The Studio

The other day, while Chi was in town, she and I were killing time by walking around in the Marina on a Sunday afternoon. As we made our way back to our car so we could drive across town to our dinner reservations, we passed an average looking girl, dressed pretty cutely, as they are wont to do in the Marina.

We had walked about 5 feet or so past each other when the girl called out to us. We turned around to see what the girl wanted. She asked if we lived here, I said "kind of" because "here" can have narrow or broad meaning. I figured she was going to ask for directions to some place...

She started apologizing and said she was really embarrassed to ask, but she was a student at Sacramento State, and had lost her wallet while on this visit. She'd tried searching for it everywhere but couldn't find it, and needed some money for gas to get back to school. I'm still not sure why I did it, but I gave the girl money! Not a little either, I gave her a $20. I usually never give people money, opting instead to donate to charities I'm familiar with or that I volunteer with. Yet, this time, there was no reservation what so ever.

Who knows, the girl could have wanted the money for an expensive pair of boots, to pay off her cell phone bill, or to buy gas to get back to school. I didn't really dwell on the whole thing all that much afterwards...just thought it was weird I did something so out of character.

It's so funny that in this day and age, there is so much information available out there, on just about anything, and information travels so quickly, yet people are still as gullible as they ever were. With the mountains of information comes mountains of crap, we've gotta learn to distinguish the two. Check your sources folks, before causing wide spread panic. The internet, like any other powerful tools and heavy machinery, should be handled with care.

As you can tell, I got bored pretty quickly with blogging about all my short-comings. Well, actually, I just ran out of flaws to talk about. Hehe. J/K. I've been wanting to blog but I've just been too busy to think, much less write. The odd thing is I can't actually account for why I've been so busy, but I guess that's a separate story.

On my recent trip to Houston (which incidentally is not so recent anymore), I flew Southwest, as most of you recall from my last post. The flight to Houston was uneventful enough; unfortunately the same cannot be said for the return trip. Since I was flying Southwest instead of my usual Continental, it was much more difficult to find direct flights to Houston, so I settled for an itinerary that had a brief stop in LA.

When I got to LA, what was supposed to be a brief stop turned into a surprise plane change, which turned into a two hour delay. When I was finally able to board and be on our way to San Jose, I got stuck next to the creepiest, dirtiest, old man. Here's how it started...

So, as I'm sure you all know, when flying Southwest, everyone gets to choose their own seats; it's sort of a first come first serve basis. I'm sure that you'll also agree with me that the standard protocol is that folks take the window and aisle seats first, and the passengers boarding the plane last fill in the middle seats. So my flight from LA to San Jose started as any other. Being among the first to board, I grabbed a window seat towards the front of the plane, intending to nap all the way back to San Jose. An old man (about 70+) took the aisle seat. All seemed normal until the man decided that instead, he was going to scoot in to the middle seat, next to me. The man starts talking to me, and I start thinking to myself, oh no, he's one of those people who likes to talk during plane rides. I decided that since the plane had not yet taxied away from the gate, I would humor the man with his small talk questions, seeing how he seemed innocuous enough. He told me he had just come back from a conference of some sort in Orlando, so I asked him if he had gone to Disney World while there. He patted my knee and chuckled while telling me he had not gone to Disney World. I was trying to figure out why he had patted my knee.

What started with the knee pat led to a much more disturbing encounter. This old guy spent the rest of the flight with his arm on my side of the arm rest, seemingly reaching for my thigh. He never got all the way there, but with his old man tremor, he got closer and closer each time. I was practically pinned up against the window trying to avoid this guy. When his hand wasn't on my side of the arm rest, his elbow was pointed outwards, trying to attach itself to my waist. I was rather disturbed and was too fearful to take a nap, not knowing what would happen if I didn't actively distance myself from this guy.

The annoying delay, compounded by the creepy situation on the plane made me realize that sometimes, convenience and comfort are worth the extra $30 - $50, and it's ok to spend this extra money on yourself. Justin has been harping on me for over a year about not living my means. While he's not advocating living beyond my means, he makes the point that we are all professionals with decent paying jobs, and it's about time we stop living like grad students. ;-)

While I'm not yet wholly convinced that I ought to increase my standard of living, I am coming around to the idea of flying on direct flights whenever possible and not to fly on Southwest unless there are no other airlines who fly to my destination city.