WRITING AT 35,000 FEET

I do my best writing on airplanes.

Maybe it's because there's little else to do. I can't go anywhere and the peskiness of regular life - the laundry to be done, the accounts to be reviewed, the seam to be resown, the television shows to flip idly through - simply aren't there.

Maybe it's because, being in Alaska, even the shortest flights out of state are a minimum of three hours. Three hours of airline-mandated butt in chair. I've never sat for three hours straight while writing, not even on the one day in which I wrote eight thousand words. I can maybe go fifty minutes at a run.

Maybe it's because pretty much everything about airplanes bothers me. The rude travelers, the generally unsanitary conditions, the noise, the terrible food [with the exception of the Alaska Airlines fruit & cheese plate, which is amazing (unless you're flying out of Boston, in which case it's inexplicably yucky - I know there's good cheese back there)]. So I can either fester in my anger at and disdain for the other travelers or the delays, or I can bow my head, pull of my headphones, and drop right out of the sky into another world. One that exists because I enjoy it.

Reading is great escapism. Writing at 35, 000 feet is divine.

I'm actively (desperately?) seeking earthbound places in which writing comes as easily.