A long haul flight is a lot like being in a womb; sleeping, eating and excreting in confined spaces. I’m just speaking for myself as an economy fetus of the world. My legs are too long for economy class. Economy was originally designed for snakes and lizards to be transported across the globe, then when they couldn’t afford to fly, humans took their tiny seats. You need to slither in and out of them. Economy would be fine for me if I had paper legs and I could just neatly fold them up into springy origami. But I don’t. It’s like trying to relax in a panadol capsule.
In theory, flying should be a very relaxed thing. You just sit down for awhile. But for some reason it is a gigantic ordeal. I try to imagine myself on the First Fleet, months of vomit and scurvy. A long haul flight can’t be too bad compared to that. But why are we so tired at the end after doing nothing. How do birds feel after they have migrated across half of the world? I assume they are much more tired and yet they just get on with it.
Airports are cattle stations for people. We all line up and get stamped as we go through the gates, before being herded up and transported away. Catching a commercial plane has so many ups and downs. Checking in isn’t too bad, you are acknowledged as human for this part. It’s all downhill from there; ‘show your passport, where’s your boarding pass’. Felt up and down. Detectors, detectors, no shoes, jackets, belts, liquids or personalities allowed. Everyone is a suspect, an impersonator of themselves until they get through. You’re guilty till proven innocent. When you finally make it through the interrogation to your seat on the plane, you are treated human again.
‘Thank you for flying with us. Sit back and relax. Have an enjoyable flight. We will do all we can to make you feel comfortable blah blah.’ How much can you ‘enjoy’ a flight? I’ve never met anyone who has told me so. It’s not exactly a night on the town. Let’s see, sitting in confined bumpy space for 12.5 hours, ingesting remnants of processed food. Enjoyable, come on, everyone, join in! Let’s all sit in a crab pot and eat Kraft Singles for a week.
I think plane food is made in toy factories. It’s more fun to play with it than eat it. I would be better off trying to digest photographs of plane food than trying to eat it. It’s so cleverly disguised as food, but it is actually old car tyres. Once I was on a flight where an option was seafood lasagne. That should never be an option at 14,000 feet or at any feet. My response to that option is gin and tonic X 4. Last time I flew, the breakfast was a stale bread roll filled with weevil looking spaghetti and corn. I wouldn’t feed that to the pets of my pets. Like, if my dog had a mutant grub pet. My sister actually quite enjoys the plane food, not because it’s tastes good but because there are so many different containers to open. Each one is a surprise, ‘Ooh, what’s in here? Gross. What about this container? Gross. Next? Gross.’ Can you imagine paying $1000 to go to an uncomfortable restaurant to buy 5 tiny, average meals, then just eating them because you’re bored and you want a break from tetris because you have RSI. You’ve already watched the 5 movies which did so poorly at the cinema so they had to sell them to airlines to make any money back. The scripts are terrible but that doesn’t really matter because even though you’ve got headphones on, all you can hear is engine noise. But you’ve got your ipod, so at least you can listen to MORE ENGINE NOISE. So what else are you going to do, of course you’re going to eat the plane food, or at least play with it.
You’re never going to look cool on a long haul flight, unless you want to be as comfortable as an expired string ham. The best option is to go for some loose fitting pants. So you either want to look like a pear or a bean bag, something really unappealing. Think Grimace from the McDonalds ads in the 80s. I’m sure he’ll be on The Biggest Loser soon. Last time I was l a little too comfortable, you know, like a step away from incontinents pads comfortable. I wouldn’t have had to move anywhere for the entire flight. Hello deep vein thrombosis.
Ah, what is flying without that extra little waft of paranoia in the air. Can you smell it? No, most people couldn’t because this time it was swine flu. I felt left out without my mask on so I cut my bra in half and used one cup to cover my face. Actually, that’s a lie. My boobs are so big that one cup would have been way too big to cover just my face. I sat next to a Japanese lady, and pretended I was in my own version of ‘Lost in Translation’. She actually spoke English quite well so it wasn’t really like ‘Lost in Translation’. It was like....just talking to someone. She didn’t believe that I was Australian so I told her I was Samoan and we settled on that. The only Japanese I knew was ‘joogi o kudasai?’ That means, ‘Can I please have a ruler?’ I decided not to use that one on her. I didn’t need a ruler. Interestingly enough, that is one thing that has not been banned on planes. I find it odd that you cannot take over 100ml of liquid aboard, yet we have more than that amount of liquid in us already so that is not really effective. Mistake!
There is a brief moment that pops up when I don’t mind flying so much, apart from the landing. It’s the bit when I peer out the window at the vast blue, sky and water. Then there are occasional green lumpy bits. I realise myself looking at it then I remember that I am a part of it, just a spec though. And then I look back at the screen inside the plane. Yes, a virtual map with a giant cartoon plane nuzzling forward. Which one is correct, the view outside the window, or the cartoon map? Which one am I in?
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