SLEEPING ON THE CORNER

There are a few disadvantages about going to Oahu. The biggest is the six-plus hour plane ride from Los Angeles.

I had already been sitting on my big old fat butt for the two hours driving to the airport in Tucson - then the one-and-a-half hour flight to LAX - and then waiting for three hour there before the flight left.

It's difficult to do laps at an airport terminal (dodging passengers and luggage) although running backwards on those moving sidewalks has a certain surreal effect I do enjoy.

And I can't browse through the inflated-price shops without either bursting into tears because I find the most perfect laptop case that have ever existed for only $145,000 - or breaking into loud, raucous laughter at $34 price tag on a Wal-Mart item worth 34 cents.

So normally when I have more than twenty minutes to wait in an airport, I find the cleanest corner I can (usually an obscure corner either right AT the gate, or the furthest away), curl up with my luggage straps wound around protectively around my wrists multiple times to discourage any possible threat (although why a thief would even bother looking at my dirty-banged-up travel carry-ons for anything with actual cash value is beyond me), and go to sleep.

One of the great advantages of being partially deaf is if you sleep on your GOOD ear, the rest of the world disappears (or is at the least seriously muted).

No, I take that back. The ONLY advantage of being partially deaf is that.

Perhaps LAX has higher standards, or they just recently passed a law that no-good-bums-homeless-people cannot sleep in public places where it might-look-bad-to-the-tourist-flying-in-to-go-to-Disneyland. I figured since I obviously had already gone through all the security check points, and clearly WAS a passenger, no one would bother me.

However after dozing for just a few minutes, I was jolted awake by a female flight attendant who deliberately unlocked a fake-line-creating-random-column-holding-strips-of-seat-belt-like-material (that's the technical name for it) and allowed the automatic-fling-back-into-the-column mechanism (ditto) to SLAM one metal object (the clips-thing) into another metal object (the metal pole), creating a non-slumber-allowing KA-BOON.

It didn't break the sound-barrier, but to someone who was almost asleep, it was extremely painful.

While she didn't exactly smile as my groggy and exhausted body flung itself automatically into an upright position as my subconscious mind reacted to the sound and my dozing-trying-to-sleep mind careened together, causing all of my fifteen brain cells to slam into each other, it was obvious she enjoyed the reaction.

Then she calmly reconnected the fake-line-creating thingies back, and walked off.

I was pissed-off enough that I stayed awake the entire flight until we landed in Honolulu.