You know what really kind of pisses me off. Companies offering free this or free that, on terms so unclear or difficult to figure out that you basically don’t even want to risk trying it or bother in the first place.
Example one: Flying back and forth on Delta from LAX to MIA, there was an offer for free wi-fi for the first time that one used the new pay-wifi service Delta offers, called GoGo. You know why its called GoGo? No, neither do I.
Anyway, I saw a mention of this free offer on one of the Delta TV screens and didn’t catch the password. It was well into the first part of my trip to Miami, which was an overnight and I had great aspirations of sleeping. I think I may have even achieved them to a degree. In any event, due to the difficulty with the password being unavailable (one would think they would put it somewhere on the Delta website or something, or on GoGo’s site, but no) it seemed like using my one free trial during a long flight where I wanted to be out with the lights was not the best use of the trial. The ATL-MIA leg was short (90 minutes or so) so those legs in each direction again didn’t seem the best opportunity. I figured that I’d use it on the way from ATL back to LAX to catch up on emails, pass the time, explore Zangarmarsh (never mind). But I ended up taking an ambient on this flight, with the hope of sleeping through a decent portion of it. Hasn’t happened and so now, an hour and a half in, I am basically wide awake. There’s still that free trial, so why not. I pull out the laptop and try to log on.
Like last time I played with it for a little, it made no mention of the password, and provided no link to sign in as a free trial (I don’t know why). It also didn’t give any indication of when the free trial offer expired, though in one of the flight magazines there was a mention of “holiday season.’ Well, apparently the holiday season has completed during the weekend of New Year’s eve. I got onto a help (ya) chat with a GoGo employee who told me as much. Too late. Had they told me that from the first, perhaps I’d have given it the free try on the way to Miami. Now, I’ll not have the benefit, and they’ll have an issue getting a new customer who might not want to take it on faith that the connectoin is worth 13 bucks for a few hours. I guess I’d say that this story is unfinished, but at the moment, I find it somewhat aggravating. Now I am flying, cross country in a middle seat between two dudes (again), though the first leg I actually got an exit row, just by checking in online the night before. Very weird to end up with something that good.
But the trip itself? Hmmm. Yeah, that. It was a pretty basic week and change. As my brother and his wife were out of town in NYC, and my closest friend who typically does parties in Miami didn’t come down this year, I didn’t do a lot of nightlife. My associate producer David, from the movie My Brother, bought a 12,000 square foot penthouse on Miami Beach and I hung with him a few times, but that was pretty much it. We went out once with his gal and her friends but I left early, and we watched the football game last Sunday at the new refurbished Clevelander. Those were the primary “going out” highlights. I spent a bunch of time with my parents, much of it with us gathered around reading or doing out thing, and some more of that when Stephanie and her boys showed up. The weather was really only beach weather perhaps twice, so we did that both of those days, and we also went on a river ride out of an alligator farm that was quite tourist but pretty entertaining nonetheless and conveniently located near a very solid BBQ joint called the Pit. I was on the couch in the living room for the six or seven days Jake, Derek and Steph were in town (they got there three days after I did and left the day before), but my back is even mostly recovered by now.
In short, I didn’t even go out or make a wholehearted attempt on New Year’s Eve. Didn’t have a partner in crime and was not inclined to drop hundreds for a party where I’d know next to nobody. Writing it like that, wow, makes a lot of sense.
And now I am on ht way back to work and bills and the gym and the new apartment. It was time to go back. Was ready, despite how enticing I find the sea/sun combo in Miami. As my folks get older, these trips take on for me, a greater importance that a jaunt to a beach or a nightclub.
I live in Los Angeles now, for most of the year. With the new full time job, I will be neither in New York or Miami regulatly, That limits my interactions with my parents, and they are in good health but they aren’t getting younger. So each time is a half-life, if you will, of our time together until their gone. When you’re packing a bag full of boxer shorts and socks, it is that which gives you pause to consider what your priorities are and how you fit them all in the same basket. Its mostly why I fly across the country to see them. And it’s a very good reason, I don’t know how I am going to continue to fit all of these things in the same basket. I don’t even know if I am supposed to fit them. All I do know is that it feels like yet another pressure from another angle, something that needs doing, for good and valid reason, and even in the doing of it, it feels, as I fly back to LA with my father’s words “See you next year” ringing in my ears, insufficient. The effort isn’t enough for what its worth, and I end up feeling like I put effort into something that doesn’t go far enough to really matter.
OK. I am not writing airplane blogs on Ambien anymore. Didn’t know it had these emotional side effects. I just wanted to sleep, not write a treatise of observations about how I feel like I am failing at life. This plane ride is not nearly long enough for me to write that anyway, I’d need to fly to the moon.
That’s about all I have to say for now. The guys on either side of my seat are very much awake and I am going to choose not to make a spectacle of myself.
Talk soon.
Grumps.
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