Stupid Spring Mix!

Eating a “spring mix” salad on a plane in front of strangers is one of the most humbling experiences a person can have. Cutting a 7 inch long arugala leaf with my plastic fork, getting the fork tangled up in the weird ball of light green leaves all while trying to stab at the soggy purple wild lettuce was so hard…you’d think I’d never eaten a leafy green vegetable in my entire life! I continued the salad adventure - wondering if my cherry tomato was going to roll off the fork or squirt cherry tomato juice on the passenger next to me if I pricked it with the fork…ugh..if I wasn’t starving as usual from all of the running around and airport parking to the gates and hustle and bustle of the security line (BREATHE!)…I wouldn’t have even given a nod to the weirdo salad. But there I was…braving the task of trying to eat politely and not making a fool of myself in front of the people around me.

The in-flight entertainment starts and I pick “The Invention of Lying”…which is so incredibly dry and stupid, that I have to press stop 10 minutes into the viewing. I pick another one..”The Time Traveler’s Wife”…this one doesn’t seem like a picker-upper, but I’d heard some good reviews on it so I thought I’d give it a try. 10 minutes into this one – I’m crying on the plane in front of the strangers around me as if the salad adventure wasn’t embarrassing enough! I watch the depressing drama and decide to give up on in-flight entertainment and just get some much-needed sleep. Away the tv goes, the seat reclines back into laying position, I’ve got 2 blankets and 2 pillows and juuuuuuuuust as I’m about to fall into a deep slumber, I’m irritated awake by the most annoying sound behind me. Newspaper rustle! And not just a turn or 2 of the newspaper…this dude behind me must have been fighting with USA Today because all I heard was “wshhhhh, wshhh, wshh-wshh, wshhhhhhhh”…as if he was reading 3 pages per second..or a baby’s picture book…turn turn turn the paper went. So since normal people don’t punch people out on airplanes…I did the whole “turn around and give him a mean look/grumble to myself/turn back around and shake my head in disgust so he can see the ears moving in disappointment.” None of the symbols of irritated humanity took a toll on this guy though and the rustling continued…unaffected by my discernment. I put on my noise-cancelling tv headset even though it stabs my ears when I sleep (better that than constant wshhhes behind me!) and doze off. Finally – peace and quiet. Sala kameena.

I arrived in Gatwick, got on the Gatwick Express, put away my luggage and take a seat on the train awaiting my 30 minute ride to Victoria Station. The train was packed beyond belief with English white-collar workers, ready to get to work. I rest my head back and then it starts. One sneeze. Two sneezes. Sniffles next to me. A cough to my right. For those of you who know me know I am a HUGE germ-phobe who takes Airborne on random days and carries hand sanitizer gel on my belt loop. Well, if they made belt loop-carriers for hand sanitizers I would wear it but you get the point. As I sit there holding my breath for fear of breathing in a gross flu germ, I begin to get a bit light-headed and realize that if I don’t breathe, one of these germ-spreading sickos are going to have to touch and carry my passed out body to a nearby hospital which will undoubtedly be packed with even more germs and so I give up and take the first teensy breath of dirty London sickly air. 28 minutes to go. I’m not really sure why everyone here has the sniffles and coughing fits but I’m afraid to death that I’ll catch it and so I’ll be popping Airborne’s and drinking tea all week.

So its now 4:02PM GMT and I can’t even keep my eyes open. They should have sleeping pods in offices! Power-nap pods with alarm clocks attached to them that put on a pot of Red Bull as the alarm buzzes you awake. You’d think they’d have invented those by now and for some reason, I could have sworn I read about some company doing that somewhere in the world but maybe it was just a dream…right about now…I can’t really differentiate the 2. Everything feels surreal today – my wet and freezing walk to and from the hotel, the cans of red bulls I’ve shamelessly downed, the accents, the people…something’s off about me this week. I definitely need to snap out of it!