Wednesday, January 01, 2003 :::
Happy New Year's!
This entry is entirely personal, so if you're here for the politics, skip it. And if you can infer my wine and beer, well, it's no calamity, but I tried to edit it away.
I flew from Des Moines to Boston today, via Newark. The DSM-EWR flight, I saw crop circles in Illinois and, in Pennsylvania or New Jersey, rainbows. The crop circles were, I believe, south-southeast of Dixon -- I'm relatively certain that was the Rock river, but I'm a lot less certain of towns. They were groups of concentric circles or semi-circles, and I'm curious whether there was a reason. The rainbows were complete circles, with the shadow of the airplane in the middle, which was really damn cool. I also spent that flight interrogating
the flight attendant (asking her, probably too often, to ignore me if I interfered with her job). I'll call her Sofia, since I think that's close to her name. I learned that flight attendants spend four days on the job, then three days off (which, truth be told, I may had learned earlier), that she flies different routes with different crews each week (not even keeping the same model of airplane), that the biggest surprise to her is the fourteen-hour days, and -- least generally -- that she keeps an apartment in the hub city where she's based -- Newark -- and one in her home-town of Los Angeles. And that Continental Express is hiring, if anyone's interested. She also told me it was the last flight on the four-day shift she was on. On my way off, I wished her a good "week-end".
Tonight I went to a party with a couple of my friends, which was, to be honest, disappointing. I guess I did get a chance to talk to a few acquaintaces I hadn't seen in a while, but I didn't really meet anyone knew. I was, however, dropped off at a bar near my house ("The People's Republik") around 11:55. As it happened, the People's Republik, which had at least a hundred people in a few hundred square feet, honored the new year with '80's music -- I considered calling one of our few regular readers who is a particular fan of the stuff, but I didn't think she'd hear me on my cell phone over the din. I did meet a few Rhode Islander/BU students, who were even younger than I am. I expect I'll never meet them again -- and I hope so, since I don't remember that their names are Liz, Shana, Matt, and maybe Derek, let alone that Liz is the one trying to quit smoking. Incidentally, I pondered how old Dick Clark is -- both of the young women guessed low, with 70, but were closer than I thought.
So, that's my New Year's Eve. I hope yours was at least as good.
::: posted by Steven at 2:07 AM
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