Something About Airplanes

Location: Seoul, Korea
Time: 5:41 am

I believed in God on runways and starting lines. Crouched waiting for the gun or strapped tightly to my seat, I murmured incantations with every breath, crossed myself an innumerable amount of times, praying for agility, success, safety. I quit track three years ago, effectively halving my belief, and my family has stopped traveling since trying to save for college. God and I haven't spoken in about two years.

It was necessary today/tonight/last night/I don't understand time though, as we sat on the runway, the standard safety video playing, preparing us for our flight. Showing us how to blow up our life vests in case of an emergency water landing.

I fucking hate those videos.
I don't know if I'm neurotic or paranoid or insane, but for me, those videos force me to imagine every possible scenario in which the plane could crash over and over and over again, and all it has to offer as solace is a pigtailed Korean girl calmly applying an oxygen mask to her face. Or a business-suited man manually blowing up his life vest because the ripchord didn't work. And in my own morbid fantasies of falling from the sky, the asshole with the malfunctioning life vest is always me.

Airplanes scare me because they don't make sense.
They're giant carriers floating in the air, carrying lives and luggage and and...metal. Giant winged creatures with turbines. Just floating. Flying. I don't like to think about it, because I'm always convinced that these things run on pure belief. I'm like Wile E. Coyote, running off a cliff, suspended in the air, until he looks down, until he stops believing. Until he falls out of the air with nothing but a picket sign reading "Yikes!" left to remind everyone of what happened.

But something happens when you take off from New York at night. It's something surreal.
The plane picks up speed, rumbles, takes off, tilts and banks until the glow of New York City becomes visible through the tiny windows. The streets are real at first, filled with cars, cabs, pedestrians. But eventually they shrink and fade, and the city and the plane do each other the mutual favor of disappearance, Manhattan becomes an incandescent grid, and the airplane a blinking memory, a twinkling apostrophe in the sky.

The airplane is absurd because people have no common sense and like to put words where they don't belong. I can listen to "Blackout" by Britney Spears while playing "In-Flight Tetris." Like I needed to be reminded that I was on a plane. Like in-flight Tetris is somehow different from safe-on-the-ground Tetris. It's like the Seattle Cafe's Original Classic Burger. Hamburgers are a classic American staple. Tetris on a plane is in-flight Tetris.

These are the things I have to contemplate on my 14-hour flight. I have three more hours in this terminal, and another 4 to Manila. I could bitch about how, by the time I touch down again, I'll have been traveling for about 30 hours, but when you think about it, what's 30 hours when it gets you to the other side of the world? Think about the months and months it took to round the tip of Africa. It takes 30 hours to get to the other side of the world. Think about all the people on the plane. Replace "people" with "lives," "stories." We're all being taken somewhere.