Have a Safe Flight

Sometimes it's better not to say anything to someone at all. For example, I don’t understand why people are compelled to say “have a safe flight” to me just before I’m about to fly somewhere. What kind of pressure is THAT to give to someone who is about to get on a plane with a couple of hundred other passengers? Really, unless you’re the pilot, what else can YOU do to control the overall safety of a flight?  When someone tells me to “have a safe flight” I feel that I have just been surreptitiously given ownership of the flight's total safety over the next 3000 miles for a group of stinky sandwich eating, drooling, loud mouth passengers.  Sometimes I think the person might be trying to send a covert message to me about a premonition they had about the flight but they really don't want to be the one to tell me about it.

I doubt we'll ever hear a pilot say during a pre-flight announcement: “Uhhhhhh ladies and gentlemen thank you for flying with us today and uuuhhhhhhhhhhhh if anyone has any uhhhhhhhhh suggestions on how to make our flight safer, don’t uhhhhhhhhhhhh hesitate to notify one of our uhhhhhhhhhhh wonderful in flight service attendants. Because uhhhhhhh to be quite frank people, we’re uhhhhh just plumb out of ideas up here! HA!”    

I think the next time I get on an airplane I’m going to put my carry-on bag in the overhead and then proceed to make a scene by exclaiming out loud “Please, if everybody would look up for just a minute; As you can see, I put my bag in the overhead compartment. It fits securely behind this door with a nice latch in the middle of it. I think if you all do this with your bags it will make us much, much safer…Is everyone with me on this one?

So the next time you feel compelled to express such a wish on one of your friends maybe give them something they have a running chance to control. Something like: “Have a reclining seat!” or “have an unoccupied lavatory”.

Have a nice day! ;)

Please Don't Pluck and Drive

Look, everyone knows that my life has been comprised of living exclusively with women. Well, OK, our dog is technically considered a male. However, being that "he" is neutered, the validity of his masculinity is questionable at best and that will be further demonstrated later on in my blog. Not-with-standing the fact that our cat, in her non-verbal cat talk ways makes abundantly sure his presence in the house is nothing short of "emasculation station". But I digress... So it should be obvious that I've grown accustom to what comes with the territory of all things female in the 21st century.....things like hair care (and removal) products, gels, lotions, vanity mirrors made from stolen carnival fun houses, bottle after bottle of gop, goop, ick, greases, waxes, hair brushes that look like they could thatch my lawn, three towels a shower, makeup stations established where ever there's a mirror mounted on a wall, all the various french named tools of the trade...all in the name of "what else can I do that enables me to be late getting out the door this morning?" But like I said, I'm use to it..no big deal. I've learned to just look the other way...but I do draw the line when the dog decides to eat foreign objects, wrapped in tissue pulled from a bathroom waste can that he dumped over because he's pissed that I didn't give him a treat while making the kids lunches in the morning; that's when I call him a bitch! (I'll save writing about doggy "ear-lolly-pops" for another blog).

So today I'm driving to work minding my own B.I. business when this odd kind of movement caught my attention in my rear view mirror. A woman in a Toyota SUV was s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g her neck way, way up like she was trying to smell her ceiling. But I quickly realized what she was doing was plucking, with a peculiar level of finesse, something from from her facial regions (whiskers? What do I know? I'm just a guy!) She was searching her mirror for pluck-able objects on her chin, neck, cheeks, nose etc. with a pair of tweezers. It was a display like I've never seen in the world of bad habits in the commuting world. The picking, the stretching, the plucking, the squeezing, the finger flicking, looking left, looking right, looking up..more picking, squeezing and flicking it all out the window... and the grotesque facial expressions that went along with it to get the job done...Oh my Lord!! I found myself being mesmerized but also completely skived out by this display of commuter hygiene. What made the situation worse was that I would find myself physically wincing and twitching with every tweeze and squeeze she made. It reminded me of when I was a kid watching Alfred Hitchcock's movie "The Birds" where I would subconsciously swat the birds away from me as they attacked the characters in the movie.

You might ask, "why didn't you just stop watching her? But I couldn't! Aside from my morbid curiosity of this freak show that was thrust upon my rear view mirror, I had to make sure she wouldn't plick and flick herself to complete distraction and rear end me. The last thing I needed was that tense, post accident dialogue with someone who is not only freaking out at me, but also has a pair of tweezers rammed up her nose. Thankfully the show ended when she turned left and I continued straight along with the rest of the morning traffic all the while thinking that I just lived through some kind of weird Seinfeld episode "it was a rub!! No pick!! NO PICK!!"