All of This Has a Perfectly Reasonable Explanation, Part 2
I’m explaining. Just hang with me.
The second thing you should know is that I’m kind of a nervous flier. It’s crazy, given how much travel I’ve been doing lately, but I can’t help it. The night before a big trip, I can almost never sleep.
I wasn’t always like this. When I was a kid, I loved planes. I demanded a window seat and would sit there, watching the world drift along, dreaming I was even higher, in a spaceship, floating away.
But I was younger then, and air travel was a whole lot less crappy. That was back when you could actually meet someone a the airport, when they rolled stairs up to the planes so you could exit on the tarmac, when old men waved their cigarettes around and you didn’t have to strip down to your tighty whities just to get on board.
Now air travel is a pile of suck. Between the security alerts playing on endless repeat (it’s orange, okay already), to the look of suspicion and worry on everyone’s face, to the smaller seats and bigger people, it’s all gone wrong. You might as well freeze yourself in carbonite and FedEx yourself to where you need to go. You’ll get there faster and with more dignity as cargo – even with the temporary blindness.
So, I worry. And when I worry, I can’t sleep. That’s how I found myself up at 2am, the morning Heather and I would be flying to Hawaii for a friend’s wedding, deciding to install Apple’s new operating system on my laptop.
I’d somehow decided that traveling with a laptop running the totally reliable Tiger system was not a good idea, and it would be far better to install Leopard, a brand new and still fairly buggy operating system for the trip.
I hit install and watched the animated progress bars fly until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. A tiny whispering part of myself knew this wasn’t a good idea, but I couldn’t help it. Sometimes when a bad idea takes root, you realize that if you can’t go around, you should just power right through it.