Let me paint you a picture.

Oh, the things I could show you if I only knew how to paint. The views from the sky really are incredible. The rare times I get to go into the flight deck during flight, I'm just blown away. I'd never be able to focus as a pilot, I'd be too busy staring out the window all the time. (Then again, they don't generally need to be focused. More often than not they're not even doing anything, except non-flying-related things! Ah, auto-pilot.)

It's unnerving, when you're just flying through clouds. Um, guys? Guys, I can't see anything. Where are we going? Where are we? How do you know what's out there? But then, you break through the clouds, and it's wonderful. Above the clouds are colors, if you're flying during sunrise/set. More shades of white and gray in the wisps and undulations of the clouds than I ever knew existed. Thick, tomato juice orange and vibrant blue and, somehow, enough colors in between to blend those two seamlessly.

Below the clouds is gorgeous. I got to ride in the flight deck one night, because we had an empty plane and my pilots were nice enough to let me. When we started descending, and we broke below the clouds... I want that view, all the time. City lights stretching in every direction. Roads look like rope lights, dark with evenly-spaced fuzzy spots of light. Minneapolis was just sitting there, all together, looking tiny. Like I could pick it up and move it if I wanted to. Like a perfect snowglobe creation. And anywhere I looked, in 180 degrees, there was something to see.

Besides the views from the top, I just see things, everywhere. In the woodgrain of the cupboard outside the bathroom, which I used to stare at when I was falling asleep when I was little, there's a woman holding an over-sized mask to her face. There's something in the wood across from my bed in this room, but I can't remember what. Perhaps I'll find it again tonight. But I'm always seeing faces, pictures, silhouettes, and I see them everywhere: hidden in woodgrain, in clouds, in snow, in the shadows of someone's shirt. If only I knew how to paint, I would show you the things I see.



I canceled my date. Remember the texting? It was just too much. And it wasn't as if I was encouraging the guy by texting back. I was, for the most part, ignoring him outright. But he didn't get that hint. I would have been happy to go on the date, had the texting been slower beforehand. But the more I ignored it, the more urgent it got. When I missed a call from him on the morning of date-day (hey, you know, some people like to sleep in on their days off) and got a text twenty minutes later saying (not asking, asking requires a question mark) "U alive lol", I decided that was enough. I'd been battling a snot-monster in my sinuses for a few days, and decided that was as good an excuse as any to cancel the date.

But canceling the date did not, unfortunately, put a stop to the texting.

I left for a four-day trip on Tuesday. The thing about working on a plane is, my phone has to be off most of the time. And when it's not off, I'm likely sleeping. Or eating. But relaxing and trying to rejuvenate for the next day, anyway. He continued to text me, continued to ask if I was alive, and eventually started to give up. By give up, I wish I meant stop texting, but rather I mean, he texted to me to ask if I had changed my mind. So yesterday, I put an end to it. There will be no dating of RampMan by me, and there will be no more texting.

Well, hopefully.