ugh

I woke up at around four AM. I'm not really sure why. Between my Loveliest and I, lately, there's someone up at nearly every hour of the day at our place.

I spent the first twenty minutes of my morning lying in bed with random thoughts swirling around in my head. One recurring thought was about the likelihood of trouble in transit this week. So I got up and checked the east coast weather.

The problem isn't the weather per se, but the backlog of flights now that 9000 flights have been canceled, today through tomorrow. The Philadelphia airport is closed today. All flights are canceled by every US airline in and out of Newark, New York, DC, Baltimore...

And again, we're not going any of those places. We're going to Rochester, up on the Lake Ontario coast, where Hurricane Sandy will provide about 48 hours of constant rain. Given what's happened to Atlantic City already today, I'm hoping there's still enough Rochester above water to fly to.

But the main problem isn't in Rochester, it's in the airports. I'm not a good air traveler, I loathe and feel dehumanized by the non-place of an airport, the non-people of crew members, and the non-service they work so diligently to provide.* Perhaps we'll get lucky, and the airline employees and travelers will have gotten the mean spirit of Sandy's aftermath out of their systems. Perhaps flight schedules will have returned to normal by Wednesday afternoon when we're supposed to transfer at O'Hare.

I might be on east coast time before then. We do have to leave here a little after four AM Wednesday.

--

* I take these terms from George Ritzer's The Globalization of Nothing. "Nothing" is Ritzer's term for the placeless, featureless, ubiquitous crapola that global capitalism produces and sells so much of. RItzer's other concept, of "McDonaldization," helps explain how, where, and by whom "nothing" is produced and consumed. "Non-people" is a modification of Goffman's idea of a non-person, and the rest should be pretty simple to tease out.

My favorite bit is his account of the scripted interactions of non-persons during commercial exchange (i.e., overwhelmingly most of our daily, commodified interactions). It's one of the things about air travel that most offends me. Maybe I'm wrong, but when flight attendants start to run through the safety card information, their dead eyes unfocused on anything in particular, never making eye contact, I experience a sense of their icy hatred of every person in the plane. I believe we all know that the safety information is not for our safety, but that of the airline, specifically, from liability. (Remember when Southwest used to have "joke" safety information? That was just as offensive, because it was that gutless mild kind of writing that isn't actually humorous -- I'm sure they hired a writer from a sitcom on ABC Family Channel.)

Then there's the "in-flight service," a non-service in every way Ritzer talks about. It seems as though the typical non-service amounts to one 8-ounce plastic cup filled with off-tasting ice and a soft drink filled to the rim, per two hours of flight time. On flights over four hours, they sometimes provide a plastic bag containing 2 ounces of mini pretzels (approximately eight), and the smart airlines are now providing free stupefaction pacifiers television. As the plane lands and taxis, when they say "welcome to __" and "your final destination," and tell us to have a good day, I can tell they really mean "get the hell out of the plane so I can wash the dreck of your repulsive presence off of me," or, you know, words to that effect.

montreal - part one: travel, coronaries, etc.

Too much Montreal to discuss in one post. So for today, the travel part.

I've been stressed beaten over the head continuously with short lengths of rubber tubing over-stressed this year. I was grading up to the hour we packed to leave for Montreal on top of that. Then we got into Memorial Day San Francisco traffic (I was so stressed and so anxious that I forgot to make our favorite Memorial Day joke, of 5 years' vintage, to wit: "When I say it's Memorial Day, you say, 'how high?'!").

Saturday we knocked around in San Francisco, and that night I barely slept, tossing and turning, finally waking up around 2 am with my heart pounding. I have been concerned about my health because of the overwhelming pressure of the past couple years.

Sunday morning, I wasn't doing too well. We made our 7:20 am flight to JFK, but my heart was still pounding. By about a half-hour into the flight, I was short of breath, sweating, and my chest was tight with pain. I called the flight attendant and told her I was having chest pain. She looked freaked-out (I later discovered that was just sort of her look).

Here's what happens when you complain of chest pain to a flight attendant on a transcontinental flight.

The attendants emptied the very rear middle row of the plane (big 'un, a 767 with a middle triple row and two side double rows). They brought me back there. Meanwhile, they turned on the PA: "Attention, ladies and gentlemen. We have a medical emergency on board. If there is a doctor, a nurse, or any other medically trained professional on board who would please volunteer to assist, please let a flight attendant know."

Thus I became the Celebrity Medical Emergency of Flight 24.

A lovely nurse from Santa Rosa named Denise came back and talked to me a while. She checked my pulse, asked about my medical history, and asked for oxygen for me. The flight attendants turned up the O2 and a blood pressure cuff, and Denise got all that underway, while she told me I don't fit the profile for a heart attack victim.

I sat in the dark breathing oxygen for 10 minutes while, from time to time, passengers turned around to look. I felt physically rotten, but the pain in my chest started to abate. Denise all but diagnosed me as not having had a heart attack, suggested I get some juice, and just sit in the dark and hang out. The attendants got me apple juice and a cookie (and I never paid for the cookie - so there's a travel tip for you right there), and I sat in the back row the whole flight to New York.

It was a panic attack - my first serious one in over 6 years, and the first I've had that felt like this. I used to just hyperventilate and get light-headed and nauseated. Never had the chest pain before, but I think it may be related to the serious neck and back strain I've gotten from the stress. If you know about panic attacks, you know they're miserable and stupid, and that you feel like crap for at least a day afterward.

We got to Montreal by 9:30, which was late, because of construction at JFK. We couldn't figure out how to take the airport express bus to town to get to our hotel, so we took a very expensive cab ride instead. I'd had it at that point. It was a good decision: on the way out of Montreal, we took that bus, and there was no room whatsoever on it - no seats, no standing room, nothing. 30 minutes to the airport, stuffed in. Wouldn't have been good after a panic attack.

Our flights home were uneventful, except that the Montreal airport is pretty stupid to get through for an international flight. We got back to SFO at 11:15 or so. The Sleep, Park, 'n' Fly bus got us to take us to our car at around 11:45, and we were on the road to Turlock by just after midnight. So, after a 23 -hour day of conferencing (of which more in a later installment) and traveling, we were home by 2 am.

(Next year, this conference is in Fredericton, New Brunswick, which is further away and much less convenient to travel to!)

Lessons learned: Don't panic; don't die of a coronary on a transcontinental flight; nurses are lovely; if at all possible, don't fly from Montreal to the US.