By Kristance Harlow
Those damn seats never gave enough legroom and even though I was short, it was far from comfortable and I still complained about legroom because that’s what everyone always complains about. A rigid, straight-backed position was simply not my style so I tried to slouch down, to no avail. Then I attempted to position my feet on and slightly in the pocket of the seat in front of me, always bending SkyMall and slipping on the laminated emergency card. The grunts and loud sighs coming from the passenger in front of me made me think they might have possibly been annoyed about my constant fidgeting, but I was too afraid of getting those blood clots discussed on Channel 5 news to care.
And why were the seats always blue? Dark blue, sometimes with strange diamond patterns which I stared at to test out the theory of going permanently crossed eyed. The end result was my nose meshing into the seat back. It was enough to keep me occupied for a good 53 seconds. After that amusement was gone the next obvious distraction was the tray. It made my awkward knees-bent-5th-grade-school-bus-era position more awkward but if I would flip the latch that held the tray up back and forth I wouldn’t think about the time in 5th grade when Jimmy “Smelly” Steward sat next to me on the bus. He had sat so close that I was sure his nauseating odor would envelop me in a deadly gas, everyone would have been sad that I died so young and been mad at Jimmy because it would have been his fault. Instead of dying I just reeked of Jimmy all day, which when you are in 5th grade is just as bad. Thank God for airplane trays.
Oh! And that television, it was never where it should be, either ridiculously far away or so close that the colors were reversed like film negatives. It’s not like the television was the point of the flight. Although I did hear that it is the journey not the destination that matters. I suppose the lack of technological entertainment did provide time to contemplate why the pillows were so tiny and why there were never enough itchy blue cotton blankets for everyone.
Not to mention that sick guy who sat to my right, I had a window seat. Window seat being the choice because if nothing else I knew I could stare down and pretend like I was a giant looking at all the tiny roads and houses, using my fingers to size up how easy it would be to squish anything I wanted down there. But back to the sick guy I’m griping about. He had hundreds of tissues, used tissues. When he coughed he always used his left hand and proceeded to wipe his left hand on the outside of his left leg. It was so close to me that I could almost see the vacation destroying germs trying to vault onto my right leg, but of course I tried not to notice it by being a giant. As soon as the clouds covered my view of the square cornfields, this guy started sneezing in my direction and I tried not to be surprised because I should have expected that.
That’s when the man on the aisle seat tried to figure out his portable DVD player that his 16-year-old daughter suggested he buy for long business trips. He plugged the headphones into the wrong jack and turned the volume up loud. The speakers blasted me with the Braveheart soundtrack and me, being the kind person I am, tried to explain to him what he did wrong. He, politely, turned it down but didn’t plug his headphones into the right place. After 10 minutes of me trying to talk around the coughing man I told him he got it and gave up. A nap was in order so I took my tiny pillow and tried to position it against the window, since there was just a big enough gap, my pillow kept slipping down between my seat and the window. When it finally fell down so far that I couldn’t reach it I realized I was unable to do anything but slip my feet on the emergency card while I made my nose mesh into blue.
