Yay Gary!

I really don't like to fly. It's not that I'm afraid (though I'm certainly less comfortable than I used to be, particularly on bumpy flights), more that I get incredibly, stupendously restless. Which makes me incredibly, stupendously irritable. As in, 'why did you just take 12 flash pictures in a row out of the window, it's nightime and we're flying over Nebraska', 'do you need to do a pull-up with the back of my seat in order to get to your feet', 'is it some kind of rule that all the cranberry juice on planes has to have apple juice in it' irritable.

So we're about an hour into three and a half, drinks/snacks are over (handi-snacks?? I thought they stopped making those because of their extreme toxicity...) and I've just fallen asleep, which I know because I remember being on song 8 of my dinosaur of an iPod and now I'm on song 10. The dopey Mr. Rogers-wannabe (except young and like 6'6") flight attendant gets on the loud speaker to ask how many people lost money in Vegas this week. (Side note: If you go to Vegas for any other reason than to gamble, you get sick of this question really fast). The crowd chuckles idiotically, and some people raise hands. At this point, I'm thinking maybe I could still go back to sleep. But then, Mr. Rogers announces that he'd like to remedy that situation and proceeds to have a goddamn raffle wherein people write their seat numbers on dollar bills and throw them in the bag he runs up and down the aisle. Okay fine. They're idiots (and *no wonder* they all lost money), but I'm still enjoying the iPod. But then, we have to give Gary in 15A a round of applause and THEN chuckle idiotically (though since this has been going on the whole time, it's really just a matter of not stopping) as he walks down the aisle collecting trash as some sort of moronic penance for winning 69 one-dollar bills. (I'm not making that up, the total was $69).

Maybe I'm just the world's biggest buzzkill (funny, since I may have been the youngest person on that plane), but while I appreciate informality and little one-liners in the safety lecture and I don't mind being told when we're flying over the Grand Canyon or the like, I pretty much think you should stay the hell off the loud speaker until you want the guy next to me to stop watching Ronin on his DVD player. You guys fly the plane, I'll try to take my mind off the fact that there's a foreign butt ooching into my seat under the armrests. I bought a plane ticket to Chicago, not a bus ticket to summer camp.

*Though I promised I wouldn't, it almost killed me not to do a football post today. I hate you so much, Notre Dame.