birthdays are awesome. sad it's over, but ready to collect new exciting tales of adventure (and this post is for KATE!!) !

It was probably misleading for me to end on that last note.  I'm not apologizing: I'm all about the drama and the suspense and you heard about Ida anyway.  Poor Hampton Roads.  My little sister's birthday was State of Emergency'd out.  Too bad I was in Florida enjoying perfect weather, so ... not my problem, MidAtlantic.  ZING

What I DID do that is ill-advised prior to travel was watch the latest sensitive and classy TLC special: "I Survived a Plane Crash."  There were not just interviews of the (remaining) pilots and survivors, but actual footage of planes as they burst into flame and dropped out of the air like stones, only to wrench apart in tumbling fireballs of groaning death upon contact with the ground at an ungodly high speed.  For an hour.  At night.

My favorite (?) went like this: a Boeing 757 takes off from somewhere in the US to somewhere in Latin America (which is the extent of my geography skills, so deal with it).  The captains set the coordinates and settle into autopilot, with their headphones or personal laptops or whatever captains do on autopilot.  Suddenly, as a survivor describes, the plane rears straight up into the sky, engines screaming and passengers following suit.  Straight.  Up.  Into the sky.  She described the panic in the cabin and the screaming and the rising G's and ... then she blacks out.  The rescue footage shows the pilots desperately tried to correct a misguided flight path but ultimately couldn't save the plane from crashing right into a mountain.  DIRECTLY into a MOUNTAIN.  Of the like 210 passengers, four survived.

Me: "That's it.  That's how I'm going to achieve my 15 minutes of fame: dismembered in a fiery mass of crushed metal and ugly upholstery, my limbs scattered among airline peanuts and displaced tacky Hawaiian shirts.  I'm not even going to crash onto a time-traveling, debilitating-illness-healing, quantum-physics-manipulating island, either, it's going to be the totally crappy-by-comparison Appalachians.  Goddammit."


I'm lucky enough to have friends who make fun of me and my inability to remain safely in planes anyway, so yes, of course I eventually boarded my own Boeing.  Good thing too: my seat-buddy for three hours was a House Rep with a literature PhD who recognized my flight-reading.  He had evidently heard Derrida lecture before on the recommendation of his friend, Gayatri Spivak, whose translation of "Of Grammatology" I was clutching with sweaty palms before takeoff.  His wife wrote a Modern BritLit dissertation and is a Woolf scholar in the process of completing Divinity school.  He lauded English majors and every precious soul in the world who follows their hearts and not where they think paychecks are: there's something so empowering about choosing a life path based on love and passion, which got him several degrees and a pretty sweet government job.  We are now best friends.   And #6 suddenly looks pretty attainable. 

In any case.

Jackie witnessed my first train experience and my trial-and-error method of boarding, and from there I was so stoked to be traveling again I didn't have time to be embarrassed.  What follows is the transcript of text messages I sent to Rick as my travels began:

Anne: "I cannot express how god. Awful. The weather here is."
A: "My feet are serously turning blue as I wait for the train.  Tell me NoLa is warm yo"
A: "What luck! A US Airways person right across the aisle on the train. Pilot? Flight attendant?  Who knows, but my new guide for sure"
A: "There is a GAP in this airport."
A: "And you can get flu shots in the food court."
A: "So I just lost my boarding pass.  Retracing my steps to the GAP, but will the gate agent reprint me one?"
A: "Strike that. It was somehow in my laptop.  Crisis averted."

If I could also take this moment to recommend nonstop flights.  PHL to MSY offers more nonstop options than RIC or ORF ever did, so I checked it out and it was awesome.  We left almost an hour late and still landed four minutes early.  This was okay with me: a weekend of alligator cheesecake, palm trees, white sandy beaches, Derrida, and job-scoping (okay, very little of that actually happened) were waiting, and getting to it the sooner the better.

Four minutes sooner, in fact.