AIRPORTS

It’s the same as always. You look around, at the gray floor and at the high ceiling. Babies are crying and it smells like the scent of overpriced perfume and greasy fries mixed into one. You’ve been in line for an hour. Why isn’t it moving faster? you ask yourself, shoulders slumping in exhaustion and eyes bleary from looking at the artificial lights of the building too long. But the answer is simple.

You’re at an airport.

I hate airports. I hate everything to do with airports. Even if I’m at the airport where I live, I feel like a tourist. People look and people watch you and you certainly feel out of place, but you’re still there because you need to be somewhere. Security looks at you with scrutinizing eyes like you’re a troublemaking child and they are the reprimanding teacher. Going through security is even worse when there are people behind you. Why don’t you hurry up, they ask, Start moving faster! And it’s not like you can because Hello, look, there are people in front of me, I can’t just bowl through them inconsiderately like you would.

And then there’s the actual flying. Maybe it’s just me being paranoid, but after reading the stories where planes crash into the ocean and never come back you start to have some doubts. You go up and up and then you think that the plane’s going to crash and burn, man, I wish I deleted my internet history before I went on the plane. Then it turns out you’re not going to die a horrible death, but the man next you has this unbearable snore that you wish you had died from a climatic death instead of being driven insane from his sleeping habits. Then there are crying, burbling babies, and the women who like to talk too loud and laugh too loud when watching movies, and the guy in front of you who likes to lean his chair all the way back so the only way you can breath is to lean to the side near the snoring man. He wakes up and looks at you and complains about how people never respect other people’s personal space.

The food comes, and it looked good on the menu, but they must’ve hired the McDonald’s advertisement photographer because it looks nothing like it did in the picture. You pick at it and manage to eat the fruit, but it turns out to be as filling as taking out the crumbs of a finished bag of chips. You manage to survive, however, because you bought some overpriced candy at the Duty-Free shop.

You wait and wait, go through all the movies available, make sure the snoring man next to you doesn’t fall asleep on your shoulder, and that you don’t bang you legs on the chair in front of you every time you want to go to the bathroom. You finally go through the battle of air travel and manage to make it off the plane safely.

But then there’s customs. I don’t even want to go there, except I have to because I’m in an airport.

You finally exit and get to your destination, overjoyed. For a second, you think it’s all worth it because this place is wonderful and you feel like a knight who has just staked the dragon and met their princess.

And then you remember you have to go back to the airport.

SEAFOOD

I hate seafood. It is simple as that. My mother looks at me every time while chopping up a flopping fish, a tight lipped smile on her face, and informs me that when I was little I would inhale fish by the ton, and I ate enough fish each day to feed small armies in Monaco.

“I don’t understand you,” she nags, “You used to like fish.”

“I don’t remember ever liking it.”

My dad laughs.

Some days my mother and father will take me out to seafood restaurants to eat. My mother loves seafood; she was born next to sea and I have always thought she was secretly a mermaid. It’s too bad I wasn’t born with her fish-loving mermaid powers.

“You shouldn’t knock something before you try it,” she says while sucking out the brains of something that looks like a combination of a lobster and a crab.

“I never liked seafood.”

“It’s tasty.”

“But I don’t think so,”

“It’s good for you. Omega – 3 and all that.”

“But I don’t enjoy fish.”

“You’re going to like it.”

“I don’t like it.” I sigh, scowling at my father who is laughing his brains out in the background with a bowl of clam chowder.

It’s not like I haven’t tried seafood before.  I remember the times biting into a piece of shrimp and tasting the sandy shores of some distant beach. Tasting the strong smell of the ocean with each bite of some bulging-eyed fish.

Maybe I don’t hate seafood. Maybe I hate the thought of it because my mother is so ready to stuff it down my face 24/7.

A Welcome

This blog dislikes things. It is as simple as that. There is no goal here; this is only food for thought. The posts are something to think about when you’re bored and something to talk about with your friends. Posting whenever something bothers me, which is always, you may find out we have more in common than you thought. Let the complaining begin!