Stuck in the Middle

Sometimes I can’t believe that they let us get away with flying. (By ‘they’ I mean of course: God and his buddies.) I mean, when we tried building the Babel tower and reach them, they made a big fuss about it. And then we went and built giant birds of steel that fly to the heavens – clearly their territory – and they just look the other way.

I always thought there’s something freakish about flying. Not just because I can’t really grasp how it works. I’m stupid that way. There are lots of technical things that are beyond my comprehension. I’ve studied media in college, and took a detailed course in video technology that explained the concept of television in clear wording, but none of it made sense to me. I ended up memorizing it for the exam – word to word – and got an A+. My teacher was convinced that I was a tech genius. But in fact, I don’t get any of it. How do these little people get into the screen? What keeps those giant heavy birds up in the sky? Why can’t I touch the internet?

Planes are weird for many reasons. There’s the dry recycled air that chaps your skin till it hurts, the little neat meals that seem like they were prepared by aliens, those round windows you can’t open, and the forced intimacy with strangers who share your armrest for 10 hours.
But mostly planes are weird because of the huge distance they cover in such short periods. Right now I’m sitting in an Amsterdam café after spending four and a half hours in an airplane, and it just doesn’t seem right. It shouldn’t take 4 and half hours to get from Tel Aviv to Amsterdam. It can’t be that close. It snows here (although right now it’s gorgeous,) people speak Dutch and live on canals and are polite and really tall. You should take a boat for a couple weeks before you can make the shift from my sweltering hot crazy and rude Middle Eastern country - to this.

Somehow boats, cars and trains make more sense. They provide a reasonable amount of adjusting time, so you can process the changes as they take place. You can watch the landscape transform gradually, and adjust to the climate. I suspect you’re more ready to face a new world after a longer in-between stage. Maybe after a week on a boat your longings to what you’ve left behind subside and the excitement of what awaits builds up, so they don't just get mixed up and make you feel crazy, wandering Harlemmerstraat exhausted and emotionally fragile, dressed all wrong for the weather, carrying three types of currency, not sure what’s the time, what day it is, which language to speak, and if any of this is real.

But then again, I can’t help but wonder – who decides what's reasonable? Maybe the reasonable amount of time is the time it takes to walk somewhere – or ride a camel. In my research I’ve learned the distance between Yemeni cities by foot, or on a donkey. Back then, that was their only option. They probably thought cars moved too fast.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not badmouthing aviation. As someone who lives half a world away from her family – I’d be screwed without planes. Just the other day my family complained that I live too far. 16 hour flight is just too long, they said, and I had to agree. “I’m gonna develop a new device - a blinker,” my younger brother said. “You blink and concentrate and get transformed to another place.” For a few minutes we all got carried away in that sweet fantasy and imagined how I'd make it to our family Friday night dinner every week. I know the blinker would allow for no adjusting time at all, cause a sweeping culture shock epidemic, and who knows what it might do to my skin, but I don’t care. I guess nothing is too fast or too freakish when it comes to seeing your loved ones.