Love Actually

You know that scene at the beginning of Love Actually, with all the videos of people smiling and hugging in the airport, and a voice over of Hugh Grant telling us all about love and how it is all around…

I mean, so maybe that movie is two decades old now, but I feel as though airports are the exact OPPOSITE of a love scene montage.

Outside of rush hour traffic, I have really never seen such humanistic ridiculousness. The sheer number of people who CANNOT stop staring at their phones, as they press forwards in lines, irritated that the line isn’t moving faster, all the while NOT reading the signs or listening to the various TSA people yelling out instructions, and then end up doing something wrong and holding up the line. The TSA guy who waved me through the scanner actually THANKED me because he didn’t have to send me through multiple times for having left something in my pocket. (That they all told us multiple times to take out of our pockets…)

And it always seems as though everyone is in such a damned hurry. I am constantly thinking to myself, as I get shoulder checked by some White Rabbit, that, just because you reach the gate first, doesn’t mean the plane is going to leave any earlier.

And the common courtesy has just become extinct once you enter the airport. In certain airports you must catch a train to go from gate area to gate area. It can get tight. When we reach a gate area that I am not disembarking, I am rudely shoved out of the way so people can get off, and end up being shoved into more people who shove me out of their way.

At one point, while walking I had stopped to allow a group of people walk through a narrow area (due to millers about dawdling…) and in the process was shoulder checked by someone behind me in some damned hurry to get past me.

One woman cut in line to get through the TSA check. While waiting at baggage claim two separate gentlemen literally stepped in front of me, as though I wasn’t practically standing at the front of the mosh pit with my thighs smashed into the stage. While sitting in a seat waiting, multiple times, people walked up and stopped infront of me, like RIGHT in front of me, like would have stepped on my toe if I hadn’t moved my foot. Nevermind the fact that there is an ENTIRE walkway between my seat and the gate…

Nobody looks at each other. Nobody acknowledges each other. I get more social anxiety and anger at the airport than I do at a Walmart. And that isn’t even counting once I am ON the plane.

The people who cannot CANNOT just do what the flight attendants have told us to do three damned times. I look over and old guy STILL has his tray table down, with his phone that is STILL plugged in. Dude, we are about to smash into concrete in like 3 minutes..

Or the parents who let their toddlers freely kick the seat back infront of them. Yes, this is not some fiction, this has happened to me. Were I a bolder soul, I would maybe have turned around and asked them what they thought it meant when the flight attendants said it was a completely full flight. That somehow this ONE seat infront of their child just happened to NOT be occupied?

Or when I am leaning forward and using my tray table appropriately and the person infront of me decides they want to lean their seat back back. All two, life altering inches. With some twinkling of a hope that if they fling their entire weight into it, they may get a blessed extra inch out of it. Instead, they hit me in the head with their seat back. Also, not some fiction, but an actual skull jarring incident.

I had seen this meme once that said, dress as though The Doctor might show up any moment. I sometimes wish he(/she) would, if it mean’t I could avoid airports.

Even first class isn’t safe, as I walked past a woman with a screaming baby. My seat was in row TWENTY-FOUR and I could still hear the monster screaming. I am certain the rest of the first classers were extraordinarily happy they had spent the extra money to be in first class.

Okay, okay. So this is some really long hate mail on air travel. It always makes me angry and hateful though. And extra disdainful at Hugh Grant for trying to make airports such lovely, frolicking through the meadows places. Well, lets see how well you recite that monologue about love while TSA is wanding you between the legs…

(No feelings towards Hugh Grant were actually harmed during the writing of this post.)