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Cynical Travel Diary #1

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
Aboard plane to Atlanta

There is a curiousness of airports that is, I think, baffling. When I was younger, the excitement of flying was intoxicating. I was free to do what I could not normally: read trashy magazines and purchase snacks to my heart’s content. There was a freedom and a loss of structure, a confounding of identity.

The mysticism of people coming and going, flying anywhere and everywhere was captivating. Reconvening, meeting and greeting, and traveling on their individual paths - individual paths that happen to cross others in a transitway of life, family, career, home.

That magic, it would seem, is gone. Travel has become lackluster - an understatement, some would say, of epic proportions. I cannot decide if it is because I am older now, and I see so much more in the eyes of the people passing by with their carry ons, feel something different from the people sitting next to me in the cramped and discomforting seats.

It would be easiest to say that it is because the world has changed, idealistic as this sounds. Traveling is no longer magical when you must be investigated, your belongings picked apart as if you were on trial.

Guilty until proved innocent.

More than this, however, I think it comes from a certain maturity. This saddens me, to think that I have lost some of the impressionability that comes from traveling away from home, being away from the comfort of my everyday to the unwritten, the unsure.

Perhaps it is a cynicism that is inherent within my personality. It is a wry laugh that is evoked when I get on a plane to the south, behind men whose levis are tighter than mine, stretching down to their cowboy boots that perpetuate their wide gaits.

I wonder about cultural ties, definitions, and identities. I do not fit the bill of this plane, this identity, this culture. I am going to the south, going to a place where notoriously, women are pretty and calming and quiet. Where meals are made and consumed and God intersects with the family, and the safety of home and hearth manifests itself in conservativism.

So I board my plane with a weight that I cannot begin to describe accurately or eloquently enough. Life in the airport has changed, the way we travel has changed. Perhaps, through this critical lens I am using, because I have changed.

Posted by Clarissaag on 2008-06-09 01:48:49 | Rating: