weezer, airports, cell phones, la and stee

I can’t believe Bush is going to choose Dick Cheney for his running mate. I can only apologize in advance for the months, if not years of open mic night abuse with the punchline “Bush and Dick.”

Friday night was spent inside an airplane. The entire night. The flight from Austin to Dallas only takes an hour. After that I got on my connecting flight to LA. And then we sat there.

Perhaps my karma did me in. The woman in the three seats next to me said that her family was going to move to another row, and said that I could have her row all to myself and that I could just sleep the entire way to LA. I loved her in that moment more than I’ve ever loved another woman.

I kicked my shoes off and picked up my book.

And then they told us that the plane was going to stay on the ground for about an hour while they worked on an air conditioning problem in row 44. Apparently it was only blowing hot air.

I called stee to tell him I was going to be late, and looked like a chatting teen, with my socked feet propped up on the armrest, my book sitting on my chest, making fun of row 44 for being such pussies about a little hot air.

They told us to deplane and wait in the gate while they fixed the problem. They said it’d be another hour or so. They brought bags of food out, but I was too angry to eat. Stee and I spent fifteen minutes discussing the concept of “deplane,” since you don’t “decar” or “debike.”

They brought us back on the plane close to eleven-thirty. We taxied and listened to the safety information. Then we sat.

And then we turned back around and sat at the gate.

It was at this point that I smelled something funny in the cabin. Like burning. I realized that probably something worse than bad air conditioning was happening, but they didn’t want to worry us.

They cancelled the flight.

An hour later I had a ticket for a hotel room. They bussed us to some hotel. An hour after that, I had checked into a room.

150 very angry people all shuffling in a lobby, hungry and pissed. Not fun.

I spent friday night three hours from my house, trapped and pissy. I called the airline and they told me that they had rebooked me on a flight in the morning. Different airline. Different airport, in fact. I called stee again to give him the new information.

My cell phone committed suicide.

The next morning I got up and paid for my own breakfast (no vouchers on a cancelled flight!) and took the shuttle to the airport. The shuttle driver figured out which terminal I needed to be sitting at to catch the flight. If you’ve never been to DFW, there are about five or six different buildings, and you have to get in a car and drive to each of them.

I went up to the gate to get my boarding pass. I thanked Charlotte for sending us the new carry-on suitcase, as all of my fellow travelers on the doomed LAX flight had their baggage trapped in the plane. If I had a suitcase there, I would have had to go from the Burbank airport to LAX to get my luggage.

“I need your ticket,” the woman told me.

“This is what I have. This is my confirmation number.”

“They have to give you a ticket.”

“No, I talked to four different people last night at one in the morning as I tried to get all of this fixed. They had me on three different planes before I found out that I had been booked on this one. I suffered drunk boys in an elevator telling me that the prettiest girls come from Austin. I talked to so many people at the airport an on the phone. They never said I needed a ticket.”

“You have to go back to terminal A and have them give you a ticket. Then come back here.”

“I’ll miss my flight.”

“Probably, honey, but we’ll get you into LA by this evening.”

I ran to the shuttle. It’s one of those cars that just goes without a driver and looks like you’re stuck in a bad amusement park ride. I woke up stee to tell him that I might not make the afternoon plane either.

I swore and cried and screamed and said the f-word many times before the gentlemen next to me informed me that they were from Salt Lake City. I calmed down and made it back to the Delta gate.

I swear to God, they just wrote me a little note. “Please let Pamela on the plane.” Why couldn’t they fax that from one terminal to the next? Why?

She told me (rudely) that there was another shuttle due in fifteen minutes. I ran outside and hailed a taxi. I paid him five dollars to take me to the other terminal. I ran and ran and ran up the broken escalator with fifty pounds of luggage in my arms.

I made it on the plane.

When I first started visiting LA I always remarked that the city doesn’t feel very welcoming. That’s not the case anymore. I always feel good when I get there.

I called into my friends’ web show and told them my airline saga. They introduced me as the girl with fat in her eye. That’s the worst introduction I’ve ever received.

Uh, then there was drinking, and phone calls and I think a little food with drinking and Mr. Show and laughing and phone call screening and calls from Ray telling me how much closer he was to being in LA. Ray was moving there that weekend, and it took us almost the same amount of time to get there. I should have just hitched a ride with Ray.

Sunday afternoon I went out with my friends Brently and Anna. We had lunch, had a small missing-purse scare, and then went back to their place. I heard “The Kids of Widney High.” We went right out and bought myself a copy.

And, of course, there was Weezer. It ruled to be a grown-up, as they let us in early so we could drink, and then let us in the room first. We were up in the front. I was covered in sweat. I couldn’t hear anything after the concert for a couple of hours. I don’t care. We were right there. Right in front. Getting hit with little bits of Rivers sweat. I became twelve and started girlie-screaming at the first two notes of every song. Other girls were turning and giving stee sympathetic, “Sorry your girlfriend’s a freak” looks. I. Don’t. Care.

We took pictures. Lots of pictures. Hopefully, lots of good pictures.

Apparently stee and I are very approachable. Some guy almost sat in stee’s lap and told him that the song stee was telling me about was the best song ever written. He then said that we could understand, because he was on massive amounts of mushrooms. Another man walked right up to the car window and said, “Good lookin’, can you give me a cigarette?” Since he was looking at me, but stee had the cigarettes, we really aren’t sure which one of us was the good looking one.

Food. Drinking. Mr. Show. Seeing the light come back up and feeling like I had just gotten there. I had. I wasn’t even there two days. I fell asleep about three times on the way to the airport.

stee is just as tired.

I slept in all sorts of wrong positions in the plane, in the Dallas airport again (for my three hour layover), and on the flight back to Austin. Then I slept in my bed, on my couch, and in my bed again.

I missed all of yesterday, except for dinner with Eric. I called Ray to find out why we didn’t see him at the Weezer show. I called stee to tell him I didn’t sleep through my connecting flight.

I spent more time actually getting to and returning from LA than I actually spent in LA. That sucks.

But, as always, I had a great time. I’m tired. I don’t know when I’m going to be back there again, for sure, but now that Ray’s out there, it might not be that much longer.

And Eric is home safe from iCamp and San Francisco. It felt like I hadn’t seen him in weeks. We swapped stories of concerts and friends and our desire to get to the west coast soon.

And then I fell asleep on the couch. I wasn’t such good company last night.