Training Wings

Today I learned that:

--Being an adult means getting up at 4am on a Saturday morning to do something other than pregame for football.
--Flying isn't so bad (and neither are those seasoned flight attendants)
--I am weirdly graceful when hit with unexpected turbulence.

Today I worked a Dallas-LaGuardia turn, which means I flew 2 3/4 hours to LaGuardia, saw a snippet of that long lusted-after Manhattan skyline, and turned right back around to Dallas, arriving just in time for the heat of this September day. Apparently, fall is in full swing here in Dallas, and it sucks just as much as summer did.

    All three of the ladies I worked with were actually pretty great. They were positive, adamant that I need to have a "life" outside of being a flight attendant, and full to the brim of the most ridiculous stories.

 For example, breastfeeding dogs on an airplane is a lot more common than you think it might be.  Also, flight attendants have been known to crawl into the coat closets on larger aircraft and hunker down for a nap (which is really, really illegal for so very many reasons, but something I would be tempted to do for hide-and-seek purposes if I thought that jumping out and yelling "BOO" on an airplane wouldn't get me shot immediately.)

Of course, flying to LaGuardia and turning right around was just the remedy I needed to feeling good about my assigned base.  I will start out as a DC-based (read: domestic. No London layovers for me boo-hoo) F/A.  In clear terms: I am having the slightest heart-death over not being based in New York right off the bat.

Death. not ache. Its more than an ache. its a pretty petite death, but not in the French la petite mort way, which, according to Roland Barthes, is pretty great.

Bottom Line, I miss New York. Upper line, I created an upper line, and  on my days off it is a 45 minute flight to that voluptuous apple. This means dinner in Manhattan, hold the rent.

 Speaking of Rent-- HOW we gonna pay this year's rent?!**
It looks like I'll be living in good old Fred-neck, a convenient 40 miles from my main base at Reagan National Airport (Because Who Doesn't Like Reagan...). (...)

On a related note, if you see any Nissan Leafs for under 5,000 bucks, let me know. Homegirl needs a car. (RIP Millie the Nissan, my only friend.) 

By "Live in Frederick", I mean that I'm creating a one person crash-pad in my sister's basement.  No hot bedding here, girlfriend.
It doesn't have a door, but it DOES have a toilet.

 Due to this ground-floor development, I have concluded that my adulthood is beginning to look more and more like an episode of Orange is the New Black.  Adulthood is a trap and I sort of want out. (Grad School?!)

When I was flying,
two (2)  particularly cool things happened today.

1. While holding a tray full of half-finished (glass) glasses over a man's head in First Class, we hit a patch of unexpected turbulence, and, although I did "drop it like its hot", I did not drop any glasses OR spill any precious liquids. Instead, I did a spectacular R&B dance move while holding an entire tray of glasses, and received a reasonable golf-clap applause from my (actually) captive audience--the seatbelt sign was on.

2. One of the pilots had to pee, so I got to go in the cockpit to "stand guard" (...). I am supposed to call the cockpit a  "flight deck", but one of my favorite parts of this job so far is that I can say cockpit as much as I want. Cockpit.
You know how the view from the window seat of an airplane never ceases to be mesmerizing? Oh, you don't feel that way? Well, I'm sorry that you don't have a soul, but those clouds remind me of the end of All Dogs Go To Heaven, when Charlie is hopping along the fluffiness, running with joy over these solid, cottony pillows like they're lilypads...chasing a pink dog he probably wants to hump,  but they left that part out (see, la petite mort). Of course, clouds are practically nothing (water vapor***), a fact I learned shortly after viewing the aforementioned scene from "All Dogs...Heaven".

 But those little puffs of nothing are astoundingly beautiful, and more than a little confusing, because they look like actual marshmallows, and if you disagree then you're an idiot.  To clarify, I am speaking of the cumulonimbus variety. Call a Cirrus as you see it, that shit's vapor.

The cockpit is sky land.  It's like I'm Charlie, but I've died for real this time.  There are three huge windows, and blue skies and clouds fill every one of them.  I don't want to think about how it looks on bad weather days. Well, I do, but I don't particularly want to fly in that. Someone can just instagram it for me.

 What you don't see in the cockpit (cockpit) is the ground. You might be able to see it if you bend over, but I  did not do that. I chose to lean against a wall that turned out to have a lot of buttons on it. I Felt safer?

I like the little mapped out grids of farmland, trees, and "civilization".  From up in the sky, everything looks orderly, planned, and meant to be.  Even though most stuff feels like it was random, accidental, even purposefully cruel when it is life-sized. (See: parking lots. Hospitals. High School. Shopping Centres with an -re.  The MLB. ) It's nice to know that from far away, some of our plans went as planned, and everything looks like a decent abstract painting. From way up there, water is the only thing that reminds me that our plans don't always fit the right grid.

Water creates the necessary chaos up there. It breaks up the plan, creating curved lines and unexpected pockets amid the squares of beige in varying shades.You miss out on that in the cockpit, though apparently watching a plane take off  from the deadheading seat is an even better view.  Its a new goal of mine to sit in the cockpit (cockpit) for the entirety of a flight (shut up, Olivia Raftshol with your cool life)



**I am really sorry that I referenced RENT in this blog, and I promise to never do it again, either here or elsewhere. Love, Olivia

***I googled a children's science website to confirm that clouds are, indeed, made of water vapor. I did, however, pull cirrus and cumulonimbus right out of the ole' butthole, and then confirmed onthe same website that i am in fact a meteorological genius. For reference:

http://www.weatherwizkids.com/weather-clouds.htm