TreeHouseView

I’ve been behind on my challenge writes in the 40 Days 40 Writes Challenge so now I’m perched in seat 48L on board United flight 2380 bound for Honolulu and five days of what will hopefully be sun and fun, and I’m trying to play catchup. The writing prompt for today is about something in your workspace and the choices would seem to be limited because what could more limiting than a tube hurtling through space, however the people…the people make it juicy.

Our first flight was completely full, but this one isn’t quite so jam-packed. There are still more bodies on board than make sense in a flying tube. I don’t profess to understand more than the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to aerodynamics and jet propulsion and physics (how I ever passed that class in high school is a mystery) but what I do know is that it makes absolutely no sense that we are all going from one point to another some thousands of miles away and we are hurtling through the air in a giant metal capsule and it just does not compute.

Regardless, I don’t get freaked out by flying and that’s not the point. My point is the top-notch people watching that travelling brings. Thank the gods for sunglasses so I can freely soak in all there is to see. I wish there was an observation deck in airports—I know some airports are multi-level but I’m talking a dedicated area for people watching. I know I’m not alone in enjoying that Lifetime Sport. It wasn’t offered in the class of that name in middle school, but it should have been along with golf and tennis.

People are endlessly fascinating, and I’m usually left frustrated because I start watching and I just want to know more. Or I start to turn what I see into a story in my head. That’s probably what happens more often than not—I see someone who piques my interest, and my imagination takes over. I give them their Life Story, or my version of it. Sometimes the talkers do the work for me and fill in a lot of the blanks, like the man seated behind me who was carrying on polite conversation with his seatmate while the flight was boarding, and I noticed quickly that it was quite one-sided. She asked a few questions and away he went, giving detail after detail of things she had not asked about, and when he did pause for a breath, it wasn’t to ask anything about her. She got more and more quiet as our plane taxied for takeoff and since we’ve been airborne, there hasn’t been any chatter.

Maybe this is on purpose…I’m one that isn’t too terribly interested in chatting away a flight with a stranger and will do the universally recognized earbuds/headphones in place, book in hand, head down/zero eye contact tactic to try and dissuade any seat mates from engaging in anything more than a polite greeting. I’m just not that interested most of the time, and yes, I realize that could be to my detriment but mostly it’s to my benefit. as I just don’t have the vim or vigot in reserve to give any away to energy vampires.

We are curretnly in the back of the bus so to speak and I’m in a window seat, so you’d think there would be many sights to see but so far this flight has been a little unadventurous when it comes to people watching, and honestly that’s okay with me. Today’s travel climate seems to be as unpredictable as everything else, with people losing their absolute shit over the seemingly smallest things, so if we make it across the Pacific with nothing to note, this will be a space worth working in.

My ongoing wish for an elevated observation deck would work here as well, or my lifelong wish to be invisible would be a trick worth having up the sleeve on a boring flight where I could drift along the aisle, listening in and peeping on people’s conversations that I can’t hear because of the ambient jet noise and also my airpods that are a permenent fixture from takeoff to landing.

My workspace today is both distracting and disappointing to me. I’d hoped for more fodder…chum in the water…something to really spark a rant or a beautifully poetic piece of prose…instead we are just smoothing saililng through the mostly clear blue sky toward a little island paradise in the Pacific, and that in and of itself is enough to spin some tales through the time we’ll be there.