Jetlag

My brain is stuffed with cotton, and that cotton has been soaking in some kind of heavy syrup for a week and then woven into the tightest weave ever before being stuffed inside my skull. I'm not sure where my brain went. I think it's hovering about 2 feet above my cotton-filled cranium, watching everything I do through a haze of cotton plants.

That is how full my head feels at the moment. I'm not drunk, although my ability to think is more impaired than usual.

Jetlag.

I can honestly say I've never experienced it before.

Speaking of travel, I never want to fly again. I say that every time I get off of an airplane, so that statement doesn't exactly express intent. I'm going to Italy next year, after all, and I'm certainly not going to cross the ocean on a freaking boat. Given the choice of 12 hours of freaking out (plane) versus a week and a half of hysterics (boat), I'll self-medicate and do the 12 hour thing. I've seen Titanic. I don't think I can be sedated enough to even step foot on the Queen Mary 2 herself.

Speaking of flying, those airlines really have a thing going there. People pay truckloads of money to go to DisneyWhatever and Paramount TakeMyMoney Studios and ride those crazy upside-down-stop-on-a-dime-with-a-side-of-heart-attack machines they call roller coasters. The airlines? Give you the same sensation but charge you $600 for a ticket and $10 for a sandwich. Oh yes, they no longer give you food on trans-national flights without charging you for the fake mayo.

The only fun thing about flying is the few seconds before landing. The Professor and I have a game where we try to guess whether the pilot is former Navy (the pilot doesn't slow much before the wheels touch and the landing is hard enough that it feels like you are going to actually tunnel under the runway) or Air Force (gentle landing from a pilot that knows he has space to not kill every organism on board, that then makes you worry that he is not slowing down enough and you will plow through the buildings at the end of the runway).

So either way I always think I'm going to die. But I get a few seconds every flight to play a game. Somehow, I never find that a worthy trade-off. Yay for games?

And yesterday - or two nights ago, more specifically (I think) - two of my three flights started with the pilot saying "The first half of our flight should be fairly smooth", which leaves my brain an hour and a half to wonder what the hell is going to happen in the second half of our flight. Is there a herd of pterodactyls waiting on the other side of the Rockies? Is the fake mayo going to respond unfavorably to the change in air pressure and spontaneously combust? Why is Blogger telling me that "combust" is not a word?

So, jetlag.