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the dream of the 90s is alive on this flight
Thursday, October 20 2016
rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York, USA
Throughout the morning, I gathered together the stuff I would be needing on the trip to the South of France. Both Gretchen and I are light packers, and I'm also a rather thoughtless one. My main priorities are to have the drugs and alcohol I wouldn't be able to get along the way and the files I would be needing on my laptop computer (which, in this case, only meant files that normally live on my main desktop computer, since I would have access to the internet). It didn't even occur to me, for example, that European electrical outlets have a different shape than the American kind (though, of course, I am aware of this if I stop to think about it).
Betty, our house sitter, arrived at around 10:00am. Fortuitously, she's a just-retired veterinarian whose nephew works at the farm animal sanctuary in High Falls. Gretchen had cooked up a peanut noodle dish, which we all ate after Gretchen gave a tour of the house. Betty told us all about her adventures since retiring, and many of them involved staying at monasteries, some of which required complete silence. Betty seemed like a bit of a weirdo, though it's not uncommon for veterinarians to have odd social skills and prefer the company of animals. She seemed to like Ramona and Neville, and that's what counted. Gretchen took Betty for a walk down the Stick Trail to acclimate her to the environs, and the tranquil beauty of the autumnal forest blew her mind. Meanwhile I gathered some last-minute kindling so she'd have an easier time starting fires.
Our flight to Nice would be leaving from JFK, and Google decided it was best we drive there via the Tappan Zee, a route I haven't been on in years. I saw that a brand new Tappan Zee bridge is being built next to the existing one. While the old one is a steel cantilever bridge, the new one is being built with cable-stay technology, one that is suddenly so ubiquitous that it will some day undoubtedly be viewed as a quirk of these times.
Today was the first of my vacation, though I intended to be in contact the whole time. Via my smartphone somewhere near the site of the old World's Fair in Queens, I learned of a somewhat embarrassing glitch caused by one of my sync scripts had deleted name and information info from the record of the Organization's president. It had also changed his home country to Brazil.
After dropping off our car at the discount long-term parking place and riding the shuttle to the international terminal, we experienced an unusually rapid passage through security. There was an absence of plastic trays at our security checkpoint, so they told us to put all our shit in one bag and send it through and to not bother taking off our shoes. "This reminds me of the '90s!" Gretchen proclaimed with delight.
Unfortunately, in furtherance of the retro-90s experience, there was no free WiFi anywhere near our gate, but I managed to get a connection anyway for my laptop using a smartphone app called FoxFi. FoxFi connects to the cellphone network and serves as a hotspot that a laptop can connect to via WiFi. I tried a number of such apps, some of which were more advertising-laden than others, but FoxFi was the only one that actually worked. And, unlike other such apps, it let me permanently set the name of my hotspot and didn't bombard me with advertising. I've been aware of such apps for years, but this was the first time I'd ever used one. It worked well enough for me to log onto the various databases at my workplace to research the sync update glitch that was now weighing on my mind.
Our plane to Nice was a fairly large jumbo jet with two aisles and seats in the 2-3-2 configuration. Happily, it closed its doors with about 90% of the seats still empty, another thing that reminded us of the 1990s. These days, computer algorithms ensure that planes fly as full as possible, but evidently there just aren't enough people to fill a regular flight from JFK to Nice. And such planes cannot, by definition, be small, since the distance to travel is nearly 4000 miles. One of the last posts to my colleagues on Slack was something Gretchen said in reference to our pleasant 90s flashback, "the dream of the 90s is alive on this flight." Gretchen found an empty set of three seats in the middle of the plane near the back and managed to sleep well for most of the flight. I took up two seats by a window nearby and used wine and ambien to render myself comatose for four or five hours. The only thing that sucked was the food. Gretchen had ordered special "vegan meals" for us, and they were, in evident deference to the continued 90s theme, blandly-uninspired compartmentalized servings of overcooked vegetables and rice. Fortunately, though, the wine was free, and I got two good pours from the friendly Delta stewardess. (I know, the technical term is "airline attendant," but it was the 90s again.)
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