In The Hands of the Airlines

You leave the familiar, comfortable surroundings of wherever you've been recently (even if it's just a hotel room where you've flung your clothes around for the last few days) and travel to the giant, immaculately clean airport (or, even more surreal, a dingy airport in great need of being updated from its 1960s or 70s decor). There you sit around for an hour or more among strangers, before boarding this peculiar cargo pod which takes you through a strange, bright, often white terrain, to your final destination.

Once there, you collect your things, and step out into a potentially entirely different climate, perhaps returning to entirely different familiar, comfortable surroundings, or perhaps to a basically unfamiliar place.

If you're making the transition between work and vacation (either way), it's an even more profound change, as your whole day-to-day schedule is in flux.

(I sometimes wonder if it's different when families travel together. It's been a while since I've done a long trip with a family - or even a girlfriend - so I don't really remember. I'm pretty sure the experience is different for children, though.)

I'm writing this on the plane back from Boston (which left two-and-a-half hours late due to mechanical problems), my cold still with me (cough, post-nasal drip, and clogged ears at this point; thank goodness the sore throat is gone!). So you can see why this is in my mind.

Right now the plane is showing some movie called Beautiful starring Minnie Driver (whom I've never seen before). I'm not listening to it, but since I have serious Television Attention Disruption Disorder (TADD - okay, I just made that up right now) I can't help but watching it from time to time. As far as I can tell, the plot involves (1) cleavage, and (2) Hallie Kate Eisenberg.

I wound up my vacation with a whirlwind (for me) reading spree.

For instance, I read Philip Pullman's novel Northern Lights (published in the US as The Golden Compass, a title which suggests the US publisher somehow misunderstood the book), which is the first of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy. Ostensibly written for older children, it struck me as being a more adult story, although raising the bar of children's literature is always a good thing. Ceej has said she thinks Pullman is a better writer than J. K. Rowling, and I think this is plain as day once you've read both of them: Pullman's handling of imagery and world-building is in another league. Though the Harry Potter books (especially the first) have more of a sense of wonder about them in some ways. But they're also more manipulative of the reader.

And I re-read one of my favorite books, Ken Grimwood's Replay, which is about a man who relives his life from 1963 to 1988 over and over. It's similar to the film Groundhog Day in some ways, but has a broader scope. It's not perfect, but it's a very neat book.

On the flight back to California I read a book on buying a home that Subrata loaned me (it turned out not to have a whole lot to say beyond what the book I'd already read said). I also read the first volume of a series called The History of Architecture, named Origins: Egypt, West Asia and the Aegean, which I found very disappointing. The book's small size (it's about 3" by 3") reduces the impact of some of the lovely photography. But more seriously, writer Christopher Tadgell's text is turgid and tedious, focusing largely on the cultural histories of the peoples involved, with only occasional asides to discuss how their architecture actually evolved. I'd rather have had the text cut by half or more and restricted to only the architectural discussion, with minimal context about the cultures. (If I want to read about the cultures, I'll buy a book about their cultures, dammit!). Skip this one; I plan to skip the rest of the series.

On the plus side, the book did teach me something I'd been wondering about for years. H. P. Lovecraft's fiction often employs the word "cyclopean", but I've never been able to learn a definition of the word. A Cyclops has one eye, and is very big, so what conclusion can I draw from that? I inferred that terms like "cyclopean caverns" refer to their size and are otherwise just using the word to be exotic.

This book explains that cyclopean refers to a bare, unadorned style of masonry, and includes a photo illustrating an example:

You learn something new every day!

The plane flight took over an hour less time than predicted, since we apparently had very favorable headwinds. Nonetheless, on landing, it turns out that since we were an hour late, there wasn't a gate for us, so we sat on the runway for 40 minutes waiting for a gate. Sigh.

We finally got in, and Trish was there to pick me up. (She seemed pretty happy to dart out of work for an hour or two. Long week, I guess.) We went to In-n-Out Burger for dinner, and then she dropped me off at my car. I headed home to greet some very, very happy kitties, unpacked, and lounged around for an hour or so before going to bed early.

Tomorrow I guess I start my latest "new life".