Though I Love to Travel, I Hate to Sit Next to People

I'm amazed at what people will reveal to those seated around them on an airplane, usually without being asked to bare their soul. The first leg of my trip to Vancouver today was a United Airlines flight from O'Hare to Seattle. B dropped me off at the airport at 7am (Thank you!,) and shortly thereafter I was boarding the plane. I was seated next to a 6'3" 250 pound man who declared when I put the armrest down that "the seats must have gotten smaller! Or I need to lose some weight!" Unfortunately, he didn't really fit in the middle seat assigned to him, so every time, throughout our four-hour flight, that he put his arm back at his side, he elbowed me in the ribs. I had the aisle seat, and after I put on my headphones, he chose our window-side seatmate to strike up a conversation. He's a "real estate investor," dressed in sweats and carrying a "Make Millions in Real Estate" self-help book, on his way to make connections and secure his career in real estate at a convention in Portland, Oregon. I swear that within 10 minutes of cruising altitude, he was telling this woman how he knocked up his 16-year-old high school girlfriend and became a father, and how his mother hunted him down when she found out and berated him for "not learning anything from her teen pregnancy!" After the third kid, he also told us, his wife won't let him touch her. He talked to the poor woman for the entire flight, though for the most part I was able to tune him out and listen to my music or doze off for a bit, only to be awakened by a sharp jab to the ribs.

This man brought me in mind of another seat-mate who couldn't keep her life to herself, the woman (and her boyfriend) who sat next to me on my flight home from New York City two weeks ago. The couple asked the gentleman seated next to me if he would move to a single seat so that they could sit together, and soon I was sharing my seat with a southern couple, whose accents suggested to me that they live in Appalachia and drink Mountain Dew for breakfast every morning. They began to fight over something he'd said about not wanting to talk to her sister, and they had a domestic quarrel that lasted 2 hours and included a waterworks of tears, both audible and silent tears, and her spilling her soda all over her paper bag of belongings. As she tried to dry them off, she had to pull her autographed Jerry Springer headshot from its envelope and ensure its safety. The familiar, "I don't want to get married, not just to you, but to anyone" came out of his mouth, followed by the revelation that she couldn't marry him, anyway, because she was still married! She threw the blame for this at him because "you wouldn't give me the money for the divorce. You said you wasn't payin' for nothin' that wasn't yours!" Ultimatums flew, she went running to the bathroom more than once, and after she repaid him some money she owed him, she told him to find his own way to their connecting flight, that they were done when this flight ended. It was all very dramatic, but I'm not convinced that this fight doesn't happen for them nearly every day, and I don't know why it couldn't wait until they weren't on a flight with me and ten other people who were all pretending to listen to their iPods, but were, like me, actually listening to the feuding couple, because we couldn't help ourselves.