You know those toilets they have in airports that flush automatically?
I just used one in the Denver airport and it flushed while I was sitting on it. I shifted a millimeter and it thought I had gotten up and it flushed, spraying my own pee all over my vagina. I lunged forward and had to wait in half-squat a good eight seconds while the toilet finished its flush cycle and I could sit down again.
I am currently on a commuter flight from Denver to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I just shifted my computer at an angle so the woman next to me can't see that I typed the word "vagina." Great. Now it's in quotation marks and just stands out more.
Maybe she is a gynecologist.
Oh, God. She's knitting. She's actually starting to knit. She's good, too. It appears to be a very complicated sweater.
It's fun flying next to writers. My husband and I once sat next to a college-age girl on a plane. It was her, him, then me at the window. She was writing in her notebook and she kept looking up at me and then scribbling more in her notebook. This went on for hours. She's writing about me, I thought. Then I thought, No, wait, that is so narcissistic. She's writing about something else entirely and just occasionally looking up to check out the window.
After three hours we were coming in for a landing and the girl passed me a note. She literally wrote something down on a square of paper she'd torn out of her notebook, handed it to my husband, and gestured for him to give it to me.
It had been fifteen years since I'd been passed a note. It was sort of thrilling.
I took the note and opened it. "What are the Long Winters?" it read.
That is not a cryptic as it seems. The Long Winters are a band, and I was wearing a Long Winters t-shirt. "A band," I wrote on the note. And then I passed it back to my husband who passed it back to the girl. She read my answer, nodded in thanks, and then wrote something in her notebook.
She was totally writing about me.
Was I a bit player in her journal, or the center of a caustic diatribe on air travel that she was preparing for some college newspaper? Would I read a novel five years from now and recognize a character, wearing a Long Winters t-shirt, on an airplane? Would my character be a jerk? I hadn't even said hello to her. I should have been friendlier.
This is good for me, writing about vaginas on airplanes. I'm usually too shy to write on planes because I assume that everyone on board is as nosy as I am and will look over my shoulder and read what I'm writing. I read what everyone else is writing. There is nothing else to do. I usually sit on the aisle and I know exactly what is on every laptop five aisles up. The guy working on the agricultural tax spreadsheet. The woman writing a speech on storm water drainage. Then there is always the person writing the screenplay (you can spot those ten aisles away ? just from the format) and you think, What an asshole. Who do they think they are? If they were real screenwriters they wouldn't be flying coach, right? They need to make a laptop burka, or one of those hoods the refs use on the sideline replay machines, so people can have some privacy.
The problem is that my screen is so luminescent and high resolution that, seriously, if I were to hold it above my head right now, everyone on the plane would be able to read it. They need to market a laptop that is hard to read, with a screen that can only be viewed from one angle.
She's fucked up the sweater. She's pissed. She's unraveling part of it to start over. She's definitely not a gynecologist.
I feel bad about her facial hair.
The pilot is saying something. WHY CAN'T YOU EVER UNDERSTAND WHAT THE PILOT IS SAYING? It makes me crazy.
I know you're reading this, guy in the row behind me.