CODA

After 21 hours of travel we're finally home. The funny thing about modern international travel is how the generic, sterile nature of airports and airplanes - they can all try to be different, but airports are ultimately built from the same Platonic ideal, with collections of shops, rows of chairs designed to prevent one from lying down, airplanes are also the same, the same forward-facing rows, and they vary in terms of uniforms, degrees of luxury, but they all conform to the same model - international air travel scrubs all the local from the experience. Hour after hour spent sitting in a metal tube whizzing through the air serves as a kind of brainwashing, stripping from you all of the immediacy of place that being in a place has, the smells, the sights, the customs are all the same, until where you were is dimly remembered, the only evidence the photos on your camera, and where you are going painfully far away.

That's partly the reason it feels a bit like you were never gone when you arrive back home; the crucible of international flight has melted it out of you, not with heat but with sameness.

Perhaps as testament to my compulsiveness I notice that our home smells unusually clean - getting re-accustomed to the scents and odors doesn't take long but it's jarring enough for me to realize that I must normally be really, really OCD about the way the house smells, and I only have that insight now because it's momentarily new again, as though I've walked into a stranger's house only to understand that it's actually my own.

Okay - maybe all international travel and jet lag does is make you think way, way too much. I should probably be applying all of this thought to the next Scope of Work Proposal: how to justify bringing a bunch of guys with Arabic names into the States to see how we take care of emergencies. I always love a challenge...