Sometimes mid flight, what you really need is a sturdy shoulder to lean on. In order to get some shuteye. Take my 9pm flight home from Queensland last week, for instance. I was exhausted. As in, well & truly beat, gone-for-all-money style exhaustion. Gone for all Rinehart's money, even. I'm sure you appreciate that's a reasonable degree of lassitude. Irrespective of the fact I'd had a relatively easy week, munching sushi & ice-creams with one 18 month old godson & occasionally burping his five month old bro (and fellow godson), I was utterly annihilated.
My flight up was a godsend. The supremely camp check-in clerk expressed his resounding approval of my early-AM airport attire by rewarding me with wonderfully cushy seating… ipso facto, I scored the entire front row in which to luxuriate like the eight-foot goddess I most certainly am not. You can understand my disgust, then, when discovering the seating arrangements for my long-awaited journey home to the Melbourne frost. Unlike my dream run up, this time I found myself wedged alongside Australia's Most Woeful. And his equally impressive mate, Next Top Moron. In their very own instalment of The Amazing Race: Alcoholic Annihilation At Altitude. AA of another kind. Forget Straight Outta Compton - we're talking Fresh Outta Frankston. Or Beaudesert, or Blacktown, or Dubbo, or Rockingham. And any other hideous, dentally deficient town you care to shake a Bundy can at.
Mike Whitney could well have lobbed in the aisle, in full 'fro-haired glory, to host a scintillating episode of Who Swears Wins, and it wouldn't have seemed out of place. Between talk of their weekend "banging broads" (HONESTLY), and "sorting out" the "Cavill crew" (I imagined an equally illiterate mob of Ed Hardy-clad meatheads, squaring up from the wrong side of the Indy-500 track), they also managed to throw some conversational morsels over their sizeable trapezoids from starboard to port. In my direction, that is. I could barely contain my scorn when asked whether I wanted to partake in one of their drinking games. Having to bear witness to it was enough, I'd have thought. Not the case. They were rather insistent, until the point at which I let slip the word "fuck" in sheer exasperation. Well, weren't they incensed. So began their concerted effort to prove they could find more ways to use the word than I could. I was too exhausted to teach them otherwise, but my WORD how I could have schooled those two beefed-up punks from here to kingdom come.
I'm not sure how much of a judgmental bitch I was when I boarded that flight, but upon disembarking, I could have gone toe-to-toe with the Shannen Doherty motherbitch in Heathers, and comfortably taken that she-witch down. In lieu of any more descriptors I can throw out, I'll give you a visual. One I feel screams ear-shattering volumes.
(G-C-B. Which I'm told stands for Gold Coast Boys. The numerals dancing beneath are 4218. Postcode for Surfers Paradise. Naturally.)
A week has since passed, and I find myself again perched at the boarding gate like the reigning queen of aviation evil. Praying my Monday evening service will be full of too-important-for-small-talk business commuters. Who want little more than to stare solemnly at their window shades in a collective silence. This isn't long-haul people.
My flight up was a godsend. The supremely camp check-in clerk expressed his resounding approval of my early-AM airport attire by rewarding me with wonderfully cushy seating… ipso facto, I scored the entire front row in which to luxuriate like the eight-foot goddess I most certainly am not. You can understand my disgust, then, when discovering the seating arrangements for my long-awaited journey home to the Melbourne frost. Unlike my dream run up, this time I found myself wedged alongside Australia's Most Woeful. And his equally impressive mate, Next Top Moron. In their very own instalment of The Amazing Race: Alcoholic Annihilation At Altitude. AA of another kind. Forget Straight Outta Compton - we're talking Fresh Outta Frankston. Or Beaudesert, or Blacktown, or Dubbo, or Rockingham. And any other hideous, dentally deficient town you care to shake a Bundy can at.
Mike Whitney could well have lobbed in the aisle, in full 'fro-haired glory, to host a scintillating episode of Who Swears Wins, and it wouldn't have seemed out of place. Between talk of their weekend "banging broads" (HONESTLY), and "sorting out" the "Cavill crew" (I imagined an equally illiterate mob of Ed Hardy-clad meatheads, squaring up from the wrong side of the Indy-500 track), they also managed to throw some conversational morsels over their sizeable trapezoids from starboard to port. In my direction, that is. I could barely contain my scorn when asked whether I wanted to partake in one of their drinking games. Having to bear witness to it was enough, I'd have thought. Not the case. They were rather insistent, until the point at which I let slip the word "fuck" in sheer exasperation. Well, weren't they incensed. So began their concerted effort to prove they could find more ways to use the word than I could. I was too exhausted to teach them otherwise, but my WORD how I could have schooled those two beefed-up punks from here to kingdom come.
I'm not sure how much of a judgmental bitch I was when I boarded that flight, but upon disembarking, I could have gone toe-to-toe with the Shannen Doherty motherbitch in Heathers, and comfortably taken that she-witch down. In lieu of any more descriptors I can throw out, I'll give you a visual. One I feel screams ear-shattering volumes.
(G-C-B. Which I'm told stands for Gold Coast Boys. The numerals dancing beneath are 4218. Postcode for Surfers Paradise. Naturally.)
A week has since passed, and I find myself again perched at the boarding gate like the reigning queen of aviation evil. Praying my Monday evening service will be full of too-important-for-small-talk business commuters. Who want little more than to stare solemnly at their window shades in a collective silence. This isn't long-haul people.
(G-C-B. Which I'm told stands for Gold Coast Boys. The numerals dancing beneath are 4218. Postcode for Surfers Paradise. Naturally.)
A week has since passed, and I find myself again perched at the boarding gate like the reigning queen of aviation evil. Praying my Monday evening service will be full of too-important-for-small-talk business commuters. Who want little more than to stare solemnly at their window shades in a collective silence. This isn't long-haul people.
