink Starbucks before flights. That probably wasn't the real cause, but she really wasn't feeling well, and was still indisposed when they started boarding our flight. The restrooms are immediately across from our gate, and I'm standing there nervously pivoting 180 degrees between the line of people shrinking into the plane, and the door to the lady's room across the way. With literally less than a minute left, she's back and we board pretty much directly in front of the 10 stand-by passengers waiting to take our seats.
The fun thing about airlines these days is twofold really. First, they overbook their flights, which makes financial sense to them but is just about the shittiest practice in the world for passengers. Second, even if you DO get on the plane, they don't seem to design them with enough room for everyone's bags. Had we boarded when we were supposed to, it wouldn't have been an issue, but literally being the last ones on the planes, there wasn't room left in the overheads for our rolly-wheeled carry on suitecases. Who designs an aircraft with 138 seats for people, but only enough space for 136 carry-ons? The head flight attendant made us walk all the back to the boarding ramp to have our bags checked and (presumably) pitched into the belly of our aircraft. On the walk back to our seats, we gathered quite a few sympathetic glances from our fellow passengers, but I bet all of them were secretly thankful it wasn't them.
Remember when I said I like flying before? This is the part I was really talking about. We took off. Yeah, that's it. It's my understanding that loads of people don't care too much for this step in the process, or the whole middle part I guess, but for me it's like a roller coaster. It's ironic, because for the first half of this flight, I just couldn't stop thinking about what it would feel like to fall straight down for 30,000 feet. I even wondered if I would have time as I fell to grab the iPhone on my hip and type out a last love note to Jenn. The laws of physics and aerodynamics probably make that pretty improbable, but I'd like to think that with no hope of saving myself I could at least tell someone somewhere in the world what was most important to me before I died.
Wow. Morbid. Okay, so back to fun flying. The whole middle part of flights (where you can't tell you're really moving) is usually pretty boring to me, and I'm thankful that I don't seem to have any kind of motion-sickness that would prevent me from watching a movie, reading a book, playing my DS or even typing on my computer. The last one was the thing I really wanted to be doing, but the incredible lack of room effectively excluded that for me. Instead I read a book. And a half. Both really good. Both, and this wouldn't be at all surprising if I had a chance to explain it yet, by Wil Wheaton. I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I haven't read his books yet, because I've been reading
his blog for a couple years now and have been incredibly entertained and inspired by him just from that. He convinced me that he was like me (even though he spends lots of time talking about how he's realized that lots of people are like HIM) and that he's a role model seriously worth looking up to. There's a lot more I want to write on that subject, but I'm trying to stay in the general vicinity of a single thread here.
I started with Dancing Barefoot, because it was the one that was in my backpack and not Jenn's and therefore easier to reach. Even though I don't make the time to read as often as I should, I can be voracious when you put something I'm genuinely enthralled with in front of me, and I just devoured the book. I was a huge Star Trek (TNG) fan when I was in middle school (and I'll admit it: high school too).
Oh, I'm afraid that I'm going to lose my thread. I'm running out of time to write! Jenn's going to be expecting me back in bed when she starts waking up, and I don't want to disappoint her.
Final thought: I've wanted to write about my life a lot lately, partly because I can't remember it that well and there's people and things in it now that I feel are worth remembering. But I'm struck by the cruel balance writers have to make: spend time shut in a room by yourself documenting the amazing things in your head, or be "out there" in the world, actually experiencing the very things you will eventually want to write about?
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