En-route to Tokyo

This is the long, annoying part of the trip. This flight is always a bore since it's so freaking long. Now I really wished I brought my P.G. Wodehouse along for the trip. Any other books I have are in ebook format on my laptop and I only have so much in terms of battery power. Oh well, at least The Brothers Karamazov is interesting. It's mostly classics and stuff that one would find for free online. Remember, I'm a cheap ass, and a big supporter of free and open source software. I regularly browse Project Gutenberg, but since they only have books that are out of copyright, the selection is mostly classics. Other books I've been meaning to read lately are the rest of the His Dark Materials trilogy (The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass), Lord of the Flies, and The Prestige (since I loved the movie). If I can, I also want to look into the newer Redwall books. While everyone else during their elementary-middle school days were reading all sorts of stuff, like Bridge to Terabithia or Where the Red Fern Grows, I was engrossed in the Redwall series and then The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Yes, I spent about half a year (can't remember exactly how long it took) reading nothing but Sherlock Holmes, but I think that Sir Arther Conan Doyle's influence on my writing was ultimately beneficial.

Well, since I was bored and had nothing better to do, I decided to write, but my mind was blank. I tried all sorts of ideas to create a story out of, but my mind ended up rejecting all of them. Finally, however, I settled on an idea and started to write. This is the result of it. I turned Billy Joel's Piano Man into a three and a half page (by my notebook's count) short story. I tried to write a story representing the setting in which the song takes place, almost like the course of events that would've inspired the song in the first place. It's pretty raw, I only edited a handful of things here and there. I'd love to hear what you guys have to say about it.

There's about an hour and a half left in the flight. I'm irritable, and my ankles are swelling up. I grabbed a nap sometime around 6:00 PM EST, but that didn't amount to much more than an hour and a half. I watched Meet the Robinsons. It's an alright movie, but I didn't get very attached to the characters. I felt the same way about The Incredibles. There's plenty of stuff to make you go "cool!" and want to see more. But once they hook you, the movie does little in terms of giving you what you want: seeing that coolness in action. I mean, take a look at The Incredibles. There's the fight scene that shows the whole family in action, but it lasts what, a minute and a half, two minutes at most? And the climactic "final showdown" is against a boring enemy with a boring ending. There's no "fanservice" so to speak. They don't place the characters in cool and interesting situations any more than strictly necessary to make you interested in seeing the character in more of those situations.

So what was a guy to do? Other than trying to doze off, I tried to listen to what music the airplane radio provided (woefully inadequate), but that didn't work. I don't have a portable mp3 player, and my computer was running relatively low on batteries. So ultimately I just let my mind wander and think of whatever songs I could. My mind eventually hit a rut on "Golden Boy" by Sin with Sebastian. It's a pretty bad 90's group that exemplified the era: catchy, relatively empty pop/techno/funk songs. The verses were pretty clever and well-written, but the chorus digs into your brain and drives me to go out and end some creature from 4 inches to 4 feet tall via a brutal, Black Mage-esque stabitty death. The music video on Youtube also causes my eyeballs to bleed green Kool-Aid (so it's German-safe, too!) and makes me want to gouge them out with a spork and feed them to my goldfish. Okay, enough ranting. I don't want to disturb my readers too much. Besides, I already said I was irritable at the moment.

About this time, as well, breakfast was served, or at least they tried to. There's a typhoon that recently hit Japan, and there are pockets of turbulence along the way. I was literally the last person to be served breakfast before the flight attendants had to pack things up for the turbulence to come. The guy next to me, who also got served before the pack-up, commented that one of the good things from sitting near the front is getting served first. But then, with my sparkling wit, said, "Yeah, but the first thing you gain is also the first thing you lose." While I'm not a guy to get motion sick, I did have the scrambled eggs, and they have a tendency to give me an upset stomach sometimes, especially if they're poorly prepared, which airline food undoubtedly is. Luckily, I can say that I have felt no discomfort thus far.