Layover at LAX

Airports are amazing: everyone you've ever met is walking around, though no one you ever know. (Well, Anthony Barr got lucky: he took an airplane once and ended up sitting next to Ben Sasse. I saw Ben Sasse give a college commencement speech once, but I didn't get to meet him.) Alternate universe versions of people you know, people who could pass for your friends' siblings or cousins. There was one unusual 3rd Rock from the Sun episode where the premise was that the characters went to an alternate universe where all the main cast members were inexplicably living in New York City instead of Rutherford, Ohio.

I'm in Los Angeles, sipping on a coffee from Peet's (my grandparents are going to kill me if I give them an itemized list of expenses…that or not reimburse me, though I think G-pa will be sympathetic to the coffee), and I don't know if I did something wrong or if I just don't like it. I should've waited till getting to my gate (the plane is delayed and won't leave for another almost two hours), because there is a coffee vending machine near me (I am amazed! What a novelty! How deliciously low, how horribly dirty! —that's a Pygmalion quote) which is not only offering cheaper coffee, but offering it out of a vending machine.

I told my friend who recently braved commercial flight despite their fear that I think I understand the terror of flight better now. I truly forgot how loud it is — but more than that, it seems (I'm about to use ideas that either came from C.S. Lewis talking about sex or, worse, Catholics on Twitter talking about sex) more unnatural than driving, even if it is safer. C.S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, compared…oh, something, probably one of the four types of love in one of its iterations — to approaching a city via an overhanging cliff. You reach the edge of the cliff, you can see right into the city, it is as if you were practically there. But if you actually wish to get into the city, you must backtrack, go far away from the city, and enter it at ground level. Similarly, acting in certain ways can feel holy, because in a very real way we are imitating God. But if we wish to get close to God, we must act in the ways we are commanded, not try to imitate God directly. And so, I say, with airplanes (disregarding the comparison of environmental costs), it is safer to fly than to drive, obviously, but it is still less natural to fly than to drive. You feel you are flouting the laws of nature. You wonder if we have not been become altogether too inured to the miracle of flight, to gazing down godlike on the world below where humans have become microscopic. You consider if the fact of your flight doesn't make you more bougie than you care to admit.

What I will admit is that the use of Lewis's analogy doesn't quite work, and I'll have to figure out and better explain the connection later.

I wonder if I could get a job as a flight attendant. I overheard one saying something to another passenger about being short-staffed. I'm worried one of the flight attendants thought I was trying to look at her chest. I wasn't, honestly.

Last time I was on a flight, we had actual screens on the backs of chairs. Now we have the option to watch movies on our phones, although there was no place to charge my phone on the plane. And my screen is cracked to begin with. Tsk-tsk—change is the illusion of improvement.