my trip

Well, it’s been an interesting day. I had not two, but THREE legs to San Antonio from Champaign! Luckily, I only have to make two legs on the way back.

So it’s been all airplane flights, all day. Of course, that totally beat getting my ass to Chicago by 7 AM for flights that each had a four- to five-hour layover on the way to San Antonio. That would have involved getting the shuttle (which runs every three hours from Champaign and takes four hours to get to Chicago) at around midnight. And would have cost the same.

I like to sit in the window seat in general. I suppose the general population is probably pretty evenly divided between aisle and window preferences. When I fly Delta, I make sure to log in and confirm my flight(s) about a week beforehand so I can try to get window seats. Today, when I boarded at Cincinnati for Atlanta, I found a woman sitting in my seat.

This particular woman was quite nasty looking. Remember that poor woman who was mauled by the weird mastiff-type dogs in San Francisco five years ago? The lawyers who owned those dogs looked like (and happened to be) supreme assholes. She looked just like Marjorie Knoller. But was a lot heavier.

In any case, I told her that I thought she was probably in my seat. She responded: “Oh, you want to sit in the window seat?” No, I wanted to sit in the middle. I told her that I’d ensured a window seat awhile back and yes, I did intend to sit in it. She threw a miniature tantrum—sighed, huffed and puffed, and slammed things around in order to vacate the seat for me. She happened to have been assigned to the middle seat and no one sat in the aisle seat. But she stayed in the middle seat anyway and almost leaned over me to continually gaze out the window. Good grief. I think she was trying to make me feel sorry for her and give up my seat to her. Finally, she gave up and moved to the aisle seat and wrung her hands the entire trip.

My little secret: I might have been nice enough to let her sit in the window seat, had she perhaps pressed my hand and earnestly said, “You know, I am really nervous on airplanes and I need to see out the window,” or, “I’m clinically insane and go ballistic on aircrafts when I can’t see outside” or something to that effect.

But no. She thought that if she just SAT in my seat that I would be too pacifistic to insist on sitting there myself. Ha!

Anyway, in a more important vein….

There is this really fascinating “column” in The Nation this week called “Girls against Boys?” Katha Pollitt discusses how the projected demographics for people attending college in the next few years will be 60% female/40% male. She says: “So of course the big question is, Who will all those educated women marry? . . . . If the ladies end up cuddling with their diplomas, they have only themselves—and those misguided ‘advocates for women’—to blame. Take that, you hyper-educated spinster, you.”

So, hmmm. I wonder how much my east-coast education is hurting my dating game in C-U?