It's you... Not Me

I think this is the second time that I'm going to write about this topic, and it likely won't be the last. I'm a 5'10" (178cm) 190lbs guy (yes, a bit heavy for my height, but I spent many, many years lifting on and off - consistently inconsistent) who simply does not fit in the middle coach seat on an airplane. For the second time within a few months, I've been on a relatively short flight and left with my left or right shoulder aching because I had to hold it in towards my body the whole flight in order to avoid hitting the person next to me. Most CEOs I know are my size and up. I would imagine this means that most CEOs of the airlines are my size and up. I would love to strap them into one of their middle coach seats for a minimum 4 hr flight and ask them how they feel after stepping off their plane. The situation is simply ridiculous. Even when I've had the money or points to fly first or business class, it sometimes simply doesn't make sense because of the length of the flight. (Why should I pay twice to three times coach price when the flight is less than three hours. I'm likely not going to get much work done in that time - the most significant reason (for me) for wanting business or first - so I simply don't see the justification. Beyond the money issues, however, this is a question of whether the airlines really care about their passengers or are they so blinded by their bottom lines that they are going to lose passengers in the process. I, personally, won't fly US Airways again unless it is a flight less than 2 hrs or I am able to fly business or first (unlikely unless they take a different attitude towards pricing - i.e. if they aren't going to care about passengers in coach because of bottom line concerns, then what is to say they will be reasonable on their business or first class pricing?). It simply isn't worth the pain (literally).

I'm waiting for Steph to finish her shower, letting the warm air waft in from the open door to our hotel room here at Atlantis. Irony is a hell of a thing. While the weather has been nice, it has been relatively windy and of course, the day we leave, the wind dies and the sun blasts down with full bore. I shouldn't complain, though, as I probably would have scorched my body had it not been for the short stints in the sun.
We leave in a few hours for our flight - something, though, is a bit different about this flight back than what we usually go through. US Customs is actually here in the Bahamas (Nassau). So, we actually enter US territory (from a legal standpoint, as I understand it) here instead of back home. My sister, who left a few days ago, said that you go through a security check three different times. This has always been a sticking point with me and flying: security - or the lack thereof. I've had multiple security checks at numerous airports that were nothing better than as if a stranger on the street were to ask me the time of day (i.e. I wonder if they actually checked or looked at my luggage as it went through the scanners - and other times I feel a rectal exam coming on). I'll miss the weather, but I'm glad to be going. Home is, well... home. I'll post some pictures and comments when we get back.

and you are on a small plane SHUT UP! This is literally the first time I have been so annoyed with someone on a plane that I almost asked them to quiet down. There was a guy next to a woman in row 2 (seats D and F) on flight 4027 from Charlotte, NC to Milwaukee, WI who yapped his mouth so damn loud the whole flight I thought I was going to go crazy (I'm the same person who persevered through an eight hour flight with a crying kid a few rows in front of me - and I wasn't nearly as annoyed as I was tonight). It isn't so much what he talked about (although I hope to god he and the woman next to him were drunk - otherwise they were idiots), it is the fact that it was loud enough to disturb me from being able to read (nothing intellectual, mind you, so it should have been easy for me to ignore the guy). I'm so glad I downloaded a few video podcasts at the hotel before leaving (thank you Alex and Kevin)... The moral of the story, if you have never learned to use your inside voice, the time to do so is before you board a plane filled with people who may not want to listen to your dialogue (and are praying the whole time that you go mute).

I finally understand why I'm on God's green earth:

link to comic
Thank you, Scott, for making things clear to me.

My wife, Steph, and I have certainly had our ups and downs. (Anyone who knows me, especially, knows how thick headed I can be.) At times I've tried to come up with clever ways of venting my frustrations (my way of getting my head back to level) online in a posting or some somewhat vague discussion of an irritating subject or situation. I always felt uneasy, though, about getting into too much detail, as it is what I consider a very private part of my (and Steph's) life. I doubt I'll ever fully divulge anything that happens in any of my relationships out of respect and concern for myself and especially the others I'm dealing with. When I happened across Chris's (Pirillo's) latest post this morning (and it has been a few days or weeks since looking at his site), I thought about how openly some of the disputes between he and Ponzi have been laid out for all of us to gawk at. Is this good? Is it good for them? I honestly don't know. There is probably only one person in my life (outside of my wife) who has gone through all of my trials and tribulations with me. I'm glad he's the only other one who knows my deepest, darkest secrets. I'm always concerned that there will be a time when something I made public will come back to haunt me. In the age of no boundaries and openly hard core pornography (and I'm not just referring to pictures and video), it seems like we've forgotten that there are private topics that the world doesn't need to know about. I'm not particularly critical of Chris and Ponzi's discussion - there does seem to be a line drawn, over which neither of them appears to step in their online discussions about one another. In fact, it is fascinating to see some aspects of something so complicated that armies of psychologists will continually come up with different answers and reasoning for our behavior: relationships. The danger is simply that we will judge both of them on the basis of what little we probably know about either of their personalities. The fact is that I can hardly explain myself to anyone around me without going into long dissertations about my likes, dislikes, rants, raves, philosophical ideas, etc. If anyone took time to read through everything I've posted to the net, they would still only have a small glimpse of who I am. Perhaps some out there are relatively simple and transparent, but I doubt that many of us/them are (when judging others we wish we were, but... we aren't). For me the irony is that even though I find some of what Chris and Ponzi have posted to be trite. If they think their latest snafu is bad or reason enough to dump the other, they're sadly shallow. And that's the whole point I'm trying to make: I doubt that is the case and imagine we are seeing a very small sliver of what is really going on. At least I hope so.

While technology has gotten us closer to one another, it is still only providing us with a way to see a shadow of the other. It's like Plato's Allegory of the Cave: all we're seeing is shadows of the others. We can only surmise what is really happening. Analogously, we can only see more when we come into the light. You combine the discussion being referenced with use of video, sound, writing and some holographic stuff and maybe we can come halfway out the cave. Who has time for this, at that point? We also have our own lives to run... We just aren't there, yet...