Day 16: Interlude, part 1
I’m sitting in JFK, on my first long layover of the trip — I arrived from RDU at 12:37, and I’ll be leaving for PDX at 8:40. It’s 2:14 now, so I’ve got some time to kill to say the least.
Find me nattering on about the details a bit over on twitter as @joshmillard, if you’re nasty.
I’m continuing to have a great time on the trip, and nothing has yet gone seriously wrong, so at the halfway point I’m feeling pretty good about this whole thing and looking forward to kicking off the second half in LA in a couple days.
But at the moment I’m more excited just to be home. A day will not be enough. I miss my wife. Six hours of waiting for a long flight and a medium cab ride is sort of telescoping out in front of me now without any big distractions.
So, small distractions: here’s some notes.
1. I had my first itinerary scare this morning, checking in at RDU.
The kiosk couldn’t help me, an agent coming around with a list didn’t see my name on it, and the woman at the counter who helped me post-kiosk didn’t find my flight either.
My flight out of RDU to JFK, that is. My flight from JFK to PDX later tonight was all set. The question of how I would be getting to JFK sort of hung in the air there between us for a moment. Then we got it figured out:
When I rearranged my flights a week or so ago to nix Vegas and swap in PDX, the phone tech I spoke with got a little overzealous with the nixing and just plain killed RDU-JFK. Oops. That conversation took place on a windy Vermont porch with about half a bar of cell service as the tenuous bridge between me and the call center, so a miscommunication wasn’t too shocking in retrospect.
The record of that original booking made fixing it up pretty painless, fortunately, and here I am in JFK. Quick and happy resolution, props to jetblue for that.
2. Music, books, internet, oh my.
My media-consumption habits are basically fucked at this point.
2a. My daily internet reading has all pretty much gone AWOL — I’m a creature of habit, if I can’t check in daily I end up wanting to just write off checking in at all until normalcy returns — and so I’ll have the mixed blessing of a month of comics and blogs to catch up on once the whole trip is over.
2b. As for books, I brought four and haven’t gotten more than a quarter of the way through the first one, much as I’m enjoying it (The Once And Future King, of which more later), so it’s safe to say I overprepared a bit on that front. Esp. considering that I have received a number of recommendations/reminders on the trip that would make good airport buys if I were short on material. Anathem, for one. How have I no read the latest Stephenson?
2c. Music has been catch-as-catch-can — I don’t want to put an iPod when I’m hanging out with new friends, or when walking solo around a new town when I could be soaking in the local sonic signature, or when I’m back from a meetup and tipsy and tired, and that’s pretty much all of my time not spent in an airport or on an airplane on this trip. I snuck in a couple hours of downtime yesterday morning, catching up on Metatalk business from the last couple weeks and listening to some comfort-food Wilco in my host’s living room, but that’s about it for non-air-transit listening for the last couple weeks.
2c-i. Girl Talk. Loving it, listened to bits of Feed The Animals when it first came out but never really got around to giving it a good listen until this trip. Grabbed it, Night Ripper, and some of the other stuff on Illegal Art (Steinski was basically my packing music before trip launch).
2c-ii. But listening to it when I’m already disoriented from traveling is kind of a mixed bag. If I get distracted from the fact that what I’m listening to is mashuppery, it can leave me feeling like losing my shit a little — the flu fever, where even simple television gets hard to keep track of in your addled state, and all the foggy-heated connotations that come with that. The phonological spins.
2d. Speaking of television, I blame JetBlue for exacerbating some of these consumption-habit troubles. Satellite TV at your seat is neat and all, but it’s also hard to ignore if you don’t remember to, and time spent channel-flipping is time wasted half the time at least. And yet flip-flip-flip I do, with the miserable little blister-button controls on the armrest that I would otherwise prefer to have put up flush with my seatback in the first place.
I accidentally turned into one of those I Don’t Watch TV people a few years ago, by moving to an apartment with no cable and buying a TV without an antennae, and at this point I’m pretty okay with it. I still watch plenty of TV, but I do it in bulk, without commercials, on my own schedule, thanks to things like Netflix and the internet and so on. There’s too much good stuff for me to watch as it is; why I would bother with the bad shit too and ads wrapped around it all, I don’t know.
But then I get on a plane. Way to undercut my otherwise reasonably-well-managed media-consumption philosophy with your admittedly-much-better-than-previous-airlines personal entertainment approach, jetblue.
3. Power stations good, LCD ad crawls bad.
JFK’s T5 area is littered with power stations, ten-foot-long bar type arrangements with four ass-fitting stool on each side and plentiful outlets. Definitely a good thing (though not so ergo in the long run, stools are too low or counters to high depending on how you figure it but not great for wrist position in any case, and I’m a fairly tall guy). Beats the shit out of hunting for a neglected outlet near some seats in one gate or another.
But they’ve got these clever touch screens from which you can in theory order food and drink to be delivered to you. A neat idea, I guess, though I haven’t tried ‘em out yet. With several hours to go, I might just for the hell of it, but it’s not really something I’m interested in.
Tough shit for me, then, that there’s no obvious way to turn them off. And each screen is mounted in front of a stool, so you can’t sit at a bench without having a like 5-10 minute add loops constantly crawling by in your upper-center peripheral vision. That’s obnoxious after a half an hour. I’ll be here for more than a half an hour.
My complaints are all petty. All except for homesickness, at least. All in all I’m having a great time, and my white whines about airport accommodations should, for what little merit they even have, be taken in context of how much less accommodating some of this stuff would have been even ten years ago.
There’s something to be said about the likely (and weird) circumstance that the new post-9/11 tightened airport security, passengers-only-beyond-the-checkpoint philosophy of airport management has led to necessarily better gate-side service. There’s not really any tasteful to way to say “hey that sure worked out well”, but there you go. ”Silver lining” does not feel like the right phrase, so let’s just go with “it’s a weird world” and drop the subject.
2:56 now. Less than six hours to go. Strength.
