being in motion again

I still think of air travel as this futuristic thing. How can you not feel this way as you find yourself levitating above the clouds, gently bumping up and down back and forth with a hundred other people, all calmy listening to music and writing in crossword puzzles, together in this clean white cylindrical plastic and aluminum machine? Maybe it's all an illusion, maybe air travel is really a holdover from the twentieth century, one day soon going the way of the Zeppelin?

After all, where will we get the kerosene to feed their turbines?

reality-based fields

In the last two minutes of my flight to Atlanta, my neighbor began eagerly chatting with me. I don't know what brought on the change in him exactly. For the last four or five hours I had been happily ensconced in my Princess-Leia-like headphones and he had been very much unconscious. We got to talking about the usual air-traveler topics: where we were from, where we were going, and what we did.

"Physics," I said. "I'm looking for black holes. We use lasers to measure distances very precisely, looking for distortions in space caused by spinning pairs of black holes."

He said this was very interesting, etc etc, mentioned the Coast to Coast AM late-night radio programme (target audience: conspiracy theorists), and said, for counterpoint: "I work in a very concrete, reality-based field."

"What field is that?" I asked.

"Financial services."

I laughed inside.