It's a wacky world out there.
Travel is the one true indicator of this.
My recent stateside romp was a sweet sojourn from the tundra of Toronto.
Venice beach a mer blur in my rearview mirror.
Lingering is the weirdness of what it is to travel in twenty ten.
TSA has become an unweilding force of ineptitude. If I had to describe what the stateside airport security look and feels like, it might be a psycholtic blend of visuals, think or envision a hybrid of midwestern high school homecoming queen blandness mixed with the blunt force percision of a butter knife, add a blog for know-it-all-ness and voila-it's the Transportation Security Administration.
Throw stones if you will but someone has got to pretend to be in charge, now with Al Haig gone.
The rules change. Just when you think in a smug swagga' that you've got the drill-poof it's changed from the country club feel of the Tucson airport to the uber scrum of L>A. In it's regal-real ness stands the SFO experience where as the later shoes must be in a separate bin. My mind of course played this as a real estate metaphor- where separateness is a fabric in San Francisco life that shoes deserve a separate and quiet place before the laptop but after the camera gear.
Think Namaste but for footwear.
Crocs still seem to be in bankruptcy but available in too many shades to think about, all over the airport, all over-stocked.
The true object and marketing genius lost upon the wearer of said plastic shoes: a non pharmaceutical form of birth control.
The quaint kiosk quiet as the croc sales rep or as I called him the croc monsieur, surfed porn on the free airport wi-fi. I guess his lack of eye contact meant he knew I wasn't a true shoe shopper, either that or my footwear du-jour was too telling - I am more of a Christian Louboutin girl than plastic shoe girl.
The airport moment that stood above the rest - the q tip test experience.
The no-fly list of prohibited items is weirdness personified. Think twice before picking up the $13.00 snowglobe from Hudson News- it's been banned. Not because someone got bonked on the head but rather it contains an undetermined amount of liquid, and therefore banned. Verboten.
So back to the q-tip story. While awaiting a Denver connection, I notice a blue gloved harem of TSA "officers" wielding q-tips and hovering near a very pedestrian looking woman who was simply sipping from a plastic water bottle. Nothing exotic, a garden variety crystal geyser brand in the handy 500ml size. The q-tip in the hand of the specialist- or at least dressed to look like one hovered over the open water bottle while the perplexed sipper looked mortified.
Since when is anyone on the TSA team equipped to address this sort of testing? My first thought after thinking that the TSA is now employing biologists- wow the economy really is worse off than we thought, biologists at the TSA gotta make less than 30K a year, when actually they are compensated a bit better, at 35K. But alas, none of these agents possessed any science or biology background. Nary a one barely possessed a GED..but really, why throw stones?
Now who is calling on the white courtesy phone?? Ayn R. Key, paging Mr. Ayn R. Key.
It's a wild and wacky world, don'tcha feel safer in the confines of the airport as of late?.....Me neither.
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