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The good: Amazon has come through! I have my ROTK:EE DVDs just in time to fly back home, where I can watch them on a ginormous screen! (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fannishly, want to have a party?) WHOO!!
The bad: The fixer-upper people have found (even) more damage on my car, and they don't think it'll be fixed by the time I get back. Which leaves me rather carless. Sigh. Don't want to get another rental... At least the people there were really nice. The amount of damage has reached a monetary amount that I don't even want to think about, even though I'm not paying. Sheesh. I am very, very thankful for insurance (especially the other guy's, heh).
The in-between: In the process of finalizing packing and preparing for the flight back home. It's almost a bit of a ritual now, and I feel myself gradually moving from Me-in-the-States to Me-in-Taiwan mode. My head is probably going to explode when the boy lands in Taiwan -- collisions of worlds! Confusion! Terror!
Airports and airplanes are such odd, liminal spaces. They even look it, imho. All the stark greys and boring color schemes, the drowning noise, the impersonal nature of it, it all detaches you from any sense of place or time. I suppose that's actually a bit opposite of traditional liminal spaces (from the very little I picked up from my one anthropology class that I mostly slept through). I remember more traditional liminal spaces/rituals being larger than life, even more colorful, with that sort of Fool/Trickster quality of breaking the rules. Whereas in airports and airplanes, everything is even more rule-bound, especially nowadays.
Does anyone else get this impression? I always feel so strange and detached and not-me in airports and airplanes. In airports, it's a little better -- there are shops and magazine stands, and sometimes your family or friends are there to see you off. But then you go past the impenetrable "going through security" line, and it's a totally different world. The gates especially are very odd. Everyone is just sitting there, in their small pockets of personal space, trying to distract themselves.
Airplanes are ten times worse, particularly if you don't know anyone on them. The long flights are the strangest. Time never quite passes in the same way on the plane, where they have artificial days and nights using the internal lights and lowering and raising thee window shades. When I was a kid, I used to stay up the entire flight and watch the sun rise over the sea of clouds. The plane itself almost tries to cut you off from everyone else -- the ambient noise is so loud that it's difficult to carry a conversation without severely irritating everyone within twenty feet.
I'm perpetually fascinated by airports and airplanes. I know Terry Pratchett has that L-space in which all libraries meet (right? or is that something else all together?). I think there's a strange pocket of space in which all airports meet and become one, and if you just keep walking down that aisle, or make a slightly wrong turn out of the restroom, you'll end up in Heathrow when you were just in SFO two minutes ago. I think they keep this a deep, dark secret so that they can keep the planes going and because there are very strange things lurking around in airports.
Heh, private rituals of my life. I spend (and have spent) entirely too much time in airports and on planes.
fannishly, want to have a party?) WHOO!!The bad: The fixer-upper people have found (even) more damage on my car, and they don't think it'll be fixed by the time I get back. Which leaves me rather carless. Sigh. Don't want to get another rental... At least the people there were really nice. The amount of damage has reached a monetary amount that I don't even want to think about, even though I'm not paying. Sheesh. I am very, very thankful for insurance (especially the other guy's, heh).
The in-between: In the process of finalizing packing and preparing for the flight back home. It's almost a bit of a ritual now, and I feel myself gradually moving from Me-in-the-States to Me-in-Taiwan mode. My head is probably going to explode when the boy lands in Taiwan -- collisions of worlds! Confusion! Terror!
Airports and airplanes are such odd, liminal spaces. They even look it, imho. All the stark greys and boring color schemes, the drowning noise, the impersonal nature of it, it all detaches you from any sense of place or time. I suppose that's actually a bit opposite of traditional liminal spaces (from the very little I picked up from my one anthropology class that I mostly slept through). I remember more traditional liminal spaces/rituals being larger than life, even more colorful, with that sort of Fool/Trickster quality of breaking the rules. Whereas in airports and airplanes, everything is even more rule-bound, especially nowadays.
Does anyone else get this impression? I always feel so strange and detached and not-me in airports and airplanes. In airports, it's a little better -- there are shops and magazine stands, and sometimes your family or friends are there to see you off. But then you go past the impenetrable "going through security" line, and it's a totally different world. The gates especially are very odd. Everyone is just sitting there, in their small pockets of personal space, trying to distract themselves.
Airplanes are ten times worse, particularly if you don't know anyone on them. The long flights are the strangest. Time never quite passes in the same way on the plane, where they have artificial days and nights using the internal lights and lowering and raising thee window shades. When I was a kid, I used to stay up the entire flight and watch the sun rise over the sea of clouds. The plane itself almost tries to cut you off from everyone else -- the ambient noise is so loud that it's difficult to carry a conversation without severely irritating everyone within twenty feet.
I'm perpetually fascinated by airports and airplanes. I know Terry Pratchett has that L-space in which all libraries meet (right? or is that something else all together?). I think there's a strange pocket of space in which all airports meet and become one, and if you just keep walking down that aisle, or make a slightly wrong turn out of the restroom, you'll end up in Heathrow when you were just in SFO two minutes ago. I think they keep this a deep, dark secret so that they can keep the planes going and because there are very strange things lurking around in airports.
Heh, private rituals of my life. I spend (and have spent) entirely too much time in airports and on planes.