262. The Four Hour Friendship

Nora doesn’t love to travel (airports bring out the worst in all of us), but lately she’s been trying to focus on the positive parts of air travel.

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I’m Nora McInerny and it’s going to be okay.  

I travel occasionally for work, not the most, not the least, but I am not the Chillest traveler. Not that I’m stressed out about traveling, but I guess I just don’t really enjoy it, which I know is a controversial take. You’re supposed to love travel, you’re supposed to want to get out there and go do things, and that is simply not me.

I really love being at home. Once I’m in another place, I I like being in that place. I just don’t like the getting to that place and airports can often be extremely stressful. People are at their worst. I don’t love other business travelers who think that they are better than other people because they can get their bag on the train.

the TSA conveyor belt the fastest, or they’ve never forgotten to take off their belt, or whatever the thing is, you know, like, it kind of just brings out the worst in us, and I  hate when it brings out the worst in me, too, because I’m like, they won. They won. They got to us. They got us to turn on each other to get on a plane 10 seconds faster.

No, no. So I’ve been trying to focus on the things that I like about the experience or just observe the experience a little bit more. And  I have a, something about me, I don’t know what it is that just says, if I’m sitting next to you on a plane and I have headphones in and I am reading a book and I am exhibiting no signs of wanting to communicate, you should do it anyway.

You should get in touch with me. You should just start talking till I turn towards you. You should maybe signal to me. Tap, tap, tap on your own ear so I take out my headphone. And this happens all the time. Almost every flight and I started calling these interactions like my, my four hour friendship  and, and that’s, you know, a longer flight for me and I like the alliteration, but the four hour friendship is the kind of intimacy that you get to with a person that you will never forget.

I mean, so it’s so deeply unlikely we’ll ever cross paths again, but as fate would have it, you are going to spend  a not insignificant amount of time seated next to each other. You know, really, I mean, buckled in and ready to go down with the ship, so to speak. Like you are, if that plane goes down, not something we should be talking about on a podcast called, it’s going to be okay, which is probably filled with anxious people like myself, who I cry every time a plane takes off.

Um,  But, you know, if it were to go down, we’d be together. We’d be linked together forever, which Marcel Melikibu, one of our producers, slash my friend, said the other day and I was like, Oh my God, once you start looking at your fellow passengers as your fellow funeral,  you really do realize that we’re on the same team.

That’s what I’m going to try to say. But anyways, you get to this sort of, you know, intimacy with a person. I sat next to a person, they were going to their son’s graduation. Their son was majoring in forestry, which I thought was really cool. Their son needed to learn some responsibility. And their son was also going to get a brand new truck that day.

And he had no idea. I was like, wow, nothing says to a kid, you got to learn some responsibility, like a 40, 000 Vehicle. I think that, that says it. And no judgment, because like, honestly, parenting is a wild ride, and we all say and do things that we’re like, who? What? Like, I have said more than once to a child, if you want ice cream, you have to eat your pizza.

That’s  lunacy. That is, if you want sugar, eat this sugar first. You want this carb, eat another carb that I have decided is somehow a superior carb to the one that you want.  On a flight recently, I was seated next to this man, an older man. Uh, and he  spent  a literal four hour flight showing me pictures of dogs. 

Pictures of dogs, because his wife owns a dog.  babysitting business, dog sitting, I guess you would call it, dog sitting business that she started just by accident because she loves dogs. And then they watched a friend’s dog. And then, you know, that led into watching a friend’s friend’s dog into a friend’s friend’s dog.

And now she does, you know, summer camps for, for these dogs. And there’s always new dogs at their house. And sometimes there’s dogs that they’ve known for ever. And then sometimes there’s new dogs. And I literally  did not read a page. Of a book and I always bring a book on a plane. I’d love to finish a book on a plane.

I didn’t listen to a single podcast episode. I sat and talked to this gentleman for four hours. and I know so much about people’s dogs. These people don’t even know who I am and I’ve seen their dogs. I’ve seen their dogs and they don’t know who I am and that is nuts. This man told me where he lives. He told me his wife’s name.

He told me how much their house cost  when they bought it and how much it’s worth now. I know so much about this man. I know his full name and his wife’s full name. We will never see each other again and that is the beauty. 

I’m Nora McInerny. It’s going to be okay. Every day we bring you an okay thing, and they have a wide range, as you can tell. We love getting your okay things. You can email us or call us.  It’s all in the description. You can find it there. We’re a production of Feelings Co. Our team is Claire McInerny, who produced this episode.

It’s Marcel Malikibu. It’s me. It’s Grace Barry. And our theme music is by Secret Audio.  Oh, that was a weird hiccup burp. I’m sorry.