In-Flight Entertainment
Shall I tell you about the girl I met at the airport?
I’d already gotten my boarding pass online, but an unplanned and excessive acquisition of clothes necessitated the checking of some luggage, so I get in the e-ticket line. A girl, let’s call her Tia Mia Ion, wearing a flouncy dress and carrying only a small tote bag, comes up behind me and comments that she hopes that she can just check in with her I.D. because she doesn’t have a physical ticket and someone told her she only needed her driver’s license. I too tell her she can. She starts chit-chatting with me and introduces herself. I check my bags and pass through security, secretly kind of hoping she doesn’t find me in the waiting area or sit next to me on the plane. For the first leg of the trip I am safe. When the jet lands in Vegas, with both of us traveling on to Burbank on the same plane, she tries to deplane to have a smoke. Of course they don’t let her. And so she finds me and decides to change seats.
I’ve chatted with people on flights before. But I’ve never met a person who talks so much. An old guy sat on the other side of her but somehow managed to get a younger man to switch seats with him so he could sit next to his wife. TMI tells us her life story in 40 minutes. A couple of older brothers with felony records—but wait, one of them was a juvi at the time so his record is sealed. She’s got a titanium rod for a right thigh bone, from a 100+ mph car accident in which her leg decided to hang with the steering wheel while her body took off (she showed me the scar). She has three freckles on her stomach and a chest-tube scar on her left side (she didn’t show us those). She is a “functional alcoholic.” Her parents have been together since seventh grade, and her dad was on meth for 10 years. She came home from school one day to find him hosing down the house with nothing but a plastic garbage bag taped around his waist. She was in Sierra Vista meeting for the first time her Internet boyfriend, a Marine doing combat tracking training in the desert there.
The funniest thing was how she wouldn’t let the guy sitting in the row with us get out of talking. First I notice he’s reading a Men’s Journal article about Gen. Petraeus. She asks him what he does. Military. Which branch? Army. What do you do for the Army? Intelligence. At this point, I’m like, Oh this is just ironic hilarity. She kept pushing him to tell her where he was going and what he was going to be doing. His answer was: Los Angeles. Stuff. She did squeeze out that he has a wife and the ages of his three kids. She got very excited when she found out one of her brothers and mine have the same name.
While TMI is not exactly the type of person I am prone to hanging out with, I have to at least give her props for living true to her stated philosophy of not apologizing for who she is and being totally honest. She says you should never do anything you are ashamed of and if you will not talk about something, it probably means you are ashamed of it. So she hides nothing and, as she demonstrated, will tell every minute detail of her life to a stranger—within the first 30 minutes of making their acquaintance.
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