The guy across from me on the plane

I shouldn't even be writing this post. I should be thinking grateful thoughts – and I am, of course – about how fortunate I was to get home forty-five minutes early, and how fortunate I was to have a seat in the second row on the plane by the window with nobody in the adjacent aisle seat, and how fortunate I was that the airline felt guilty about the flight being delayed (I got put on an earlier flight but then that flight got delayed until forty-five minutes before my original flight) so gave us free access to movies we would usually have to pay to watch and I saw Juno for free, and how fortunate I was with all the channels and the watching of Doctor Who for the first time and Almost Famous and part of The Two Towers. And I am grateful for all of these things. It was very positive.

But I'm going to go ahead and gripe about the guy in the aisle seat across from me on the plane. So okay, on take-off he went digging in his bag (the flight attendants fussed at him repeatedly for not stowing his bag away) and after a long search he emerged triumphantly with one of those round strips of beef jerky (that's what it looked like anyway), which he put in his mouth. And he had it in his mouth the entire flight, with the whole long end just hanging out of his mouth. At one point I looked over and realized that he had flipped the piece of beef jerky around and started chewing on the other end. I realized this because the tip of the end that hung out was no longer round and clean and normal but all chewed-up and gross-looking.

And then? When the plane landed? Well, by that time I had very sensibly transferred myself to the aisle seat so I could move quickly and escape from the plane, and when they said we could get up, I got up to fetch down my suitcase, right? And the guy across from me, the beef-jerky guy, stood up too, and he pushed me with his elbow. He did! It's true! He elbowed me in the ribs and I smooshed sideways and then he said sorry but continued to occupy the space that I had been occupying before he pushed me, so that I could not fetch my suitcase down. Ordinarily I would have said DUDE YOU PUSHED ME! WHAT KIND OF BIZARRE SHOVING CHEWING WEIRDO ARE YOU? except that I feared he was the kind of bizarre shoving chewing weirdo that stalks and kills you. So I meekly flipped him off.

(Not really.)