I nearly wrote a blog post this week but I didn’t. It would have been a good one too. Funny. Witty. The “makes you think while you’re laughing” kind. Too bad you’ll never get to read it . . . because I didn’t write it.
I started to. I’ve even got the notes I made about it written down on paper. I wrote it on paper because I was on an airplane and they wouldn’t let me turn my computer on because it would interfere with the pilot’s radar and bump us off course from Shanghai to Moscow and I heard that it’s already getting cold in Moscow. It’s still nice in Shanghai so I wrote it on paper.
It was a post about the absolutely diabolical engineering genius of airplane seats. If you’ve ever flown you see the potential for a good post right? I was making notes about how the designers of those seats had achieved the impossible. Like in that movie Apollo 13 when they had to figure out how to recreate a life size rocket ship, Times Square and a summer home for three Martians by using only eight cotton balls a rubber hose and a dirty shoe in a space the size of a coffee can or all the astronauts would burn up on re-entry or float through space until they ran out of dehydrated ice cream . . . and Tang.
And they did.
They figured it out. Which is pretty amazing but still nothing compared to the unparalleled brilliance of airplane seat designers. They must have pooled the intellects of the greatest minds from Harvard, MIT and the Third Reich to craft such an unfathomably complex and subtly torturous device. How can it be possible that no matter what position I contort my body into I am perfectly comfortable for exactly 30 seconds, no more, no less? How is it that if I move my knees one centimeter to the left my neck will spasm and if I adjust my neck one centimeter to the right my lower back will cramp and if I scoot forward one centimeter my knees will press just firmly enough on the seat in front of me to remind that passenger that he has forgotten to tilt his seat back and fall asleep in my lap . . .
. . . which forces me to adjust my knees . . .
. . . which spasms my neck . . .
. . . which cramps my back . . .
. . . which makes it really hard to keep writing notes for my blog post and ensures that the world will never know of their evil plan.
Genius.
I was going to write that post . . . but I didn’t.
Know why? Because while I was jotting notes (with my left hand because my right hand had gone completely numb under the weight of my left thigh) I realized something. Know what I realized? I realized I was flying. Me. Jerry Jones. Not Superman or Mighty Mouse or even a duck. Not even the real Jerry Jones who owns the Dallas Cowboys and can afford his own jetpack. Just me. I was flying . . . in a giant Pringle can . . . five miles above the earth . . . at speeds that would pull my face off if I stuck my head out the window and in less than an hour I would be in Shanghai which would have taken me 7 hours by train, 10 hours by car (96 hours if traffic is normal), and 8 weeks by camel if I even had a camel . . . or a car . . . or a train (who has a train?). How utterly amazing is it that human beings have discovered it possible to bend and shape steel in such a way that you can pour large amounts of combustible liquid into it . . . AND IT FLYS!
Then they put seats in it.
And what do I notice?
The seats.
The horribly uncomfortable seats.
Interesting that I have become so unaware of the amazingness (not a word according to spell check) surrounding me that the discomfort I’m sitting in is what gets my attention.
I spent the rest of the flight counting things that I had forgotten are wonderful . . . on my toes . . . because they were right next to my head.
When I got off the plane in Shanghai I caught some of the U.S. Presidential Debate on the airport TV . . . and I thought “hmm . . .
. . . that’s another post I probably won’t write.”
