Furiously Happy (15 page)

It's my personal opinion that airlines can do two things to make air travel better for everyone. The first is to have the people taking boarding tickets recognize the person who seems the most unreasonably determined to be sitting on the plane, hold up their arm, and joyfully announce over the loudspeaker: “YOU, SIR! You are our winner for most unaccountably and frantically eager to get on a plane
that will not leave until every single person is seated anyway
. Well done, you! Can you tell us how you feel now that you've won?” At best he'll realize he's being a bit douchey, laugh it off, and might calm the hell down from now on. At worst he'll start yelling and then everyone else gets a good show. Then give him a small medal and a mild tranquilizer. Plus a mild tranquilizer for the person who has to sit next to him. And, if you're handing them out, I'll take one too. In fact, mild tranquilizers for everyone!

(I apologize for the gender stereotyping, but in fairness it usually is a he. And he's usually in a business suit. And he often has triple-diamond status. And he's occasionally my husband.)

Frankly, if we all had tranquilizers, that would reduce the need for the second part of my plan to make air travel less awful. There's always that one person who is making a nuisance of themselves because they're furious their enormous bags don't fit, they're loudly muttering racist bullshit about people who aren't actually terrorists, or they've had too many tranquilizers and now they can't swallow correctly. (I've been there, but in my defense, I'd mixed up my antianxiety sedatives with my heartburn medication and so I'd like to think it was less that I was “drooly” and more that I was just slightly too generous with my saliva.) Regardless, I think it would serve everyone as a community if the flight attendants were able to whack one person (per flight) on the head with a piñata stick for being the stupidest damn person on the plane. It wouldn't hurt them permanently but if it happened to them more than once they'd probably get the picture
because HOW ELSE ARE THEY GOING TO LEARN
?

This would also be helpful because I think we're
all
a bit stressed and judgmental on planes and probably at one time or another each of us would get hit with the piñata stupid-stick, and it would be a good reminder to be more compassionate to others. Personally, I'm most likely to get whacked in the head because my anxiety disorder gets really bad on planes and so I end up panicking a bit. Usually I get on Twitter and tell everyone that I love them because that's about the time that my antianxiety pills kick in and they make me super sentimental and scared that I'm going to die. It's like taking ecstasy, but instead of having sex and going to a rave I just want someone to stroke my hair and sing me old Irish drinking songs. Unfortunately I always end up sitting next to people who don't know any drinking songs at all and spend their time making pie charts, which is pretty much the worst use of pie ever.

During my last book tour I flew constantly and it really fucked with my anxiety disorder, to the point where I eventually had a mild nervous breakdown, which they now refer to as “vital exhaustion” for some reason. My shrink suggested that if I was going to continue traveling so much that I could look into getting a service animal expressly trained to provide emotional support to people with anxiety disorders. I considered getting Hunter S. Thomcat trained, but then I remembered that he gets spontaneous nervous diarrhea every time he's in a moving car, and I'd imagine that holding a cat who seems to have explosive plane dysentery wouldn't necessarily
help
my anxiety so much as it would just give me something new (and horribly unsanitary) to be anxious about.

I called around to different service-animal specialists and spoke to a woman who told me that it's better to get an animal who has already been trained and has the right temperament. She also told me that cats aren't preferred emotional-support animals for anxiety disorder, but my cats hate dogs so I figured I was fucked, but then she told me that the Americans with Disabilities Act was recently interpreted as allowing “people with anxiety disorders to travel with an
emotional-support pony
on airlines.” So basically
I could bring a goddamn pony on board with me.
I'm pretty sure a pony wouldn't fit under my seat or in my lap, but I rather liked the idea of a small medicinal horse standing in the aisle beside me while I braided his mane. Plus, Pony Danza would make a great pack animal and instead of bringing suitcases I could just put my extra clothes on him and that way I wouldn't have to pay to check a bag. Plus, the pony wouldn't get cold because it would be wearing my pajamas.

I tried to convince Victor that this was a win-win situation but he got all shitty about our having an indoor pony pet, even though I pointed out that it was for my mental illness. He responded that he had no doubt my mental illness was involved in a decision that would eventually conclude with a bunch of horses in bed with us. I reiterated that I only needed
one
medicinal pony but he argued that I'd eventually claim that the pony was lonely and then one day he'd come home to a houseful of ponies. I didn't respond because we both knew he was right. Besides, I'm pretty sure the girl who brings her horse on the plane is going to get hit with the piñata stupid-stick every flight and Victor's probably just saving me from myself. And from a concussion.

Truthfully though, ponies on planes are small change compared to some of the things I've seen. Like the time the lady sitting next to me listened to every single ringtone available on the highest volume possible in the thirty minutes we waited for everyone else to board. Or one time Victor was sitting in the quiet wooden-cubicle section of the President's Club, where professional people go to work on their laptops during layovers. There was an older man in Victor's row who had his headphones plugged into his laptop so he could watch
True Blood
, and out of nowhere he lunged toward the screen and screamed, “
LOOK OUT, SOOKIE!
” so loudly that Victor accidentally screamed a little too. Or the guy who was sitting two rows ahead of me one time who was
super
careful to hold his phone in such a way that no one around him would notice that he was watching hard-core porn on the plane. And probably no one
would
have noticed if he'd remembered to plug the earphones he was wearing into the phone jack but he didn't and so he groaned in frustration (I hope) and kept turning the volume up louder and louder until he realized the problem
.
Or the woman in front of me in the security line who asked if they would put her cat, Dave, through the luggage X-ray machine because she wanted to see if he'd eaten a necklace. (What the fuck, Dave? Get it together.)

I have to admit that occasionally I'm the one causing the scene. Like the time I bought an antique basket in California but it wouldn't fit in my suitcase so I decided to carry it on like a purse, except that it was a basket made out of a dead armadillo and the handle was its tail and it didn't fit under the seat so I tried to hide him in my lap but the flight attendant was like, “Ma'am, you need to place your … uh … armadillo in the overhead compartment?” and I said, “I can just hold him. He's carry-on. And carrion.” She made me stuff him under the seat but he wouldn't fit and I ended up sighing to my seatmate that I'd just chipped two nails on my armadillo and this is
exactly
why people hate to fly. I considered keeping a nail file in my armadillo for the future (tucking the file under one of his armored plates so it would fold down when you didn't need it) and it sounded like such a good idea that I thought you could probably add a cheese knife and a corkscrew and make a Swiss Army Armadillo.
A Swiss Army Dillo
. I made a note on my phone to create a Swiss Army Dillo but spell-check changed it to “Create a Swiss Army Dildo,” which frankly just seems painful and excessive.

Victor believes that people turning into assholes is a new phenomenon, because flying twenty years ago was much easier and less stressful. I have to take his word on that one because my family always drove or camped on our vacations. This included a summer trip to Lost Maples (age nine), when we returned to my grandparents' camper after a morning of fishing to discover that a band of squirrels had chewed a hole through the cloth of the pop-up camper and shit
everywhere
. It was like a shit sprinkler had gone off in there and we were horrified but also grudgingly impressed. Perhaps the neighborhood squirrels were mad because they could see campers relieving themselves in the woods and were like, “
Really, asshole?
You just shit in my living room. Now
this
is happening in your living room
. I can do this all day, motherfucker.
” Hard to say. Squirrels can be real conundrums.

Still, angry, shitty squirrels can't hold a candle to angry, shitty people in airports and if you've ever doubted this you've probably never seen a person refuse to switch seats so that a parent can sit with their very small child who was inexplicably assigned a seat on the opposite side of the plane. Once, in Chicago, I saw a man refuse to switch seats with a mother who'd bought a seat for her ten-month-old but hadn't been given a seat next to the baby. She asked the man who was assigned the seat beside her if he could sit in the same window seat a few rows away and he refused. “I'm sitting in the seat assigned to me
because those are the rules
. THIS IS MY SEAT,” he grumped as he sat down huffily. What I really wanted was for that mother to stand up and say, “You know what?
Fine.
This is the baby's seat anyway. I'm two rows behind you guys. Have a good flight, baby. Hope you like screaming and urine, sir.” Of course the surrounding passengers quickly gave up their seats to switch around before it ever came to that, which is sort of a shame because it would have been a just punishment. Sitting next to a crying, kicking baby on an airplane is not fun, and is
almost
as hellish as being the parent of a crying, kicking baby on an airplane, which is practically as terrible as
being
the crying, kicking baby on an airplane.

Last year CNN brought me on live TV to discuss a proposal to create “kid-free planes,” and I explained if we were really going to start segregating passengers I'd prefer to ride in an “a-hole-free plane” because babies almost never ask you to join the Mile-High Club, or clip their toenails while in flight, or do any of a plethora of horrible things I've witnessed from others. The CNN anchor seemed slightly aghast that I'd said “a-hole” and “Mile-High Club” live on air, but they really should have expected it because several months earlier they asked me about “mommies and politics” and I explained (on air) that I don't usually write about either subject but that I thought it was a little condescending for anyone to call me “Mommy” unless they'd personally come out of my “lady garden.” I also explained that I'd like political candidates to present their prep plans for the zombie apocalypse, or for the robot revolution, or for when the Internet becomes self-aware, because at least then the debates would be more interesting.

Surprisingly, CNN has not asked me on again. (Although I would like to note that I asked the woman on the pre-call if I could say “vagina” on TV and she said she thought I'd better not, so I said, “Well … can I say ‘my lady garden'?” English was not her first language so she needed help on that one, yelling, “Is ‘my lady garden' okay?” to the people near her, and she said that no one seemed to have a problem with it. Of course, it's possible that no one had a problem with it because there wasn't any context so no one knew that it was a euphemism, or maybe everyone in the office assumed that the woman was fishing for compliments about her lady garden. Regardless I think it all worked out for CNN because that clip ended up being the most popular video of the day and it was nice to be able to call my parents and proudly tell them, “My lady garden is going viral.” In hindsight, that may have been a poor choice of phrasing.)

Victor travels at least weekly for business and thinks that increased security at airports is what's making people insane, because they seem to lose all sense of logic in the security line. One time Victor witnessed a guy carrying a
gallon
of homemade iced tea in his carry-on. The TSA agent pulled out the leaking jug and looked at it like it was a severed arm, and then said, “Sir, I
just
asked you if you had any liquids.” Then the man testily replied, “
I don't. That's iced tea.
” The agent paused for a second, sighed, and explained that “iced tea is a liquid,” to which the passenger condescendingly replied, “
No, dumb-ass. IT'S A BEVERAGE
.”

Then the TSA agent hit him with a piñata stick.

Or that's how it would have worked out in my world.

Everyone gets caught accidentally sneaking weird stuff through security sometimes though. Our friend Jason travels with us a lot and is forever bringing inappropriate things through airports. Last month Victor and Jason went to a conference in Vegas and Jason tried to bring through an industrial-sized jar of hair gel from Costco.

“
It was like something from a barber college
,” Victor told me later. “And security was like, ‘
Sir, you're like
seventy-two ounces
over the limit.
' Jason just shrugged, scooped out a big handful, and put it on his hair for later. It was like the size of a Crisco can.
You could have put both hands in there.
” I tried to convince Victor that Jason was probably doing this on purpose to fuck with him.

“Nope. He did the same thing in China last year. He told me he bought a bottle of wine and they wouldn't let him bring it on and so he angrily drank it in security so it wouldn't be wasted.”