All 'round me burdens seem to fall

Ok...I'm taking a break from packing.

I have some audio/visual stuff that goes with the thing I'm doing, and it's all been done wrong. This is what I get for letting someone else put it together for me. GRRRRRRRRRRR! This will teach me to not do every single last little article of minutiae my very own self. It's not fixable, and at this point, I'll be damned if I'm going to pull an all-nighter to try to re-make it all. So screw it. This sort of preventable disaster really ticks me off.

And I don't want to go. And I am going to miss my cats. And everybody's a bastard.

Grr.

And I hate that I am going to forget things. And I really at this point hate flying. If I forget to pack my year-old Xanax and have to drink again, I'm going to really be ticked off.

At this point, I'm just looking for a reason to get more ticked off. :-)

I need to get moderately plowed when I fly because:

(1) I am deathly afraid of crashing.

(2) I am a control freak, and do not trust the pilot, the co-pilot, or the tower.

(3) I feel, deep within my heart, that one day I will be on a plane and the pilot and co-pilot will have a lovers' tiff or something and shoot each other and if I'm not asleep, then I'll have to be included in some coin flip of moderately competent-looking people to see who is going to get to learn how to pilot a plane (see how I phrased that positively?), and I probably couldn't learn, and I don't trust whomever else might be doing it. I'd rather just be sleeping.

(4) I've read The Langoliers; I know how this stuff works.

(5) I've studied far too much about air disasters and human performance to ever feel safe whilst on board a plane ever again.

(6) Did you ever see Die Hard II? If mercenaries take over the airport in order to steal away with some general whatever, they're going to be basically holding me hostage up in the air without my knowing anything, and I'll have to have like, some radio that picks up tower talk and realise that I'm not hearing anything and then have to somehow fix the whole problem from Way Up There, 'cos god knows no one else on the ground is going to do it right.

(7) For some peculiar reason, the airports get really annoyed when you call them from the plane and ask to speak with the tower so that you can ask if the whole airport's been taken hostage by mercenaries. I mean, it's your credit card you're running up...what do they care? It's a simple yes or no question, for god's sake. If you don't know, then go find someone who does and put them on.

(8) Most stewardesses find me difficult to get along with when I am not asleep. I try to keep the questions down to a minimum--only the most important ones, like "WHAT IN THE FUCK WAS THAT NOISE?!?!", "Is the pilot ok? Are you sure? Could you go check?", and "It really feels to me like we're going down...might I come up front and actually *see* the altimeter?". I don't ask to point fingers--I try to take a blame-free approach to life ('cos really, when so much around you is FUBAR, what else can one really do?); I just know that vigilance isn't a long-term thing, and there's an attention decrement, and I feel that my questions kind of re-balance the signal-to-noise ratio for a little bit. Yeah. That's what it is.

(9) They don't provide parachutes. I don't *want* a flotation device--if we start going down, I want the fuck OFF. And I don't really want to parachute. I'd probably freak and pass out. I am terrified of falling. What is parachuting? Um, falling. Dur. But notice that they don't even give you the *option* of parachuting. I find that suspicious, to say the least. What--they're afraid that some people might survive and talk about how the crash was all the fault of the airline?

(10) I have no idea what condition the plane is in. The entire crew could be the most competent in the world, and maybe the maintenance personnel slacked off. I know *I* don't want to be the one to have to climb out on the wing and repair something...and I'm not exactly sure how to best present that to someone else so that they get all fired up about it; my leadership skills aren't *that* strong. And plus, they might repair it incorrectly. Or they might get out there and freak, and then you have to go talk yet another person into doing it. You just never know about people, and that thirty-two feet per second per second thing *sounds* like a long time, but I'm sure when you're living through it, it's a lot shorter.

(11) I think that many of the people with whom I am travelling look suspicious, peculiar, or like plain-and-simple dead weight. I dread not knowing how best to allocate tasks as we plummet towards the ground because I'm not familiar with my team, and most everyone looks like a mouth-breather. Or maybe they're the person who unplugged the engines when they were back in the bathroom for a long time. Or they might be in cahoots with the mercenaries who took over the airport. You just can't be too careful about these things. I'm not even sure how to throw someone off if need be, and the damn stewardesses won't ever tell me. And what if one of them gets cabin fever and becomes dangerous? How am I going to disarm and kill them when I don't have anything 'cos it was all confiscated back at the security check? What am I supposed to do--stab them with my plastic spork? That is a lot of unnecessary work, plus it doesn't sound good. I don't want to go on Good Morning, America as "Spork Girl". Who would?

I could go on, but that's my abbreviated list.

Now I have to finish packing.