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bland vegan airport food
Tuesday, January 23 2018
rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
On the few mornings when I rely on an alarm to wake me up, I'm always paranoid it won't work. There are so many things that can go wrong with even a simple alarm clock, and there are even more things that can go wrong with a smartphone. Does the alarm even ring when it's in buzz mode? The answer is "maybe," but there is no definitive answer. It's best to turn the sound all the way up and put it in airplane mode to silence all the notices it would otherwise chirp about. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) all my precautions, I somehow ended up setting a second alarm on my phone for 6:00am, nearly an hour before the intended one went off. Once that early one sounded, I couldn't get back to sleep.
I had a sleepy Gretchen take my place in the recuperation fort, got dressed, and began my journey. Happily, the Subaru started up without complaint. I drank a beer on the drive to Albany in hopes it would make me more relaxed for the plane. This was, I believe, the first time I'd ever drunk a beer (or, for that matter, any alcohol) between the hours of 6:00 and 8:00AM. Having done it, I can see why it's a poor way to begin the day, even on a travel day. It somehow put a foundation of malaise beneath my day.
As I've mentioned before, I am not a fan of breakfast foods and do not like what restaurants become around breakfast time. I would've gotten some McDonalds french fries in the Albany airport, but then I saw that instead of fries, they had some large slab of potato-like substance they were serving instead to conform with the breakfast expectations of their customers. So I bought an overpriced bag of peanuts somewhere else.
The first leg of my flight was to O'Hare Airport in Chicago, and I had a window seat, my access to the aisle blocked by an enormous white guy who smelled like soap in the way that overweight people sometimes do. He kept checking stock prices on his phone. Meanwhile, I had my laptop open and was making it so an interactive query tool for non-technical people had proper pickers for fields that expected dates. Looking down from the airplane, I saw there was relatively little snow in western New York and southern Ontario (what little there was tended to be along fencerows). Chicago, on the other hand, appeared to be blanketed several inches deep.
I spent most of this flight reading a bananas article in The New Yorker about internet celebrity culture in China. It seems internet celebrities now outrank all others in that country, though the actual celebrities are mostly just famous for being famous and good looking (like a Kardashian). These celebrities have no causes or political interests, and most of what they do consists of taking selfies and producing video clips. Oddly, all still photography must be edited in some sort of photo-editing program before being published (and it's considered gauche not to pretty-up the faces of friends). These edits are not just to remove blemishes and wrinkles; it's common to also make eyes larger and skin whiter. Some phones are now designed to do all this automatically, with the result being that photos of people in Chinese social media all sort of look alike. This has carried over into reality, with plastic surgery becoming extremely popular. One person mentioned in the article spends most of her money on plastic surgery. The idea is to look as good as possible, since this will translate into better jobs and more money. Though fascinating, the article did little to dampen my bleak view of the human condition.
In O'Hare, I had a bit of a hustle to get to from Terminal 2 to Terminal 1, Concource C, which is an island building surrounded by tarmac, reachable by a long underground tunnel. Along the way, I kept checking what was on offer in terms of packaged food. There is rarely anything suitable for a vegan, so you can imagine my delight when I came upon a package that claimed to have chipotle tofu on a bed of rice with a generous side of black beans, rice, and raw kale. I don't like raw kale and never will, but I can tolerate it, and everything else sounded perfect. It cost about $12, but it was a lot of food. I went directly to my gate and immediately began to eat. It came as no big surprise that the food, good as it looked, had almost no flavor. It didn't just need spice, it needed salt, and of course I had neither. Clearly it had been prepared by one of the many people who assume vegans do not want to enjoy their food. Despite all this, I ate nearly everything except the kale, just because I needed fuel in the tank.
I had an aisle seat for the flight to Los Angeles. The middle seat between me and the young guy at the window was occupied at the last minute by an older woman who looked and acted like an alcoholic. Unlike me, though, she was open about her boozing, and ordered a small bottle of whiskey to add to her Coke. (I carry silicone travel containers full of gin or vodka for this purpose, though unfortunately the silicone flavor tends to leach into everything it touches.)
I watched a couple episodes of Ozark on this leg of my journey. It was an older-style plane and the in-flight movie options didn't appear to be free.
At LAX, it was 76 degrees Fahrenheit and, out in the drop off zone, a calm breeze rustled the palm trees and gently stirred the exhaust and cigarette fumes. I ordered an Uber Pool, and was joined on that from the start by a woman and her small daughter who were also riding to greater Hollywood from the airport. I don't usually talk much with my Uber drivers, but I was in the front seat, and it seemed more natural to talk there. The driver told me about how he is always on the lookout for mispriced flights to exotic places so he can drop everything and go to, say, New Zealand. He said that he wants to get all his traveling in before he settles down with a woman and travel gets expensive. For now, he'd prefer to travel with his male friends. Later in the ride, he told me about how Uber subsidizes service in certain areas, making it more lucrative for him to drive there. He lives down near Long Beach but "commutes" up to the west side of Los Angeles, where he can make more money. Ideally his trips keep him on the west side, though occasionally a ride will take him to some less-lucrative destination, where he ends up in a vortex of short rides that do not leave the destination. Then there's the problem of friends and family who don't really understand what Uber is about and think they can use him for family-discount transportation.
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