Enroute to the Island of Rhode

I'm going to Cambridge, Massachusettes for the wedding of Truck (AKA Matt Connors), a friend from the Blue Band Drumline. Truck was one of the three friends from the Drumline who attended my wedding in 1995, so I'm happily reciprocating. (See The Nuptuals of Buick for more details.)

But I'm staying in Providence, Rhode Island with my friend Greg Vassar, who was also RIF'd from our soul-less ex-employer, aaiPharma, back in 2004 when their Enron/WorldCom-type upper management shenanigans put the company into bankruptcy. Greg was also an IT guy there. Providence is a far better airport to fly into than Boston's Logan, plus staying in Cambridge can be pretty pricey anyway.

I'm at the RDU airport now, and from here I'll fly to Atlanta, and then to Providence. I'm using Frequent Flyer miles that I've been collecting since at least the early '90's. After the foiled terrorist plot to blow up trans-Atlantic flights from England the other day, security has reached an additional level of silliness. No liquids or gels are allowed on board, and screening was alleged to be more intensive. So I got to the airport around 6:30 for an 8:15 flight (where I normally would've gotten here at 7:15) in case security was an issue. It was not. I moved through as quickly as ever...maybe even quicker. Granted, I should never be singled out for extra attention because I don't appear to be middle eastern, I'm not a citizen of a terrorist country, and I don't have a muslim or arabic sounding name, but that doesn't mean that I'm often not singled out anyway. I do have to add a trip to buy shampoo and toothpaste to my agenda now. Thanks IslamoFascist terrorists, you've inconvenienced me.

And now, a brief aside on flying. I love to fly. I always have, and I hope I always do. I hope it never loses its fascination with me, and that I always appreciate how amazing a feat it is. It's almost incredible that in the tens of thousands of years (or more) of human history, that the ability to subvert gravity like this has only been around a little over one hundred years, yet we treat it like riding a bus. Think that just a couple hundred years ago, a trip accross the Atlantic took weeks or months, with not-so-great odds of surviving the journey. A few hundred years before that, even taking a boat was impossible. Now we make the crossing in mere hours, and still complain about the legroom. I always get a window seat (unless I'm yielding it to Tristan or Zoe) and I always want to know where we are, how far up we are, what's the temperature outside, and what I'm looking at. Flying, anywhere, is amazing. Appreciate it.