Well, my flight out to San Diego didn’t go well. It looked like it would go well. I was in the highly-coveted A boarding group on Southwest. I was there in plenty of time and, more importantly, so was the plane. There wasn’t a sprawling long line queued up to get on. And I thought that I saw many passengers getting off before we got on. But that just shows that you can never let down your guard and that I should go back to counting them as they come off. Because this was, in fact, a full flight. The fullest. Yes, I can say that it was the very fullest flight I have seen in some time.

And though I was in the A boarding group with the other favored souls, through a silly series of events that aren’t worth recounting, I ended up the dreadful middle seat. On a nonstop 3 1/2 hour flight, this severely bites.

So I had to spend the duration of the trip trying to suck in my hips and shoulders. Now I’ll be honest. I am at least partly to blame for my hip situation, though the gene pool was not kind to the women in my family. But I can’t manufacture any self-recrimination that I have shoulders. They’re necessary. In their place, they are still mankind’s best answer to having a place for your arms to hang from. It’s just too bad that no one has spread the good news to the good folks over at Boeing, because they’re envisioning people whose collarbone appears to be seven inches across. Since I can’t live up to their expectations, I have to do the airplane strait-jacket pose, where you cross your arms almost at the elbow and then try to nonchalantly hold that pose as if you do it all the time.

And I don’t know what was up with my traveling companions. It’s probably obvious that I wasn’t in the best mood, but still, these guys left a lot to be desired. The businessman on my left was sitting in the window seat when I got on, and I guess he thought that gave him some special in-flight property rights, because he had taken his shoes off and had them in the seat next to him. When it was obvious that his shoes in fact had no magical powers that would prevent him from having to give up the seat, he put them back on — so all props there. But then he did this sighing thing all through the trip. Every 15 minutes or so, he would sigh. Why would a grown man start sighing? Did he have very sporadic asthma? Was he writing the world’s most moving love sonnets on his laptop? I’ll never know.

And I’ll never know what made the student on my right drink so much. He was an emaciated, stone-white guy dressed in black with blue-black hair, so I’m guessing he was a student (or a set designer). And he managed to drink four vodka-and-tonics in the course of the flight. That’s probably not enough to qualify for a special category of Oscar or anything, but I’ve never seen anyone drink that much on a flight. He even conned the stewardess — who must’ve just fallen off the turnip truck yesterday — into giving him one of them for free because there was “something wrong” with the last one. Not to be a complete narc, but I’m here to say that the only thing “wrong” with that drink was that it went away when he drank it.

You’d think that things would’ve gotten much better after I got off the plane, wouldn’t you? And eventually, they did. At first, though, it wasn’t so good. I thought Greg would be there after having just flown in himself. Instead, I found out that his plane had been delayed and I would have to wait an hour.

An hour isn’t a lot of time. But I had started noticing people back on the plane, and when you do that, after a while it starts to seem like every single one is a weirdo. The people waiting to meet other people at the airport at midnight can’t be that much stranger than anyone else, but when you’re there at midnight too, it just seems like they are. And knowing that you look weird to them doesn’t help as much as it probably should. I finally started to take notes. These are the less-than-comprehensive sightings:

• A nice-enough-looking young woman with the word “PINK” emblazoned in all caps on the exact seat of her pants. (Take note young people everywhere: You don’t know this yet, but trust me — every so often the fashion world will make a concerted effort to embarrass and humiliate you by giving you something to wear that they know no human being living would look normal in. Don’t wear these things. Your fellow creatures implore you.)
• A dapper gentleman who could get away with wearing a British motorist tweed cap. I was impressed.
• A teenage boy who couldn’t get away with his woolen hat. It looked like well-seasoned road kill on his head, which I’m betting wasn’t the look he was going for.
• The Jackson 2 and 1/2. Two black teenagers with perfect helium balloon afros, the like of which I haven’t seen since the Bicentennial. And another one with a deflated helium balloon afro. Don’t know what the story was there.
• And finally — and E Rica, this one is for you — a Napoleon Dynamite lookalike, complete with the perpetually sniffy expression as if he smelled three-week old cottage cheese.

So that’s it. That’s what an airplane and an airport look like when you’ve had too many honey-roasted peanuts and not enough sleep or space. I’ve always thought that if we wanted to really fire-test new monks and nuns, we wouldn’t send them off in the desert without water, but up in a crowded plane full of grumpy people like me. That’ll separate the saints from the sinners pretty fast.

Pretty obvious where I end up. ;-)