en route - part II

At the present moment, I am flying over North Central Canada. I will give 10,000 won (about 10 bucks) to the first person who can tell me why we must go North over Canada and Alaska only to return South to Tokyo. Our flight pattern forms a perfect arch. What do these pilots and pilots in general (or perhaps airlines in general) have against a straight line? Would that not be more efficient? By the way, I won’t really give you 10,000 won if you can answer this question, unless you demand it, in which case you will have to wait a year to get it, and it will not accrue interest. I would just like to understand the purpose of this flight pattern. Does it have something to do with winds over the Pacific? I hope they have Wikipedia in Korea…

Anyways, it feels weird to be traveling back in time. Throughout this entire flight, I will never see darkness when I look out the window. As the plane heads west, we are slowly but consistently heading backwards in time. This will continue to happen until we reach an imaginary line in the Pacific Ocean that will magically erase a day in my life. In one instant, it will be Sunday afternoon; In the next, it will be Monday afternoon. I suspect that crossing this warp zone is the closest I will ever come to time travel.

I expect that my panic attack is going to set in any time now. It has to, right? #1: I’m sleep deprived. #2: I’m claustrophobic, sandwiched between two unexpectedly enjoyable specimens, and have about 8 hours left on this flight. #3: I’m moving to a foreign country which, even after exhaustive research, I still realistically know very little about. #4: What in the hell am I supposed to do when I get off this plane? I suppose when I get off this plane, I’m going to go to the gate of my next plane. But what do I do when I get off that plane? I asked this question to one of the foreign managers at my school about a week ago and she assured me that someone would be in Busan to pick me up and take me to Daegu. But that was really all she said. What does that mean exactly? Who is this person? What does he/she look like? How am I supposed to find him/her? How is he/she supposed to find me? What if he/she isn’t there? Who do I call? How do I get a hold of someone? Why am I moving to South Korea with all this uncertainty? Am I mentally ill? Even as I ask myself these questions, I cannot force myself to become panicked. I want to become panicked. I desperately want to become panicked. I want to become panicked so I can feel like a normal human being. But the panic has not yet set in, perhaps because I just indulged in a glass of complimentary red wine to accompany my Thai beef that I had for…breakfast? lunch? dinner? I have no idea anymore. I suspect that once the calming effects of this wine fade away, I might have a panic attack. Usually it happens at that first moment that you step onto the soil of a strange new land. I imagine that when I walk into the airport in Tokyo, I will be faced with a triad of questions. Where am I? What time is it? What am I doing here? I am the type of person who despises discomfort. I will go to absolute extremes to avoid uncomfortable situations. Why is it that the discomfort and awkwardness that come along with becoming an immigrant is somehow appealing to me? I don’t know. But I’d like to find out.