Japan might have been TOO awesome

Holy mackeral! The vacation is over, and it was a blast! Akihabara, Shinjuku, Harajuku, Shibuya, Odaiba, and the humble, but pleasing sights of little ol’ Satte. I bought a wind-up alpaca, ate a new years feast with Denton’s wonderful host family from when he was studying abroad, viewed downtown Japan from 55 storeys up, rode the world’s tallest ferris wheel, grooved to wicked bongos in a bar/restaurant that was as hippieish as Japan can get, had my balls thoroughly rocked by Avatar in 3-D, and got my ass whupped by the best smash bros. player I’ve ever met. And, really, I left out a bunch of stuff. I don’t even know how to go about remembering it all. There’s so much! It was wonderful and I’m so glad I got to go.

But I didn’t come here to talk about that!

I got overwhelmed last week trying to write a post about one day in Japan, so there’s no way I could ever manage to recount it all. If you want to the detailed scoop, drop me a line on skype or facebook or something.

Therefore, please enjoy this post about riding in planes.


Here we go on the taxi-go-round. A highly trained pilot is earning his keep by staying between the yellow lines. We’re moving at what seems like a lumbering pace, although looking closely, I can see it’s much faster than I can run. Airplanes taxiing resemble nothing so much as a half-beached whale in 3 feet of water. The plane is dying to fly, and when the pilot thrusts the throttle forward to let those jet engines suck down torrents of air, it’s a moment of release and excitement. It’s not long after that the plane is again ready to realize its purpose. The nose tilts up, the ground drifts away, and the whale is back in deep water. Kickin ass and taking names! Hoo-rah!

The most remarkable thing about flying is the speed of the ascent. One minute, you’re on the ground and the next, ZOOM! An incredible set of sights fills the window. You learn a lot about a region in about 8 seconds. The architecture, the plant-life, the locations of rivers and lakes nearby. By the time you are 300 meters off the ground, a world that once seemed so vast, that you braved so tortuously to get to the airport and into the plane—that overwhelming world is now just geography. I can’t watch the full transition. On every flight I take, I have to look away a few seconds into the ascent.

I can look out the window just fine once we get really high, and everything in the world looks very small. I can watch the shadow of the plane sliding over the tops of clouds and it gives me no discomfort. In fact, it’s very nice.

But that first moment of ascencsion, faster than I can tie my shoe, or drink a cup of water, that FIRST shock—it always goes straight to my stomach. I feel my stomach drop suddenly and I have to look away or my brain will start screaming.

Now, truth be told, I’m the kind of guy who likes a good brain screaming. Normally, nothing could be more comforting to me than a sudden violation of my expectations. For example!

You know when you’ve been drinking a can of soda? and you put it down for a while and forget how much is in there? Maybe you thought you finished it and were about to throw it away. Maybe you did finish it but you just forgot. Anyway, sooner or later, you pick it up expecting it to be a certain weight and then Hey! It’s a whole different weight! I love that.

It’s like when you’re going to sleep and you’re in that half-under phase where it’s kinda swimmy and you aren’t really conscious of your thoughts anymore but you’re not asleep either, and then suddenly you feel like you’re falling! So you—what do you do? You throw out your arms and legs as fast as you can to break your fall! But they don’t go anywhere. They just hit the bed and stop dead instantly with a whmm. I love that too. Totally cool and definitely worth waking back up for.

Actually, come to think of it, those kind of pale in comparison to watching the earth fall away at about 50 meters a second. Those are more like “brain coughs”. But! Let it be known that at the very least I’m the kind of guy who likes a good brain coughing.

Until next time! Eat your vegetables! Even if you can’t recognize what kind of vegetables they are!