oyceter | (no subject)

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! (

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.

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You'd like Pico Iyer's book, The Global Soul. He spends a chapter discussing how LAX is liminal space. He is a great travel writer, and has a lot to say about people who live liminally: he himself is originally from India, went to school in England, and splits his time between Japan and the US. It's well worth the read.

Ooh, thanks, that sounds interesting!

Ursula Le Guin wrote a book inspired by sitting in an airport called Changing Planes. I haven't read it, but hey, it's by Le Guin. That's usually a good sign.

Long flights by oneself are strange. I've done a lot of them, especially in college, going back and forth from Korea to the states during summer and winter vacations. I always find myself checking my watch too often and discovering, to my horror, that there's still another eight hours to go.

Hope your trip goes well!

I took note and ended up getting it in the airport bookstore ^_^.

Long flights... ergh. I'm getting better at them. The ones to Taiwan now leave at some ungodly hour of the morning and land at the crack of dawn, so I just sleep through the whole thing. Usually then I'm ok for the day (plus residual jetlag).

This one was a little worse, what with the congestion and all. Ugh.

I think there is also a LeGuin book also about how airports are liminal spaces, that if you are delayed in an airport and uncomrfortable enough, you can go visit entirely different worlds. It has the one thousand leagues under the sea-seque feel.

I also feel that airports and airplane create people pockets, but I actually look at it in the exactly opposite way. I really like being in airports and on air planes. I've always traveled for fun, so perhaps that has something to do with it. I dunno, when the world becomse so small I feel like there is something liberating about it. All the pressures from outside stop, and all deadlines are far away. If you are lucky enough to have a friend on the flight, you can have a leasurely conversation for just the joy of it.

Hee, I just got it at the airport bookstore because you and

rilina mentioned it!

Ooh, I envy you and your ability to have fun on planes. Mine usually degenerate because of the sheer physical misery -- I hate being stuffed in those seats for hours, my head starts hurting because of the pressure, etc. etc.

Does anyone else get this impression? I always feel so strange and detached and not-me in airports and airplanes.

YES.

Time never quite passes in the same way on the plane
I always feel like time slows waaaay down on a plane. A two hour flight feels like 8, and I have no idea why. Maybe it is true that time flies when you're having fun (and crawls when you're not).
Have a good flight. Merry Christmas!

Gah, yes. And twelve hours feels like two days. And looks it too, after you get off and moan at the state of your hair!

PAR-TAY! Whee!!!!!

I used to get that sense of detachment and not-me-ness in movie theaters.

I like airports. I like the high ceilings, the huge spaces, the stark, stern rows of seats. The Hong Kong airport, for one, is gorgeous.

I generally like airports (though the old CKS airport was awful). The HK one really is gorgeous! And has lots of shops, so it's ok being stuck there for two or three hours (which I was). And their airport express, so nice!

My personal un-favorite is the one in Honolulu, which does not operate on the same logic every other airport in the world operates on, so I got very severely lost between terminals.

Aeroplanes do have lower pressure than the ground, so I'm sure some of the unreality is mild oxygen starvation.

Heh, fun.

The canned air quality probably doesn't help either ;).