PLANE FLIGHTS AND DRUGS

As those of you who have grown up with me know, I get motion sickness walking down the street at a brisk clip, so preparing to get on an airplane can be a major undertaking.

I have discovered the wonders of the Patch. You know—there are these little patch things that you put behind your ear, and they miraculously prevent motion sickness without making you tired, although they do make you feel a bit like someone has taken the whole of the Sahara Desert and shoved it right up your nose. But this seems a small price to pay.

I love these patch things.

Anyway, on an entirely different topic, a few hours before I left San Francisco, I was still driving around attempting to sell my car. I figured I could take it to one of those “We pay cash for cars!” places, but of course, suddenly they all seemed to have moved. Eventually I gave up and got a hot dog, since obviously people in London won’t know how to make a hot dog properly.

I got back to where Andy and Michael, who were going to drive me to the airport, were waiting, finished up some work, and got ready to depart. This included putting a patch behind my ear.

Things started looking strange. In the last few weeks, I have had a corneal ulcer on my left eye, and then some kind of emergency trauma (I don’t want to admit this to anyone, but I think I may have inadvertently gotten a jalapeno pepper seed stuck in my eye, but it resulted in me having to be rushed off and taken care of and blinded for a few days) and so when things started going all strange, I just thought that it was more of this eyeball- and contact-lens-related nonsense. I didn’t think much of it, and so A, M, and I wandered off to grab a sandwich to go on the way to the airport.

When we arrived at the sandwich-to-go place, I mentioned to Michael that I wasn’t really trying to wink at him constantly, it was just that there was something clearly wrong with my contact lens, and I couldn’t figure out what. He looked at me, and informed me that my right eye was completely dilated, although the left one was normal, and I looked very much like David Bowie.

Of course, the right ear was the one with the patch behind it, and it became clear that there was something Very Wrong with either the patch or my reaction to it at any rate, so the patch had to be removed.

This might be a good time to mention that the dilation didn’t go down for THREE DAYS. I suppose I should feel fortunate that it was only one eye, because if it had been both eyes, people (read: customs officials) would have assumed that I was a drug addict, whereas with only one dilated, people assumed that I had some disfigurement, and they were polite and just slightly too kind to me instead.

By the way, don’t ever get a connecting flight through Canada if you’re going to fly internationally. You have to go through customs twice, which is a sincere pain.

I’m not quite sure what they do if you’re carrying something they don’t like when you’re already halfway to wherever you’re going. No idea at all.

So the second leg of the journey was terribly rough—the worst plane flight I’ve ever had. I was really really scared, and I’ve never been scared on an airplane before. But the plane was careening from side to side for well over an hour, and it was not always, shall we say, parallel to the ground. I kept thinking about how long it would take to hit the ground, and how long I’d have to be terrified before I died. But the pilot pulled through, and I have never been so glad to reach terra firma (the more firma the less terra, as has been said before) in my life. And that’s not only because Matthew was waiting for me at the airport.

Anyway, when I landed I went through a gruelling customs interview. Why are you here. Why three months. May I see your return ticket, please. On and on. Fortunately, the customs agent was a girl. So by the end of the interview, after waxing poetic about The Coolest Boyfriend Ever, we were the best of friends in the whole world.

All right, so this was a relatively boring entry, but what can I say? I’m giving updates. My life is sometimes boring.

Oh, when I arrived, Matthew promptly a) drew me a bubble bath, b) plied me with wine and chocolates, and c) showed me his new sub-woofer.

It must be love.