Kudos goes to my friend "JG" who shared this email gem with me, which I will now share with the world and/or the 5 people brave enough to come forward and recognize themselves as "followers" of this blog. I could not have written this better myself. Pure literary magic.
To: Bloggerita
From: JG
Date: Today
My journey back to California was surprisingly smooth and uneventful. Well, except for one thing. I could spare you my moralistic rant on travelling etiquette but (1) that wouldn't be any fun at all, and (2) if anyone in this world will understand me here, it will be you.
So, as you may know, one of the perks of flying Jet Blue is the free in-air satellite cable. It's all real-time, so when I watch Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, I'm watching the same show as the same time that everyone down on earth is watching. It's pretty glorious. Now, I understand that political talk shows – especially uber-liberal shows like Olberman and Maddow – are not everyone's cup of tea. In fact, I realize that on a flight to Oakland, the tea of choice is most likely going to be the 49ers game. Fine. Ok. The beauty of personal TV screens and individualized sound systems is that I need not force Olberman on everyone in my row, and in turn I can expect that the testosterone-oozing segment of the plane will refrain from thrusting body-slamming overweight men on steroids upon me.
But no. See, the thing about armchair football is that the fans themselves feel the need to participate – to sweat and yell and hit things at various points in the game. Which is totally acceptable and, in fact, part of the fun of sports, when such sweating and yelling and hitting things takes place in a stadium or even the comfort of your own laz-e-boy. If you want to risk choking on seven-layer dip to cuss out a bad call, far be it from me to stop you – so long as you're holding your sticky plastic cup of Coors in section D of an outdoor stadium and not seat 27A of a 747.
But unless the pilot has just announced that, no, we're not going to crash into a mountain after all, an airplane is no place for spontaneous eruptions of applause. I don't want to hear your boos and hisses if it is not a direct response to Sally Stewardess charging $15 a peanut. Save your play-by-play for the field, kids, because on a six-hour flight I want to be able to doze off without being rudely awoken by the collective shouts of angry frat boys.
The only, I repeat ONLY time it is EVER acceptable to wake me up on a plane is if it is on fire. Even then, you'd better be sure there's something I can do about it, because if given the choice I'd rather than go up in flames asleep than in an irritated panic. It's not ok to tap my shoulder to see if I want to pay a dollar for flimsy headphones. It's not ok to stumble over me because you were too slow to request the aisle seat and now realize that downing 5 cups of free coffee is inevitably going to make you rush to the bathroom. Do not hit me with your snack cart. Don't point out cloud patterns like you're a weatherman and I care. And DO NOT , I repeat, DO NOT put your hands together in applause that registers on the Richter scale because the 49ers got a second down. It will anger me.
The problem, of course, is that if I say anything to anyone about how horribly rude it is to treat Jet Blue flight 1252 like it's Candlestick Park then I become the soulless bitch who can't just let the boys have their fun. So I'm forced to resort to completely ineffective passive-aggressive measures like the quarter-turn/ half-turn/ whole turn, and the "accidentally" whacking fans on the head as I stumble in a sleepy stupor to the WC. The latter measure – whacking fans on the head – is vaguely gratifying, but in the end what I really want is for these people to know how wrong and rude they are. As is the case with most things in life, however, the clueless offensive people get to go on being clueless and offensive while the rest of us have to suffer in quasi silence. (I say quasi not only because of my passive-aggressiveness, but also because I clearly derive some joy from ranting to you.)
Moral of the Story? People who make excessive noise on airplanes – including football fans and babies (I'll spare you my diatribe on travelling babies for another time) should be shot. If Jet Blue feels that execution is too severe for rowdy passengers, at the very least they should hook their TVs up to some sort of a shock system. My dog used to have a collar that zapped him every time he barked too loudly; I have absolutely no qualms with using the same technology on flights.
