Stephen and Jerri: my flight from Detroit to Phoenix

oh man so I am BACK IN LA!!! i tell you i have never been so excited to come back to california. The winter has been too long! i packed the most ridiculous things like mini skirts and flip flops. I guess the thought of having to wait another 4 months to wear flip flops was too much for me. and i don't even like wearing flip flops!! i hate wearing flip flops to be exact! but i don't care! I have not seen my feet in 5 months. these things change you. Anyways I had teh stomach flu for the past 2 days which was nothing but good times. Nothing like being incapacitated when you have to write a 20 page paper. Well so now I am in LA writing said 20 page paper, hoping i can finish by noon so i can go to the mall with Cathy and Bobby. I haven't been to the mall in 2 months since the last time i came to LA. Oh no wait it's only been liek a 1 month and a half. ha! i tell you it feels like years.

So anyways we had 45 mph winds last night leaving detroit which made for a really interesting take off. But luckily i had this real oversharer sitting next to me so she talked me past my usual turbulance induced panic attack. She was this old white youth minister and she told me about how she used to get panic attacks but she started takin paxil and now everyday is the best day ever. I was like "wow ok, thanks" subtext "so you're crazy?? cool" no no jkjk i have sympathy for these types of things. hello i'm a psychologist! And normally i'd be really against anti depressants being of the whole Cognitive Behavioral Therapy school of thought but she made it seem so appealing. that was until 2 hours later when she was still talking my head off about working with "ghetto children" and "black peopel and latinos" and telling me all thse typical stereotypes about them and how "they just don't want to work hard because workinf hard is looked down on in their culture." Thank you Ogbu, but i believe your theory was debunked a few years back. boo ya! i wanted to be like "lady i have a paper to write, so can you please stop talking." Because seriously this woman could not read social cues. So then i started reading adn she started wtching "everybody hates raymond" on her dvd player which she did not know how to use. hate that show. So she didn't plug in her headaphones but she had them on so the sound was all loud and it's one of those moments where you can't be liek "hey Jerri, you forgot to plug in the spekaers like this." just awkward all around. At least she didnt' try to convert me.

So i read some articles but then got really tired. I figured it was all teh vomitting and the fact that all i had eaten over teh past 2 days were 4 saltine crackers. when i woke up the nice old man next to me started talking to me. Ulike jerry HE was super cool. His name was Stephen and he was 89. 89!! he had served in WWII and was telling me all about being stationed in australia on a secret mission with macarthur's troops for 44 months and how he feels bad for all the kids in Iraq cuz they have to carry all those heavy supplies through the desert for a war that is wrong, which i'm sure peeved Jerri since she seemed to be a staunch republican and very pro war. But imagine, this 89 year old man who was anti the war. I figured he'd learned alot in life and had concluded "war, what is it good for? absolutely nothing." so then I asked him why he was flying to phoenix because something told me i could learn from this old man how to live a happy life. he had worked in paper printing and his grand son was a nascar racer. He was on his way to phoenix because a woman he had known when he ws 18 and she was 14 had found him on the internet. yes, old people google! I was like "wait so how are you on the internet?" thinking to myself, wow if this man has a blog i would totes read it! But alas he doesn't, he's just in the yellow pages. So this woman about a year ago got in contact with him and was like "my friend and i were googling all the people we grew up with and you are one of the only one's left alive! come to phoenix to visit me!" to which stephen responded "um i haven't seen you in 75 years. you're not trying ot get a marriage out of me are you?" to which she responded "oh no no no i already buried 2 husbands. i dont' want to go through that again. i just want a friend. it's hard with all this modern technology and things are so different. I just want someone from my era who understands what it's liek to be me." amen! isnt' that deep! Anyways so she was this hella cool woman who had gotten married young. Her husband died of leukemia at 45 and she moved to alaska to get away from it all. She worked on the pipeline there (oil i assume) and then met her second husband 4 years later, some type of engineer. They married and moved to idaho or iowa, one of the "i" states. And then he died a few years back and she googled Stephen and since then he has been visiting her a few times a year. And what they do is she likes to take road trips and drive from her summer fall home in the "i" state to her winter home in Arizona so right now they were gonna drive back to her summer home. And i was like "dude is she ok to drive?" and he said "oh yes yes she's a very good driver. she has a lead foot!" Anyways i don't knwo what i was supposed to learn from this man but it seemed something like carpe diem esque. Like i need to enjoy my life because it will be long and someday i will have many stories to tell of the days before the internet. Anyways it was all a very moving experience and i realized that this was way more interesting than writing a paper.

So now i'm home and i'm gonna go do my work but i thought i'd share.