| Jet-Propelled Wednesday One-Liners |
| Pilot: We’re on our way to New York where the weather is cold and icy, just like my prom date back in high school.
—Jet Blue flight 114 from Ft. Lauderdale to JFK |
| Flight attendant announcing boarding call: If you have given up your seat on this flight, please do not board the plane.
—LaGuardia |
| United Airlines employee on PA: Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to use the last-one-on-is-a-rotten-egg method of boarding here.
—LaGuardia Overheard by: Hour-and-a-Half Delayed |
| Pilot, as the seatbelt sign goes off: All rise.
—Airtran flight from Atlanta to LaGuardia Overheard by: Debbie Kate |
| Airline representative: Paging La… La-gua-ti-ne Pu-ra-na-ma-te? Paging… Eh, I know I messed that one up. If your name rhymes with the one I just said or it sounds at all like yours, please come to the desk.
—LaGuardia |
| Overheard in New York, Jun 20, 2007 |
My alarm woke me up at 8:00 to take what’s now become a big joke to my body—the antibiotics that I’m continuing to take to “complete the treatment” that’s not “treating me” at all.
“Mr. Martin, it’s time for your placebo this morning. You know it’s doing nothing, and we know it’s doing nothing, and we know that you feel silly taking it, and to that end we’ve made it the biggest possible placebo on the planet—a veritable horse-pill sized placebo.” Here you go. Use that painfully sore throat now, and swallow the huge capsule that’s not going to do anything.
Ok, I’ve moved beyond the traditional five stages of accepting change: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and I’ve moved into the undocumented stage: bitter. I now think of my horse-sized placebo more as a bitter pill to swallow.
I made it to the post office today, where I finally mailed my Father’s Day card, and stood in a line way too long to get fourteen $.02 stamps.
Two lines open, both with “complicated transactions”:
- Two (rather hot, but that didn’t make the clock tick any faster) guys who had three boxes containing 1,000 pieces of mail, which they wanted to stamp and send internationally, buying the postage to accomplish said task, and
- A young man trying to send a package to Berlin with conflicting requirements—sending it at the class in which he needed to in order for the package to arrive on time, precluded him from being able to put a return receipt on it, which he also needed to do.
I shifted from leg to leg thinking, “Where’s the ‘Simple Transactions’ line?”
Back at home, I boiled and then peeled two pounds of jumbo-sized shrimp to have for dinner, which turned out to be just delicious—with some nice Heinz Cocktail Sauce with them.
Robert and I had a rare, less-than-satisfying time completing two crossword puzzles that had been abandoned—one that we’d worked on together and another one that I’d worked on by myself.
Dancing was pretty fun to me tonight, as I missed Saturday, and just needed to “get out.” It’s been an entire week since I’ve been to the bar, which I’m sure is some kind of record, at least over the last two or three years.
I thought that I would mostly just “watch” tonight, but dancing’s in my blood, and I couldn’t just stand along the sidelines. I did stop a few dances halfway or three-quarters of the way through.
There was a fair amount of bar patrons as well as a good number of dancers, including two “outsiders” and Jimmy. I call them “outsiders” only because they aren’t “regular” dancers, though one of them may be becoming such.
He came a few weeks ago for the first time with a woman, and we thought they were a straight couple, or at least straight friends. Then the guy came back alone the following week. Tonight, he brought this friend with him, who was sure to let everyone know he was an (ex?) marine with his t-shirt on that had a Marine Corps emblem on it, and something about Tarawa on the back.
He tried hard to look stereotypically butch, but the way his hips moved and the position of his wrists during the dances led the observers to lean toward another stereotypical conclusion instead.
All of that is neither here not there (well literally, it was all there of course); just relax and be who you are instead of doing all that work all night long.
It didn’t help that he made some comment after the lesson, during which we have to turn off the fan in order to best hear the instructor, when he asked, “Why did you turn off the fan? Am I not hot enough to keep cool?” or some such illusion-of-grandeur-type statement as that. Actually, buddy, “All that, but not so much the chips.“