I have to admit, sometimes that’s the case for me too. The first few times I flew, I loved it. Looking out the window and watching the ground drop away on takeoff. Watching clouds as we traversed America. But lately I’ve grown less and less fond of airline travel. The “fun” wears off and it gets replaced with the simple fact that you’re stuck in a small metal tube for 2, 3 hours. However long it takes to reach your destination.

I’ve never really been afraid to fly, though. That’s not to say that I don’t think about it. Who doesn’t think about plane crashes at some point? Especially when you start thinking about how high you are, how cold it is outside, how fast you’re going. You know, all the stuff you have no idea of while you’re actually on the plane.

When I flew from Orlando to Houston, the plane helpfully provided all of those stats on the screen in front of me! I don’t know why I needed to know that at 467 miles per hour and 36,000 feet, the outside air temperature was -67 Fahrenheit. That’s almost cold enough to inspire a Jack London story: To Build a Parachute.

I have gotten to the point that I don’t like airports. Especially George Bush International Airport in Houston. We landed at Terminal C right on time. I had 45 minutes to get to my next flight, which was located at gate To Be Determined on my boarding pass. So I went to the “Departures” board and checked. Gate B84.

Those who have been to Gate B84 in Houston are crying already. Tears of mockery or tears of empathy, they are tears nonetheless.

Gate B84 doesn’t actually exist. I mean that. You get to the B terminal, get to the 80s. You’ll see gates for 80, 81, 82, 83, and 85. Then there’s a little sign saying: Gate 84 –>

If you follow that, you end up in something that looks like a bus terminal’s stepbrother. There are six doors there, helpfully numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. And up on the monitor, I saw the Colorado Springs flight at gate 84K.

Yes, K.

Using my fingers and a toe, I discovered that K is the 11th letter in the alphabet. Did I mention there are six doors? Using logic, I decided this made no sense, so I waited for the gate attendant to get off the phone and asked where the flight for Colorado Springs was located. She informed me that when they called for boarding, I’d go through the door behind her and wander around the tarmac for a bit before climbing on the plane “over there.”

Soon enough, she called “Now boarding for flight [whatever] going to Colorado Springs” and I climbed into the plane they had. It was an economy jet. One row of seats on the left side, two rows on the right. I took my seat there in row A (the single row, which was nice for space) and moments later, the aforementioned lady who was afraid to fly was seated two seats back and across the aisle. Given the state of the economy jet, I could understand her trepidation. I took some comfort in knowing that in Tajikistan, they fly these same airplanes and there aren’t any news stories about how often they’ve crashed into mountainsides, and American maintenance has to be better than Tajikistani maintenance. Although that’s tempered a bit when you realize our media couldn’t find Tajikistan on a map of Tajikistan, let alone care about anything not located in Washington, D.C. or New York City, so maybe they crash every week. Maybe “Tajikistan” translates to “burning piles of plane debris.”

Of course, the flight was better than the terminal. And by “better” I mean “I’m telling the opposite of what is true.” About an hour into the flight, there was a bit of a lull in the conversations. Things were quiet. There was just the dull roar of the engines dully roaring. Then: BANG!

We sat there in silence for a few seconds. Then, a small frail voice from two seats back and one over: “Is anyone going to ask what that was?”

No one said anything for another five second or so. That’s when we hit turbulence.

Thankfully, it turned out to be nothing. Or rather, it turned out to be something that could be identified. The flight attendant was doing beverage service when it happened, and when he got to our area, the frightened woman asked what had happened. Apparently, a kid had brought a pool toy, similar to a beach ball. It was inflated. The attendant said, “Normally I tell people not to load those because of how much space they take up, but I figured in this case it would be fine. I forgot about the altitude.”

Funny, that. I forget many things when I’m on a plane.

Altitude isn’t one of those things.

Everything that is, when seen through time’s lens,
Was built on the ashes of all our might-have-beens.

Seems to be a truism. Or, as The Offspring might say, a Half-Truism.

Plus he’s got good theology to boot, seeing as how he’s OPC (it’s what PCA Presbyterians would be if we stopped drinking alcohol and joined the Only Perfect Church…).

In any case, I definitely recommend him. He’s scholarly, but easy to read and great with language all around!

In any case, I’ve passed beyond the 500 mile mark on my bike! As of this moment, I’ve ridden 514.24 miles.

I decided to do the math on this. When accounting for my bike and all the peripherals (helmet, gloves, bike lock, computer to calculate distance, etc.), plus adding in expenses for the repairs I’ve had to make so far (which is just replacing some tires so far), I’ve spent a total of $578.45 on my bike.

That means that as of this morning, I’ve paid approximately $1.12 per mile I’ve travelled on my bike. That’s not too shabby.

On the other hand, riding in the bus I was paying about $0.32 per mile. In order to get to match that value, I’ll need to ride a few more miles.

1,244.26 more, to be precise.

Because when I get to 1,758.5 miles ridden, I will have broken even on the cost difference between biking and riding the bus.

Incidentally, I got my bike on August 1. That was 86 days ago. So, that averages out to approximately 6 miles per day. Which means, at this rate, I’ll “break even” in 207 more days.

On the plus side, apart from the danger of getting hit by a car or developing hypothermia in the winter or getting struck by lightning in the summer, it’s a lot healthier to ride a bike than to ride the bus!

Today it was 29.

That’s enough for me to declare “correlation”!

Speaking of correlation, along a similar thread, it’s been a couple of months since school started, and I have to ride by one on the way in to work. And my conclusion, having been past it nearly every school morning for two months, is that people who drop their kids off at school couldn’t drive to save their life. Like, there’s a 2-way stop sign there that magically becomes a 4-way stop because people just decide to not drive through it and block traffic, and then everyone else stops–even though there is clearly no stop sign at the intersection.

But this brings a dilemma too. What do I correlate that to? Is it that parents dropping off kids are poor drivers, or is it more general, since roughly 80% of the drivers there are female. So maybe it’s women make poor drivers. But then, I have to acknowledge that every single person I’ve seen there has been white, so maybe white people just make poor drivers. Finally, there was an over-representation of SUVs and minivans, so the correlation clearly is that drivers of said vehicles are poor drivers.

Clearly, all of these things are correlated. And therefore, Global Warming is true. Proof of Global Warming is found in the fact that it was 29 degrees this morning when yesterday it was 36. Clearly such a wild swing in temperatures can only be caused by massive global climate shifts….

1) The older I get, the less I like cold. And biking in to work this morning, it was 36 degrees. With a headwind. Uphill both ways. In the snow. (Sadly, only the last two sentences–sentence fragments, to be accurate–are false.)

2) I finally got ticked off at an e-mail from work that had nothing to do with the content being delivered, but the manner in which it was delivered. Actually, I don’t feel as bad about this one (i.e., I don’t feel as much of a stick in the mud over this one like I do about complaining about the cold and having a sudden desire to live in Florida), since I’ve read Cracked articles mocking this particular thing I’m about to rant at before. (Sadly, I’m too lazy to link those articles for you because that would require me to do searches and…stuff.)

Now about the offending e-mail. First of all, it was from a corporation. I won’t mention which one, but this would not have bothered me at all if it had been a personal e-mail. Instead, this is from a business that’s supposed to be reputable and is supposed to be professional. And they write stuff like the following lines:

I’ll need to request to come from someone at the organization (with that email address)…What’s your connxn?

I don’t care about the mistake of using “to” instead of “the” because function words get mixed up all the time. But “connxn”? Since when did we move to Russia? English has VOWELS.

But don’t worry, the lady who wrote this followed up that with:

Also we’ll need … [an] email for rep (agent, manager, publicist – any 2ndary point of contact)

2ndary?!

Now, I realize that if you’re typing a voice message to a friend, or a Twitter post, you’ll want to abbreviate a bunch. After all, Twitter limits you to 140 characters, my cellphone (which is pretty typical now) limits texts to 160 characters. But e-mail does NOT have that limitation (and for the record, this particular e-mail had 879 characters, so it’s not like the lady who wrote it was trying to write a Twitter post).

So what’s my reaction reading this e-mail from a “supposed” professional organization hiring “supposed” professionals to write their correspondence? The scare-quotes give some bit of an indication….

But in this instance, I don’t care if it makes me sound like an old fuddy-duddy. If you’re too lazy to look up a Cracked article, that’s one thing. If you’re too lazy to spell “connection” and “secondary” in a business e-mail then you shouldn’t be in the work force.

That happened to me today. Where I work, we will be having a conference in January, so we had to book flights to that. The conference is in Florida, and this will be the fourth one I’ve gone to since I started work. It’s pretty much impossible to get a direct flight there from Colorado Springs, but there’s always been a wide variety of cities we could go to. For instance, the first year I went to Chicago, then to Florida. The next one, just to Denver. Then the last conference I got the connecting flight through Atlanta.

I enjoy being able to pick a new city, just to say I’ve been there. And on the return trip this time, I had it going through Houston. But on the trip out there, I had the option of picking a different city to land in first.

Washington, D.C.

And my first thought was, “While the likelihood of any terror attack is going to be very small, it will be highest on a flight to Washington.”

So it sank in. I realized that I’m really, truly living in a post 9/11 world after all.

I blame Bush.

It’s also how many miles I’ve biked since August 1.

304.26 to be exact.