It's a hard knock flight, for us

I'm recovering from one of those horrid flu bugs that makes me hallucinate wildly and forget things (like the fact that I hate the word "bug" when used in reference to some sort of sickness, as it is generally utilized by the same people who say "you look tired" as you walk into the office on a Monday morning). I "forgot" I had already taken three pain relievers when I took two more, and therefore happily endured three consecutive Jerry Springer re-runs without having the slightest urge to throw my roommate's television out of the window or castrate my entire neighborhood. On a walk through Brighton Beach at the onset of my flu, I ate a dumpling filled with mystery meat without flinching, and actually thought I could read the Cyrillic alphabet as I wandered through a Russian bookstore.

I had to fly back from New York last night runny-nosed and achy. After nearly missing my flight, we sat on the runway for a half-hour before the captain announced that the plane had a "pretty big leak in the right engine," and that once the maintenance crew "signed off on some paperwork," we'd be off on a six-hour flight filled with a lot of "patches of turbulence" and a shitty Sandra Bullock movie.

We finally climbed above the Brooklyn lights into instant turbulence, which always forces me to practice labor breathing, even though I am childless and fully aware of the mechanics of flight. The beverage cart came around. The man in the aisle seat across from me was perplexed at the flight attendant's insistence that there was no food to be had in the coach cabin this evening, not even for purchase.

I ordered a ginger ale and a blanket, and was told that there were no blankets on the plane. No blankets? I looked across the aisle at the hungry guy who was curled and shivering under his leather jacket. He gave me a look of pity and motioned that he had another jacket in the overhead compartment as if he were offering me a spoonful of cold porridge. I smiled back, felt the Nyquil kick-in and curled up against the metal arm rest to dream of the riches that I intended to share with my fellow air orphan as soon as I acquired residence at the mansion of Daddy Warbucks.

After a half-hour of interrupted airplane sleep, I wandered to the bathroom and witnessed a man attacking a shiny red zit on his nose with the aid of his tiny medicine kit mirror. I walked back to my seat disgusted. Not by the fact that the man was picking a zit at his seat, but by the fact that he was hastily relieving the promise of an extensive and goo-filled operation in a dimly-lit and confined area. Which disgusted me.

I then got to thinking that they should really make portable zits. They could package them as band-aids, puss-filled squares that could be stuck to the skin, popped, then removed without the worry of scaring or redness. You would get all the satisfaction of popping a particularly ornery zit without the blemishing repercussions. They could market them to mothers with clean-skinned children, offering the joy of amateur dermatology in tiny adhesive squares.

Then the Sandra Bullock movie started, and I realized that pimples are not the only things in this universe that should be made temporary and optional. I think I still have a fever.