May 13: Sacramento, Burbank: Day one of my first, and quite possibly last, business trip actually began the day before. On Sunday, the guy who is supposed to be getting the rental car called me to get the flight information. He hadn't received it, and had no idea when and where we were supposed to be leaving from. I somehow managed to tell him everything before we became the victims of a freak, cordless phone battery dying accident.

I knew that there would be increased security at the airport, but I didn't actually know just how early I was supposed to arrive. Considering that the only information I have regarding airports comes from late night talk shows, I naturally feared the worst and arrived three hours early for my one hour, domestic flight from Sacramento to Burbank.

I arrived waaaay too early. As I passed through security to the terminal I saw a large billboard, advertising an airport -- the very same airport that I'm in. "It's like a mall with an airport in it!" it says.

If your were to put an airport into a mall, that mall would immediately become an airport, Q.E.D. It doesn't have to be a mall in fact. If one were to insert an area to be used for the taking off and landing of planes, into any area, that area would be immediately re-classified as an airport. (I apologize for digressing into a semantic analysis here. But I also refuse to edit it).

The point of the above paragraph was to simply say that, faced with spending a huge amount of time waiting in what equates to a tiny, super expensive mall, I wound up spending way too much money on a book and a magazine.

People started lining up at the gate a full 30 minutes before check-in. I had been hoping that everyone in the entire airport were just as lazy as me, admittedly a plan that was doomed to failure from the start. Fearing that my three hours too early arrival would go to waste, I rushed to the steadily growing queue, and managed to wind up #6, while only scaring a few old people.

I was standing there, reading a magazine when the woman in front of me asked if I would hold her place while she sat down. I couldn't say no, because then she would be standing right in front of me for the next half hour if I did. I also kind of figured that if she ever had the chance, she'd find some way to screw me over in the event that the plane crashed and we were the only two survivors.

About 30 seconds before check-in time, the woman came back and stood in front of me in the line. Obviously incapable of thanking me in the normal fashion, she decided that it would be better to socialize with me first, and work up to saying the words "thank you" at some later date.

The only sure thing that strangers in an airport have in common, is the fact that nobody has fun in an airport. Hatred of airports, (much like hatred of the French) is a shared American trait. The line lady nodded towards the girl working the check-in desk and said, "I don't think that she's working over there... she's just standing around looking pretty while she ignores us."

I've been making an effort not to be petty and childish, which I am pretty sure includes not speaking ill of people who might have some say in who gets "randomly selected" for a cavity search. The noble thing, obviously, would be to turn the scorn linelady had intended for the airport worker upon myself. "I'm used to that," I said. Linelady laughed and said, "Oh I doubt that. You have an aspect of confidence about you. I can read people's auras."

Oddly, she didn't seem to have the slightest inkling that, not only was I not all that confident at that moment, but she had profoundly creeped me out.

* * *

The take-off and flight were uneventful. Which is to say, I can't derive any sort of anecdote from the experience. I did however count an amazing number of private tennis courts, on our decent into Burbank.

It occurs to me now that one should always refer to one's arrival to Burbank as "my decent into Burbank," regardless of whether or not you actually flew in.

I spent the rest of the day realizing that nobody was getting my jokes, and that the next 3 days would be punctuated with a world record breaking number of uncomfortable silences.

-B. C. Silvia