Thoughts on a Plane (somewhere over the Continental USA)

Well, I figured a year hiatus of writing would get any audience ready for another dangle of goodness, right?! Here's a cop out: once upon a time, I was on a plane across the United States- the inside of a wonderful ol' C-17 cargo plane. It's a place that has a strange, cold familiarity to it. For context, I wrote this while beginning my month long trip overseas, which ended up with me traveling from New Jersey to Charleston, SC to Travis AFB in California to Hawaii to Japan to Shanghai Airport (doesn't count as the country if you're just at the airport!) to Korea for over a week, back through Japan and then to Anchorage Alaska with a wonderful, hospitable friend and finally a fateful 20 hour journey home through Edwards AFB involving waiting 6 hours for a Greyhound, walking five miles, and taking more public transportation than can possibly be healthy for you.

For you, the reader, I just poured geography soup on the screen. I'll elaborate on the good bits of the trip sometime, hopefully before I repeat the insanity this summer. However, right now I'm sharing something I wrote a few miles up when I had a terrible feeling of foreboding and anxiety like I'd never felt before- but I'll stop talking and you can start reading now, and gain a glimpse into the fear driven thoughts of Jerschina the Younger.

Imagine me in here, where it's cold and loud!

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I paced around the steel body of the aircraft, bobbing my head anxiously, deep in thought. To calm myself, I walked over to one of the C17 side windows and peered down at the ground, trying to hash out a favorite lesson of mine: “Look at how small everything is from up here… everything we do is insignificant, save for the work of God. It’s just all worth nothing in the scale of things.”

"Wonder how many people down there are pooping right now..."

For some unfathomable reason, this did not help my anxiety at all. The problem was, much like eating a disgusting brownie, you’re not exactly sure what the problem is- poor baker hygiene? Too much sugar, not enough chocolate mocha lovin’ poured into the brownies? Except in this case, I was on my way to Travis Air Force Base in California with plenty of ideas but nothing serious. Japan was on the table, but as a cadet, I’m supposed to stay in the US, but that never stopped anyone, ey? There’s two nights in between flights to Hawaii and Japan, and I don’t know what to do- probably just hunker down in some corner of the base and sleep, hopefully unnoticed by MPs.

The anxiety started the moment I finished reading In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson. I guess the sadness of finishing a book, which is comparable to slowly suffocating a good friend, simply was compounded by my anxiety over literally knowing nothing about what I’m doing and where I’m going. Plopping down unceremoniously into my jump seat, I pulled up YouBible and started scrambling for something to calm me. I found it: Psalm 19. Also, eating everything I could helped.

Jerschinas are supposed to be invincible… and we ARE. But I’m constantly eating loads of food and chugging water, and so even a perceived lack of either can be very stressful, despite my knowledge that I should be able to survive weeks without the former and at least half a week without the latter. Either way, knowing that I don’t have some horrible intestinal disease and consequently do not explosively spew the contents of my stomach into the seat of my pants periodically, does not alleviate the fact that I am hungry. (One year later editor's note: I'm not sure how I made this jump here, from one train of thought to a barge on a river thought... musta been something I ate.)

The worst thing is waiting. I want to get somewhere and do something, or even nothing. Either is fine. If Japan doesn’t work I’ll do the HelpX exchange at that camp. If I do make it, I’ll be in a country I’m not supposed to be in surrounded by people I don’t know and can’t understand, and that actually sounds like alot of fun, at least for a little while. Right now, though, I’m out of reading material and stuck pacing around the cargo bay, peeking down through the crew chief door window.  It’s like being on the other side of a glass window with the shades down, knowing that all sorts of goodies wait on the other side, except you don’t know what they are. Hopefully Australia, soon!

A land of marmite, sweet accents, and deadly everything.

I need motivation is my problem, and right now “It’ll be an awesome story” isn’t really cutting it. I’m not about the suck. I’m about looking pretty and being cool. If I get to Japan and bum around and couchsurf, it’s better than stewing at home, but within a month Kosovo awaits, and there’ll be camaraderie and photos and food and supervised trips that I’ll dutifully abandon. See, hitchhiking a thousand miles through Canada would be cool, and there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, so to speak; a tangible end goal… “the wild.” This is what the Army has done to me: instilled this terrifically insane notion that I need a team around me and I need a mission to complete. Like noone says, the Army giveth, and the Army taketh away…