Day 1 in England.
I arrived at Newark airport 3 hours before my flight at around 6:40. They have these neat new security booths that apparently test for explosives. You step in and four nozzles shoot jets of air at you for several seconds and a computer talks to you. That's right, a computer. Wild.
So I find a group of people also going to London and I try, after around 20 minutes, to talk to them. Most of them were nice. One guy was a dick for no reason. But that's okay. It was the Butler flight instead of the Arcadia flight. And I'm used to it!
Flights on Virgin Atlantic are unbelievable, though there's a noticeably less space in coach than on other flights. Still, I recommend that you fly it before they completely go out of business. That's in response to hearing that Virgin megastore in New York was closing down, so who knows what other sorts of financial troubles they're in. I sat next to two nice people who were going to different schools than me. One was named Jordanna and she was related to Nathan Lane. Just kidding! The other was Chris and he played lacrosse.
Moving on, each seat had a tiny television screen right in front of it from which you could choose to play a movie, game, or television program. And I was worried about having to watch the second Garfield movie! Instead I could choose from a list of 30 films, maybe 4 of them being bad movies. I ended up watching The Wind that Shakes the Barley, which won the Palm D'or at this year's Cannes film festival, an award that I actually respect occasionally (except when the winner is Michael Moore). It was about the Irish war and starred Cillian Murphy. Brill! There's a particularly heartbreaking scene. One of the younger members of the IRA gives up the position of certain members because he's being threatened by the British government. Stuff happens, they get caught, they manage to escape, but 3 of them are executed and one of them gets his fingernails torn off with a pair of rusty pliers. Well, they find him, and he's their friend, but Damien (Cillian Murphy) is told to kill him. Damien asks him for his letters, which are letters to your loved ones that are passed on before you're executed, but the kid tells him that he can't read or write. Jesus, almost cried on the plane. And by almost, I mean I wasn't even close. Oh yeah, SPOILER ALERT!
Too many details! I also saw Block Party and 20 minutes of Thank You for Smoking. We landed. I bought a sandwich as shown here:














I knew I was in the UK because of this:

That's enough exposition for today. Now for some whining. I hate being labeled as quiet just because I don't start conversations. It really gets to me when everyone is talking to each other, but no one comes up to me and says a word! Why is it my obligation to introduce myself to others? Because it looks like I'm the sort of person who's completely without merit? I could be interesting! And be friendly! Why would you be a dick to someone you've just met? That's poor behavior!
It all starts with those people who can look beyond their initial impression of people and get to "know them". In my opinion, you should never be able to say about someone, "Yeah, he's a dick, but if you get to know him, he's a good guy". All it does is encourage people to continue being dicks. If they had no friends at all in the world, I'm sure they would make themselves become better people from fear of dying alone. So in conclusion, if you see any of your friends being assholes to people for no reason, call them out on it. Threaten them like a subtly abusive housewife would. "I will leave you!"
A couple months ago, I came up with, what I thought was, the most cruel and vicious of comebacks you could possibly say to someone. It goes:
I fucked your mom.
And then she died.

Love,
Chris