flying book club
Aug. 18th, 2004 09:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrian_turtleI was pretty frazzled when I got to the airport to come home from Michigan. There had been so little physical or emotional privacy in my mother's house that I hadn't been able to read more than 5 pages in 3 days, and it was really wearing.
Detroit Metro Airport is a badly-designed travel center, apparently intended to make life difficult for most of the people who pass through it. I was there for almost 4 hours, and it was an oasis for me. I sat down on the floor to write a letter, and mailed it. I finished a Kate Ross novel (_Cut to the Quick_) while taking the first real walk I'd had in days. The airport is about as long as Arlington is wide, but with more souvenier shops and worse restaurants. And fewer hills. I was walking past crowds. I even went into the middle of a crowd to get something to eat. But all those people were doing their things, and I was doing mine -- they weren't bothering me. It's amazing how quickly my boundaries fall apart, and I stop being able to take that sort of thing for granted.
I was well into W.E.B. Griffin's _Semper Fi_ by the time I boarded the plane. The woman in the next seat was reading the very end of a trade paperback that looked like it was either tightly-focused literary fiction, or the preachiest kind of newage. (Why, yes. I do judge books by their covers. Don't you?) I asked the other reader if it was a good book, thinking it was a way to be slightly more sociable than asking if she'd had a good trip. *smile* It was Paulo Coelho's _The Alchemist_, and she said it started well, though the writer had been a little too ambitious to really pull off everything he seemed to be trying. It was only the ending that was cheesey. I praised ambitious authors, in general, and used the Portuguese name on the cover to jump to a generic sympathy about ambitious translators' difficulties.
Remarkably, she offered to give me the book when she finished it. Thanks, Kate! What a generous thing to do for a stranger on a plane, regardless of the quality of the book (which is turning out to be not to my taste.)
Before we settled down to read our separate books, she asked about _Semper Fi_, and I told her it was very well done for what it was -- a soap opera about working-class young men making good in the marines in wartime. So there are some ideas about "what makes a boy a man?" or "how can you tell a woman is respectable?" and such, which unsettle my liberal spirit...and they can't fade into the background, even though they aren't plot points that can be confronted directly. We went from there to the remarkable progress of feminism over the last few generations, how I'm accustomed to hearing people say, "what an amazing job you have!" but I'm still shocked by, "what an amazing job for a woman to have!" I was very pleased that nobody has ever told her that. She's less than 10 years younger than I am, but the world changes fast.
I'm don't remember how we got from there to a discussion of long distance relationships. I remember, very vividly, how shocked she was that I was happy to be in a long distance relationship. She could just barely grasp the idea that some people might be able to cope with an arrangement, and find it the least-bad option they could find for the time being. But the idea that a couple might WANT a few days of intense togetherness, and then a few weeks of focusing on other stuff ... that shocked her. (Yes, I love him. No, I don't want to live with him. No, really.) I was vague enough that I don't think she noticed I was talking about niddah and polyamory situations as well as long distance. But I gave her some advice about integrating social groups, and not trying to overschedule.
It was a remarkably happy and comfortable conversation, between interludes of reading. Generally, I looked up from my book when the plane jolted and I started to worry about motion-sickness, and she'd set her book aside and we'd chat for a while until the ride smoothed out again. In retrospect, it reminded me of another book-recommending stranger I met, that time while reading in an airport coffee shop. But it's bedtime, so I'll tell that story another time.
Detroit Metro Airport is a badly-designed travel center, apparently intended to make life difficult for most of the people who pass through it. I was there for almost 4 hours, and it was an oasis for me. I sat down on the floor to write a letter, and mailed it. I finished a Kate Ross novel (_Cut to the Quick_) while taking the first real walk I'd had in days. The airport is about as long as Arlington is wide, but with more souvenier shops and worse restaurants. And fewer hills. I was walking past crowds. I even went into the middle of a crowd to get something to eat. But all those people were doing their things, and I was doing mine -- they weren't bothering me. It's amazing how quickly my boundaries fall apart, and I stop being able to take that sort of thing for granted.
I was well into W.E.B. Griffin's _Semper Fi_ by the time I boarded the plane. The woman in the next seat was reading the very end of a trade paperback that looked like it was either tightly-focused literary fiction, or the preachiest kind of newage. (Why, yes. I do judge books by their covers. Don't you?) I asked the other reader if it was a good book, thinking it was a way to be slightly more sociable than asking if she'd had a good trip. *smile* It was Paulo Coelho's _The Alchemist_, and she said it started well, though the writer had been a little too ambitious to really pull off everything he seemed to be trying. It was only the ending that was cheesey. I praised ambitious authors, in general, and used the Portuguese name on the cover to jump to a generic sympathy about ambitious translators' difficulties.
Remarkably, she offered to give me the book when she finished it. Thanks, Kate! What a generous thing to do for a stranger on a plane, regardless of the quality of the book (which is turning out to be not to my taste.)
Before we settled down to read our separate books, she asked about _Semper Fi_, and I told her it was very well done for what it was -- a soap opera about working-class young men making good in the marines in wartime. So there are some ideas about "what makes a boy a man?" or "how can you tell a woman is respectable?" and such, which unsettle my liberal spirit...and they can't fade into the background, even though they aren't plot points that can be confronted directly. We went from there to the remarkable progress of feminism over the last few generations, how I'm accustomed to hearing people say, "what an amazing job you have!" but I'm still shocked by, "what an amazing job for a woman to have!" I was very pleased that nobody has ever told her that. She's less than 10 years younger than I am, but the world changes fast.
I'm don't remember how we got from there to a discussion of long distance relationships. I remember, very vividly, how shocked she was that I was happy to be in a long distance relationship. She could just barely grasp the idea that some people might be able to cope with an arrangement, and find it the least-bad option they could find for the time being. But the idea that a couple might WANT a few days of intense togetherness, and then a few weeks of focusing on other stuff ... that shocked her. (Yes, I love him. No, I don't want to live with him. No, really.) I was vague enough that I don't think she noticed I was talking about niddah and polyamory situations as well as long distance. But I gave her some advice about integrating social groups, and not trying to overschedule.
It was a remarkably happy and comfortable conversation, between interludes of reading. Generally, I looked up from my book when the plane jolted and I started to worry about motion-sickness, and she'd set her book aside and we'd chat for a while until the ride smoothed out again. In retrospect, it reminded me of another book-recommending stranger I met, that time while reading in an airport coffee shop. But it's bedtime, so I'll tell that story another time.
