Sorry, Dad. I know I wasn't kidnapped by a smoking, trunk-riding carnie.
In the car on the way to the airport to go visit
Stace I realized I'd forgotten my
Motion Sickness Relief Band. I really
need that band, or at least my brain
thinks I need it, and five years ago you could have asked the poor German man who was unfortunate enough to sit in the
Lufthansa row in front of me if there was a difference between the two. I'm pretty sure the back of his vomit-spattered head would have said "nein". I'm thrilled to see that the stupid thing's on sale for pretty much
free right now, too; I once barefoot sprinted through a mall in my pajamas five minutes before closing the night before a family flight and then happily threw down a hundred and fifty bucks at Sharper Image to buy a
backup of this thing, a
spare. And I would have paid double that amount if I thought it would further decrease the odds of my spontaneously throwing up on another stranger.
But standing in the airport without either of my two Relief Bands forced me to have a serious and perhaps overdue conversation with myself about the motion sickness issue (outside in the fresh air and without any exaggerated head movements so I was less likely to blow.) I haven't always been this much of a pansy; when I was a kid I used to ride from Pensacola to Atlanta lying on the floor of the car and
reading. My brother and I used to beg and beg and beg my dad to drive around with the two of us in the
trunk and he would DO IT, which is a totally different problem, probably. But my point is that when I was younger not only could I deal with stuffy, viewless spaces without getting sick, but unless my parents had a therapist install fake memories in my brain to cover up a violent, airless kidnapping (and I don't think they did, our health insurance coverage wasn't that gratuitous), I LOVED stuffy, viewless spaces!
And now? I'm getting queasy just typing "stuffy, viewless spaces" (oh my god, could you get me some water?). Often on flights I have to crank up the Band to the highest setting and the crazy electrical pulse causes my hand to spasm involuntarily every two seconds. This in conjunction with the fact that I have to pretend to be in a braindead unresponsive coma from liftoff to touchdown (if I'm in a coma I can't get you in my mouth crosshairs) creates a fairly unnerving sense of anxiety for anyone sitting in my row. Or, as I believe I stated earlier, the row in front of me.
So I'm standing in the Phoenix airport, Bandless, and I'm weighing my options. I can either a) ask somebody for a piece of gum so I can manage the elevator to the second floor without puking and then just slit my wrists on that moving walkway torture device, or b) admit to myself that 95% of this entire situation is mental, that I've turned a minor problem into a full blown vomit-covered, electrocuted issue, and that I need to stop catering to the pulling
suggestion of sickness.
I met myself in the middle. Five chewable orange Dramamine chased with the tiniest, most anemic US Air Bloody Mary you've ever seen. And I'm happy to tell you that things went well. I was in an unresponsive coma, sure, but I wasn't faking it. And not one single German approached me after disembarkment trying to get me to buy him a new tie. I truly thought I'd turned a corner.
And then my dad called me in Canada and broke the news that I'd been kidnapped as a child and driven around in a Tilt-A-Whirl-Mobile while someone chain-smoked with the windows up and made me forceread tiny-print newspapers at gunpoint. In the trunk.
That part's not true. I'm just trying to justify puking in my hand right after we landed. And here I thought I'd made such slow, deliberate strides in the right direction.
