Frequent Flier and Still Freaked Out

Okay, so I'm not exactly at the George Clooney level, but I have racked up a bunch of miles since going to work for Region XIII as a grant manager a little over a year ago. No one is going to put my name on the side of a plane, unless I decide to spray paint it myself, and that just sounds very risky. I think they've got a few laws against that sort of thing.

On average, I make two round-trip flights a month, and when I say I'm still freaked out, I mean that on a couple of different levels. For one thing, I am just freaked out to be "that guy." When you spend the bulk of your career as a classroom teacher, you're pretty anchored to one place. The only flying you tend to do is during vacations, with the exception of the occasional education conference here and there. I'm sure some of you who work in the private sector will laugh at my claim that two round trips a month makes me a frequent flier.

Still, it's not something that my career prepared me for, and the "glamour" of it, such as it was, faded a long time ago. I'm the guy whose kids have to tell their friends, "Oh, my daddy's on a business trip." I'm the guy whose wife has to fend for herself with those same children twice a month, every month. Never thought I'd be that guy. It freaks me out.

The other thing that freaks me out is flying itself. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm afraid of flying exactly; that would be absurd. It does, however, often make me physically uncomfortable, and I've taken to downing Dramamine more often than not. In addition, I never studied physics, so I just don't get it. The whole flight thing baffles me. I mean clearly, the thing weighs tons and tons. It's in the air and it's fucking flying. That just makes no kind of sense. This moment comes at least once on every single flight. I look out the window of the airplane, and I think, "How is this possible?" Now, I'm sure someone out there reading this could send me an explanation, with words like "lift" and "thrust" and "resistance" and all of that, but I'm still like a monkey with a TV set at some point during all my air journeys.

There will likely come a time before too long when I am more grounded (no pun intended, really), either in my present job, after the grants I'm on run out in a year or so, or in some other, more "place-based" position. The monthly travel will become a thing of the past, a fading memory, something I smile about as it flashes into my mind while I do the dishes. So I suppose I should simply try to enjoy it, right? Rack up the miles and the free flights and drink coupons. I'll do that, but it will always be with both the odd sensation of feeling like I'm living someone else's life and the incredulity of the monkey, scratching at the banana on the TV screen as I wonder just how the hell the whole thing works in the first place.