06 Nov 2011

Seattle to Edison, NJ

I am on a flight to Newark, NJ and as luck would have it, I am in the much coveted middle seat. Thankfully, the women on either side of me are self-contained, nothing spilling over into my space save for the elbows taking up the arm rests. The math doesn’t work for me when this happens. If they each get one arm rest on the far side of them – the aisle arm rest for the one in the aisle seat and the window arm rest for the one in the window seat – then shouldn’t I get at least one of the two remaining arm rests, just to make it even? Really, if the world were an entirely fair and just place, I would get both of the middle arm rests to make up for being the one wedged in the middle.

Newark is the airport that will get me closest to my final destination, the training center in Edison where I’ll spend the next two weeks learning the fundamentals of how to do my job. I knew these fundamentals in my pre-Australia days but that’s now going on two years ago, so I’m grateful for the refresher. It’s a bit sobering, though, to be on a Sunday morning flight and note that several of the people around me are working. iPads and MacBooks powering up as we pass 10,000 feet, I catch glimpses of financial spreadsheets, an art exhibit proposal, business development emails, and the like. I might be 2 miles above the earth and still climbing, but these reminders bring me right back down, if you know what I mean.