Nowadays, I'm rather harmless.
If I'm a passenger on an airplane, I tend to go for the window seat so I can doze off with my headphones on and without my neighbors being forced to step over me or nudge me or test the capacities of their bladders.
If I'm a passenger on a subway, I can begrudgingly resist the urge to do pullups and an Olympic gymnast rings routine for the sake of those around me. However, it is essential that I attempt to stand without holding onto anything, and I will at some point stumble into someone else. Don't ask me to explain it -- I just have to.
If I'm a passenger on a car, don't put me in the front seat because I will inevitably fall asleep. It doesn't matter if you designate me as the "navigator" -- it's only a matter of time.
But alas, this wasn't always the case. There was a time when I was a terror to deal with on public transportation. On one of my first flights to Hong Kong, I was restless. I don't know what they put in the food, but I could not be contained. If you really think about it, an airplane aisle is an ideal place for a peaceful protest, and during one of the meals or drinks services, I clamped down and protested whatever it was I was protesting like my life depended on it.
I was lying face flat on the floor in the middle of the aisle with every arm, leg, or tentacle hooked around a chair leg. I was immovable, like Thor's hammer. The stewardesses walked by and weren't sure what to do, so they asked my mom to move me, but she was also helpless against my sheer force of will. Not even my mother's tears could loosen my death grip. I can't remember how the standoff ended, though I'm pretty sure they didn't turn the hose on me or anything like that. I wish I could recall what exactly it was I was protesting so fiercely against. Whatever it was, you can't teach heart.
This sprawled-out, surface-area-maximizing technique was a recurring theme on the subway. Our family took a detour from our stay in Hong Kong to somewhere in China, and I was not pleased about it. Hey, at least I knew what I was protesting this time. So I spread eagle on a Chinese subway car and somehow lived to tell the tale. I got to my feet once the intercom blared out our destination in three different languages and discovered that my clothes were no longer in three different colors. I was covered in dirt and grime and filth and other nasty things that I don't want to think about right now. Admittedly, this protest was not very well thought-out.
But the older I get, the more I reminisce fondly on our family road trips. Our parents ensured we traveled essentially every school break we got, so there were countless hours stuffed in the back of a car hitting mile marker after mile marker. We were playing Mario Kart on N64 while cruising at 75 mph well before cars were built with TV screens and electric outlets. I would be landing aerial attacks on my siblings with green shells, red shells, and banana peels, popping all of their balloons in battle mode until fatigue set in and I had to catch some shut-eye.
Long road trips are actually the perfect trap to keep the family all together, for better or for worse. On the downside, I love sleep, so I would be snoozing as much as possible, but my parents and I would reenact the same argument every time we stopped at a gas station. The rest of my family, equipped with significantly smaller bladders, would empty out of the automobile en route to those nasty non-Buc-ee's bathrooms, but I would continue snoring. My mom and dad would start getting upset for some reason, saying that I should go even if I didn't need to go. I think they resorted to rolling up the windows and turning off the car to smoke me out once, but my slumber knows no bounds.
On the upside, though, if you can ignore the people constantly endeavoring to usher you to the restroom, those car rides produced countless memories. You're stuck in a car together, so you don't really have a choice but to enjoy each other's company. There was the N64, sure, but there were also the songs, the games, the laughter, and the high fives whenever we got a trucker to honk his horn.
A top three road trip flashback for me would have to be the magic tricks. A deck of cards is a staple on every vacation, and there are only so many times you can play War before you find something better to do. Scratch that, War never gets old; we probably resorted to magic tricks because it was more of a 3-person activity. Anyway, after we got through our elementary renditions of the "is this your card" tricks, I decided to get my David Blaine on.
I opened with a humble proposal: "Let's try to see if we can guess cards."
I held a card up to my forehead, thought for a couple seconds, then surmised, "Eight?"
My sister and brother were delighted. "Yeah!"
I pinned another card to my noggin, furrowed my brow in concentration, and theorized, "This feels like a... six?"
"Oh my gosh!"
After a few more runs with this, they glanced around, suspicious that my mom was feeding me the answers from the front of the car, but she wasn't paying attention. Then I got cocky.
"Jack of diamonds."
"Three of hearts."
"Five of spades."
I must have went through half the deck, with these youngsters getting more and more riled up with every card.
Finally, the gig was up. Not because they figured out that I was reading the cards off of the rearview mirror or the reflection on the window behind them, but because it got too dark outside for me to distinguish the cards. I ended up just laughing and telling them the truth so they wouldn't think I was possessed and perform an exorcism on me during hibernation.
If I'm a passenger on an airplane, I tend to go for the window seat so I can doze off with my headphones on and without my neighbors being forced to step over me or nudge me or test the capacities of their bladders.
If I'm a passenger on a subway, I can begrudgingly resist the urge to do pullups and an Olympic gymnast rings routine for the sake of those around me. However, it is essential that I attempt to stand without holding onto anything, and I will at some point stumble into someone else. Don't ask me to explain it -- I just have to.
If I'm a passenger on a car, don't put me in the front seat because I will inevitably fall asleep. It doesn't matter if you designate me as the "navigator" -- it's only a matter of time.
But alas, this wasn't always the case. There was a time when I was a terror to deal with on public transportation. On one of my first flights to Hong Kong, I was restless. I don't know what they put in the food, but I could not be contained. If you really think about it, an airplane aisle is an ideal place for a peaceful protest, and during one of the meals or drinks services, I clamped down and protested whatever it was I was protesting like my life depended on it.
I was lying face flat on the floor in the middle of the aisle with every arm, leg, or tentacle hooked around a chair leg. I was immovable, like Thor's hammer. The stewardesses walked by and weren't sure what to do, so they asked my mom to move me, but she was also helpless against my sheer force of will. Not even my mother's tears could loosen my death grip. I can't remember how the standoff ended, though I'm pretty sure they didn't turn the hose on me or anything like that. I wish I could recall what exactly it was I was protesting so fiercely against. Whatever it was, you can't teach heart.
This sprawled-out, surface-area-maximizing technique was a recurring theme on the subway. Our family took a detour from our stay in Hong Kong to somewhere in China, and I was not pleased about it. Hey, at least I knew what I was protesting this time. So I spread eagle on a Chinese subway car and somehow lived to tell the tale. I got to my feet once the intercom blared out our destination in three different languages and discovered that my clothes were no longer in three different colors. I was covered in dirt and grime and filth and other nasty things that I don't want to think about right now. Admittedly, this protest was not very well thought-out.
But the older I get, the more I reminisce fondly on our family road trips. Our parents ensured we traveled essentially every school break we got, so there were countless hours stuffed in the back of a car hitting mile marker after mile marker. We were playing Mario Kart on N64 while cruising at 75 mph well before cars were built with TV screens and electric outlets. I would be landing aerial attacks on my siblings with green shells, red shells, and banana peels, popping all of their balloons in battle mode until fatigue set in and I had to catch some shut-eye.
Long road trips are actually the perfect trap to keep the family all together, for better or for worse. On the downside, I love sleep, so I would be snoozing as much as possible, but my parents and I would reenact the same argument every time we stopped at a gas station. The rest of my family, equipped with significantly smaller bladders, would empty out of the automobile en route to those nasty non-Buc-ee's bathrooms, but I would continue snoring. My mom and dad would start getting upset for some reason, saying that I should go even if I didn't need to go. I think they resorted to rolling up the windows and turning off the car to smoke me out once, but my slumber knows no bounds.
On the upside, though, if you can ignore the people constantly endeavoring to usher you to the restroom, those car rides produced countless memories. You're stuck in a car together, so you don't really have a choice but to enjoy each other's company. There was the N64, sure, but there were also the songs, the games, the laughter, and the high fives whenever we got a trucker to honk his horn.
A top three road trip flashback for me would have to be the magic tricks. A deck of cards is a staple on every vacation, and there are only so many times you can play War before you find something better to do. Scratch that, War never gets old; we probably resorted to magic tricks because it was more of a 3-person activity. Anyway, after we got through our elementary renditions of the "is this your card" tricks, I decided to get my David Blaine on.
I opened with a humble proposal: "Let's try to see if we can guess cards."
I held a card up to my forehead, thought for a couple seconds, then surmised, "Eight?"
My sister and brother were delighted. "Yeah!"
I pinned another card to my noggin, furrowed my brow in concentration, and theorized, "This feels like a... six?"
"Oh my gosh!"
After a few more runs with this, they glanced around, suspicious that my mom was feeding me the answers from the front of the car, but she wasn't paying attention. Then I got cocky.
"Jack of diamonds."
"Three of hearts."
"Five of spades."
I must have went through half the deck, with these youngsters getting more and more riled up with every card.
Finally, the gig was up. Not because they figured out that I was reading the cards off of the rearview mirror or the reflection on the window behind them, but because it got too dark outside for me to distinguish the cards. I ended up just laughing and telling them the truth so they wouldn't think I was possessed and perform an exorcism on me during hibernation.
Moral of the story: if you have kids, buckle them in to their airplane seats with padlocks and throw away the keys. And don't drag them to China; China is the worst. Instead, force them to go on country-wide road trips with you, but if they claim they don't have to pee, then they don't have to pee.
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