I had a hell of a time waking up this morning and I’ve been bone tired all day. Despite the brevity of my flight, I’m theorizing it’s jetlag, which William Gibson put poetically in Pattern Recognition:
....her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here.... Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
Jetlag. Or maybe just waiting around airports. Posture-deforming chairs, everyone slumping and shuffling about like they just got back from the labor camps, soul-softening muzak punctuated with unintelligible bursts from the loudspeaker about how much longer your flight’s delayed.
Or maybe it’s just watching movies about waiting around airports. I watched part of Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal on DVD last night. It was all right. Tom Hanks was convincing enough as the lovable Eastern European imp that’s trapped in a fairytale wing of JFK populated with fun-loving and ethnically diverse janitors, baggage handlers and other public servants. And the heartless Homeland Security bureaucrat who keeps hatching schemes to get Hanks out of his hair. And Catherine Zeta-Jones as the woman he loved. Merham Karimi Nasseri, the guy who inspired The Terminal, was initially expelled from Iran for protesting against the shah, landed at de Gaulle in 1988 and has been marooned there ever since. As a documentary, I think that would be a more interesting story.
On the positive side, it seems my Big Boggle skills are still somewhat sharp. After a long reprieve, Andie and I played 10 rounds tonight and I won 228 to 209. Nothing too crazy, no ten-pointers and only a handful of seven-pointers. There were a lot of “Jason words”: Saxons, hector, satire, sweaty, Cornish. But I cannot claim sweet victory as Andie was suffering a stomachache—hopefully not from the devilishly delicious slice of holiday nut loaf she ate earlier.