I Endure So Much Weird In Tucson, Which Is Awesome, And So Is Isaac Marion
I've whined before about the ungodly amount of snow Minnesota has been enduring and other places, too, but I don't live in other places, I live in Minnesota, so that's what I'm bitching about. What I'm not bitching about is the Tucson Festival of Books, which would have been terrific even if it hadn't taken place in a beautiful desert locale. Also, I'm as pale as a trout's belly and normally find deserts horrifying, except this winter. Because, as above: ungodly amount of snow.
I was in it to win it the second the plane touched down, like people who spend thousands on a cruise but aren't sure they should have, so they are determined to have fun NO MATTER WHAT. Which is fine, and good for them, but they can be shrill. OH MY GOD, UNLIMITED SODA! WE CAN EAT ALL WE WANT SO I DON'T EVEN CARE ABOUT THE HUGE LINE OR THE EARLY MORNING WAKE-UP CALL ON THE LAST DAY! Yep, okay, settle down, glad you're having fun but that was right in my ear. Again.
All that to say I was determined to have fun, so as I stepped outside I started basking in the lovely warm weather, seventy five degrees of awesome soaking into my creaky frozen bones. "Sorry about this," a native said, vaguely gesturing to the…weather, I guess? The sky? Their soul? My soul? "Cloudy and raining on your first day here, not much fun."
Ha! Idiot. (Well-meaning idiot, so I didn't say that out loud and also, not a good idea to insult your driver when you're in a strange place.) First, it was barely raining, it was closer to a lazy sprinkling. A lackluster sprinkling, like the weather could scarcely be bothered to rain. Second, the sun was behind the clouds, so I didn't care about the cloud-curtain, because I knew the sun would return. Proof the sun was alive, it's aliiiiiive was enough for me. Third, seventy five degrees of awesome soaking into my creaky frozen bones. I'm afraid I giggled all during the ride to my hotel. And not cute giggling, like a college cheerleader discovering she likes cake-flavored vodka. Scary giggling, like a forty-something writer discovering she won't have to look at snow for 72 hours, celebrating by guzzling cake-flavored vodka.
Also, Tucson has hidden its garbage, which is astonishing and cool. Honest to god, I didn't see a single piece of litter anywhere the entire weekend. Minnesota's pretty good with that stuff, but Tucson could give us a run for our money.
So between the weather and the lack of garbage, and the plethora of frosting-flavored vodka, I was having a fine time long before I set loafer-clad foot on the lovely and litter-free University of Arizona campus. Sun shining, not a cloud in the sky, booth after booth of books, publishers, historians, more books, and gelato on a stick. Yes. GELATO ON A STICK. I…was going to live there. Forever.
All my panels/workshops were stuffed with readers, which is always good fun, and I signed lots of books and hit my Pull Goal about half an hour into my first event. The Pull Goal started when I'd accidentally hook someone who had never heard of my books. Usually the Pull is a reader's spouse dragged to one of my signings; sometimes it's a fan of someone else on the panel…basically, when I get the floor I spend sixty minutes over-sharing ("And we never saw Grandpa again, but at least we were able to bury his feet.") and suck in at least one unsuspecting reader ("I had no idea who you are, but you're funny, and possibly crazy, so what would be a good book of yours to start with?"). It started happening frequently enough that I made it a conference goal: meet as many readers as I can, pull one unsuspecting bystander into my 60+ book back list, figure out where all the bathrooms are. In fact, everything was perfect until I ended up sharing a panel with the man who destroyed my dreams of (zombie) love. His name is Isaac Marion, and he stomped all over my (zombie love) heart.
I'll back up a couple of years, when I was pitching new book ideas to my editor. I love writing the UNDEAD books, but I like to have other projects in the hopper, too, and I love pitching. And I had the idea (before zombies became the new vampire) that zombies could be the new vampire. So I pitched a book idea: zombies in lurrrrv. Think of the travails! Think of the comedy! Think of the sex scenes! Oooh, I couldn't wait. I spent days polishing the proposal, re-reading the thing until I could see it every time I passed out. I mean, closed my eyes.
She turned it down. I took it like an adult ("Waaaaah! You're mean!") and set about coming up with another idea, which she did like, so yay! Writing is sales (it's not sexy, but it's true: if you're a writer, you're in sales), and even best-selling writers (moi) don't get every single idea picked up (moi). She was a pro through and through, explaining why she felt she had to pass (among other things, she was confident I'd have no trouble making it funny, but she doubted I could make zombies knocking boots romantic and sexy). I shrugged and thanked her for her feedback and got on with moi life.
Well, no. I waited a few months, re-wrote the thing, and sent it to her again. Surely by now, I reasoned as I chortled, she has seen her folly! Or is exhausted by the idea of dealing with my whining and begging twice in six months. Or has terrible short-term memory and doesn't remember turning down this pitch.
Nope. She passed again, again like a pro, again outlining her reasons why. So I let it go ("Waaaaah! You're super duper mean!") and reminded myself that even moi can't sell every single pitch, and I put it all behind moi. I also stopped referring to myself as moi.
Then Isaac Marion, crusher of all my dreams, wrote a wonderful YA novel called WARM BODIES. It was about, yep, you guessed it, zombies in lurrrrv. Romeo and Juliet, with zombies. He wrote a funny, lovely, romantic book. About zombies in lurrrvvv. And it was such a delightful book they turned it into a movie about zombies in lurrrrv.
Bastard.
And here he was, sharing a panel with me! Oooh, vengeance would be sweet! Sure, he had no idea who the hell I was, and in fact hadn't wronged me at all, ever, and I was about to be both unprofessional and shrill, but none of that mattered beside the cold indisputable fact that he wrote a terrific book and must be punished!
So I turned to him, ignoring the 150 or so people in the audience who probably wanted to talk about books or something, and greeted him with, "I've got a bone to pick with you, pal." (In our family, that translates to, "You'd better cover your eyes and your groin, pal, because you're about to be stabbed in one or the other.") "You kind of ruined my life and also one of my dreams."
Isaac, who is not only talented but sane and cordial, expressed surprise.
"That's right!" I continued, like he'd protested or argued. "I pitched my zombies in lurrrv story and got it turned down twice, and then much later you went ahead and wrote your book about zombies in lurrrv and it was so good Lion's Gate made a movie of it and the movie was so good I couldn't even hate-watch it! Yeah, that's right, Isaac Marion, you jerk! My teenage daughter and a bunch of my friends and I paid good money to hate-watch it and we ended up being charmed!" God, that Isaac Marion, what a bastard!
All right, our dealings might have been slightly more cordial. And he might have politely pointed out that my real beef was with my editor, not him ("Yeah, well, she's not here, Isaac! IS SHE? Huh? No! It's just you and me! And the other writers on this panel! And the 150 spectators who probably want to talk about books or something! They can have you when I'm finished!"). And I might have sincerely congratulated him on his well-earned success. But that's not nearly as much fun to tell.
Once I had that dangerous confrontation out of the way, I consoled myself with the greatest invention in the history of human events, gelato on a stick and also a pulled pork sandwich. "You guys want to see something funny?" I asked, sitting down among a bunch of tan people. "You want to watch a Minnesotan eat BBQ? First, I'll need about a thousand more napkins and a Hazmat suit."
Meanwhile, my tech was acting up. All of my tech. Before I left for Arizona I dropped my phone. This is something my husband never does, so he literally couldn't understand when I said the thing was acting up "after I dropped it". It took hours of hand gestures and diagrams before he was able to comprehend my problem ("But if it's giving you trouble, why even drop it in the first place?" "Shut up shut up shut up."). Anyway, it wouldn't shut off. It worked perfectly, it just would not shut off. So whenever it wasn't charging, it was running down the battery. Thus, the first thing I'd have to do every night after returning to my hotel was plug it into my laptop. No big deal. I thrive in adversity and also, I was still high from shrieking at Isaac Marion. (Again, the guy couldn't have been more of a pro, or nicer. He really does deserve all the success that should have been mine.)
Then I noticed my laptop wasn't charging. Unfortunately, I'd run the battery down to about 12% before realizing (shut up shut up shut up). So pretty soon I wouldn't be able to charge my laptop and, thus, my cell phone. Okay, that's trickier. That could be a problem for me. Well, at least my Kindle is…OH COME ON! Basically, I endured a Perfect Storm of tech failure.
By Sunday everything was close to deader than shit. My last text was to my husband briefly explaining the situation as I watched my laptop charge count down from five minutes like in ALIENS ("You have five...minutes...to reach minimum...safe...distance…"). In the morning my cell had a bare trickle of a charge and (I'm aware of the illogic of this) I was annoyed to see my husband hadn't replied to my text warning him I had no computer/phone/Kindle charge and not to bother texting me and I'd see him that night. (When I confronted him upon my return, his obviously made-up response was, "You told me not to text you back since you wouldn't get my text." Our marriage is built on lies.)
So I packed up all my stone dead gear and made ready to return to the snowy steppes, but not before I made it clear to anyone I could grab ("Sorry! I got BBQ all over your shirt. It hardly shows against all the white. Um, will you invite me back next year?") that I would love to return. And then it was off to the airport, where the last of the wonderful weirdness happened.
I try to keep to Louis CK's philosophy in mind when it comes to flying: "Flying is the worst because people come back from flights and they tell you their story and it's like a horror story. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40's in Germany…'It was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn't board for twenty minutes, and then we get on the plane and they made us sit there. We had to sit there!'
"Oh, really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero? Wow, you're flying, it's amazing! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going oh my God! Wow!"
Louis makes excellent points, so I try to keep a positive attitude. Sometimes it's tricky, though. Airlines never used to automatically charge for all checked luggage, and now they do. Then airline personnel are astonished when everyone wants to lug their stuff onto the plane. "For some reason since we implemented the charging scheme, I mean policy, we have limited space for luggage on the plane so if you haven't checked it already, you should definitely check it since there's no room for some reason! Weird, right?"
But that's not as aggravating as those who switch seats with impunity. As I boarded (clutching my carry on which I refused to check because KNOCK IT OFF, AIRLINES) I could see there was already someone sitting in my seat. I hate when that happens, mostly because I always feel like the person who beat me to my assigned seats has squatter's rights. But I trudged ahead and told the elderly gentleman to get his narrow butt off my seat and to take his vomit bag with him. Except what came out was, "Um, I think you're, um, in my seat? Maybe?"
"Oh, yeah, probably," was the cheerful and unrepentant reply. Which is not how I thought the conversation would go. Usually they make a big show of checking their ticket against mine and seem very perplexed about the whole thing, like it's totally normal to get 8A mixed up with 29C, as opposed to what they were really up to: jumping the gun because they want a separate seat for the suitcase they didn't want to check, or their infant, or whatever.
"Um," was my fast-thinking reply. "Yeah. So. You're in my seat. And, um, maybe should move? Or something?"
"I've got 9B," said the elderly women in row 8. Wait, so she wasn't in her assigned seat, either?
"No, I've got 9B," another senior citizen corrected. (Which sounded like "what a dumbass to not know the seat you haven't bothered to claim, dumbass!") "You've got 8B."
"That's mine!" another woman said (hint: she didn't say it from 8B). By now I'm staring around in total conclusion. For whatever reason this pack of retirees went rogue all over coach and I would be forced to pay the price in blood, or aggravation.
"Okay, so…wait. Am I the only one out of the eight of us who actually paid attention to their seat assignment and, weirder, wanted to sit in the seat assigned to me?" Rhetorical, by the way. Of course I was. And I had eight butts in wrong seats to prove it.
So I hail the flight attendant over by frantically flapping my boarding pass at her and pretending not to be terrified. "There's a mix-up," I told her, which was the truth. "We'd like help straightening it out." Which was a lie, since only one of us wanted help with that.
"Wrong seats?" she replied cheerfully, coming down the aisle and looking at my boarding pass, then at the guy sitting in my spot. "Yes, sir, may I see you--thank you. Ah. Sir, you need to be across the aisle. And--"
"I'm in the wrong spot, too," 9B pointed out (which sounded like "Why is he getting all the attention? I'm an entitled jerk, too!").
"Yes, I see…" She was suddenly faced with a blizzard of boarding passes. "Ah. All of you. Okay, well, who was the--"
"He did it!" 9B shrilled, pointing an accusing finger at the squatter in my spot. "It was his idea to switch!" Ever see a sweet-looking little old lady turn informant? It's not pretty. You could almost hear the unspoken, "Take the children, but spare my life!" I've never seen anyone roll on an accomplice so quickly. It made me dizzy.
What followed was a gabble: "--sit by the window--" "--told you you'd get us in trouble--" ''--but what difference does it make where we sit if everyone--" "--you arrogant ass, you've killed us all--", etc., etc. Since there were extra spots, and since I didn't care where I sat as long as I could ride the plane to Minneapolis, I offered to sit…I dunno, somewhere, some seat the senior flybunnies had eschewed. Which is how I ended up in 22A. I'm not at all sure how that happened, but okay.
Again, not complaining. It was the final interesting, odd touch on what had been a wonderful weekend in Tucson. Plus I had something to blog about if Isaac Marion slapped a restraining order on me. Win/win!
I was in it to win it the second the plane touched down, like people who spend thousands on a cruise but aren't sure they should have, so they are determined to have fun NO MATTER WHAT. Which is fine, and good for them, but they can be shrill. OH MY GOD, UNLIMITED SODA! WE CAN EAT ALL WE WANT SO I DON'T EVEN CARE ABOUT THE HUGE LINE OR THE EARLY MORNING WAKE-UP CALL ON THE LAST DAY! Yep, okay, settle down, glad you're having fun but that was right in my ear. Again.
All that to say I was determined to have fun, so as I stepped outside I started basking in the lovely warm weather, seventy five degrees of awesome soaking into my creaky frozen bones. "Sorry about this," a native said, vaguely gesturing to the…weather, I guess? The sky? Their soul? My soul? "Cloudy and raining on your first day here, not much fun."
Ha! Idiot. (Well-meaning idiot, so I didn't say that out loud and also, not a good idea to insult your driver when you're in a strange place.) First, it was barely raining, it was closer to a lazy sprinkling. A lackluster sprinkling, like the weather could scarcely be bothered to rain. Second, the sun was behind the clouds, so I didn't care about the cloud-curtain, because I knew the sun would return. Proof the sun was alive, it's aliiiiiive was enough for me. Third, seventy five degrees of awesome soaking into my creaky frozen bones. I'm afraid I giggled all during the ride to my hotel. And not cute giggling, like a college cheerleader discovering she likes cake-flavored vodka. Scary giggling, like a forty-something writer discovering she won't have to look at snow for 72 hours, celebrating by guzzling cake-flavored vodka.
Also, Tucson has hidden its garbage, which is astonishing and cool. Honest to god, I didn't see a single piece of litter anywhere the entire weekend. Minnesota's pretty good with that stuff, but Tucson could give us a run for our money.
So between the weather and the lack of garbage, and the plethora of frosting-flavored vodka, I was having a fine time long before I set loafer-clad foot on the lovely and litter-free University of Arizona campus. Sun shining, not a cloud in the sky, booth after booth of books, publishers, historians, more books, and gelato on a stick. Yes. GELATO ON A STICK. I…was going to live there. Forever.
All my panels/workshops were stuffed with readers, which is always good fun, and I signed lots of books and hit my Pull Goal about half an hour into my first event. The Pull Goal started when I'd accidentally hook someone who had never heard of my books. Usually the Pull is a reader's spouse dragged to one of my signings; sometimes it's a fan of someone else on the panel…basically, when I get the floor I spend sixty minutes over-sharing ("And we never saw Grandpa again, but at least we were able to bury his feet.") and suck in at least one unsuspecting reader ("I had no idea who you are, but you're funny, and possibly crazy, so what would be a good book of yours to start with?"). It started happening frequently enough that I made it a conference goal: meet as many readers as I can, pull one unsuspecting bystander into my 60+ book back list, figure out where all the bathrooms are. In fact, everything was perfect until I ended up sharing a panel with the man who destroyed my dreams of (zombie) love. His name is Isaac Marion, and he stomped all over my (zombie love) heart.
I'll back up a couple of years, when I was pitching new book ideas to my editor. I love writing the UNDEAD books, but I like to have other projects in the hopper, too, and I love pitching. And I had the idea (before zombies became the new vampire) that zombies could be the new vampire. So I pitched a book idea: zombies in lurrrrv. Think of the travails! Think of the comedy! Think of the sex scenes! Oooh, I couldn't wait. I spent days polishing the proposal, re-reading the thing until I could see it every time I passed out. I mean, closed my eyes.
She turned it down. I took it like an adult ("Waaaaah! You're mean!") and set about coming up with another idea, which she did like, so yay! Writing is sales (it's not sexy, but it's true: if you're a writer, you're in sales), and even best-selling writers (moi) don't get every single idea picked up (moi). She was a pro through and through, explaining why she felt she had to pass (among other things, she was confident I'd have no trouble making it funny, but she doubted I could make zombies knocking boots romantic and sexy). I shrugged and thanked her for her feedback and got on with moi life.
Well, no. I waited a few months, re-wrote the thing, and sent it to her again. Surely by now, I reasoned as I chortled, she has seen her folly! Or is exhausted by the idea of dealing with my whining and begging twice in six months. Or has terrible short-term memory and doesn't remember turning down this pitch.
Nope. She passed again, again like a pro, again outlining her reasons why. So I let it go ("Waaaaah! You're super duper mean!") and reminded myself that even moi can't sell every single pitch, and I put it all behind moi. I also stopped referring to myself as moi.
Then Isaac Marion, crusher of all my dreams, wrote a wonderful YA novel called WARM BODIES. It was about, yep, you guessed it, zombies in lurrrrv. Romeo and Juliet, with zombies. He wrote a funny, lovely, romantic book. About zombies in lurrrvvv. And it was such a delightful book they turned it into a movie about zombies in lurrrrv.
Bastard.
And here he was, sharing a panel with me! Oooh, vengeance would be sweet! Sure, he had no idea who the hell I was, and in fact hadn't wronged me at all, ever, and I was about to be both unprofessional and shrill, but none of that mattered beside the cold indisputable fact that he wrote a terrific book and must be punished!
So I turned to him, ignoring the 150 or so people in the audience who probably wanted to talk about books or something, and greeted him with, "I've got a bone to pick with you, pal." (In our family, that translates to, "You'd better cover your eyes and your groin, pal, because you're about to be stabbed in one or the other.") "You kind of ruined my life and also one of my dreams."
Isaac, who is not only talented but sane and cordial, expressed surprise.
"That's right!" I continued, like he'd protested or argued. "I pitched my zombies in lurrrv story and got it turned down twice, and then much later you went ahead and wrote your book about zombies in lurrrv and it was so good Lion's Gate made a movie of it and the movie was so good I couldn't even hate-watch it! Yeah, that's right, Isaac Marion, you jerk! My teenage daughter and a bunch of my friends and I paid good money to hate-watch it and we ended up being charmed!" God, that Isaac Marion, what a bastard!
All right, our dealings might have been slightly more cordial. And he might have politely pointed out that my real beef was with my editor, not him ("Yeah, well, she's not here, Isaac! IS SHE? Huh? No! It's just you and me! And the other writers on this panel! And the 150 spectators who probably want to talk about books or something! They can have you when I'm finished!"). And I might have sincerely congratulated him on his well-earned success. But that's not nearly as much fun to tell.
Once I had that dangerous confrontation out of the way, I consoled myself with the greatest invention in the history of human events, gelato on a stick and also a pulled pork sandwich. "You guys want to see something funny?" I asked, sitting down among a bunch of tan people. "You want to watch a Minnesotan eat BBQ? First, I'll need about a thousand more napkins and a Hazmat suit."
Meanwhile, my tech was acting up. All of my tech. Before I left for Arizona I dropped my phone. This is something my husband never does, so he literally couldn't understand when I said the thing was acting up "after I dropped it". It took hours of hand gestures and diagrams before he was able to comprehend my problem ("But if it's giving you trouble, why even drop it in the first place?" "Shut up shut up shut up."). Anyway, it wouldn't shut off. It worked perfectly, it just would not shut off. So whenever it wasn't charging, it was running down the battery. Thus, the first thing I'd have to do every night after returning to my hotel was plug it into my laptop. No big deal. I thrive in adversity and also, I was still high from shrieking at Isaac Marion. (Again, the guy couldn't have been more of a pro, or nicer. He really does deserve all the success that should have been mine.)
Then I noticed my laptop wasn't charging. Unfortunately, I'd run the battery down to about 12% before realizing (shut up shut up shut up). So pretty soon I wouldn't be able to charge my laptop and, thus, my cell phone. Okay, that's trickier. That could be a problem for me. Well, at least my Kindle is…OH COME ON! Basically, I endured a Perfect Storm of tech failure.
By Sunday everything was close to deader than shit. My last text was to my husband briefly explaining the situation as I watched my laptop charge count down from five minutes like in ALIENS ("You have five...minutes...to reach minimum...safe...distance…"). In the morning my cell had a bare trickle of a charge and (I'm aware of the illogic of this) I was annoyed to see my husband hadn't replied to my text warning him I had no computer/phone/Kindle charge and not to bother texting me and I'd see him that night. (When I confronted him upon my return, his obviously made-up response was, "You told me not to text you back since you wouldn't get my text." Our marriage is built on lies.)
So I packed up all my stone dead gear and made ready to return to the snowy steppes, but not before I made it clear to anyone I could grab ("Sorry! I got BBQ all over your shirt. It hardly shows against all the white. Um, will you invite me back next year?") that I would love to return. And then it was off to the airport, where the last of the wonderful weirdness happened.
I try to keep to Louis CK's philosophy in mind when it comes to flying: "Flying is the worst because people come back from flights and they tell you their story and it's like a horror story. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40's in Germany…'It was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn't board for twenty minutes, and then we get on the plane and they made us sit there. We had to sit there!'
"Oh, really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero? Wow, you're flying, it's amazing! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going oh my God! Wow!"
Louis makes excellent points, so I try to keep a positive attitude. Sometimes it's tricky, though. Airlines never used to automatically charge for all checked luggage, and now they do. Then airline personnel are astonished when everyone wants to lug their stuff onto the plane. "For some reason since we implemented the charging scheme, I mean policy, we have limited space for luggage on the plane so if you haven't checked it already, you should definitely check it since there's no room for some reason! Weird, right?"
But that's not as aggravating as those who switch seats with impunity. As I boarded (clutching my carry on which I refused to check because KNOCK IT OFF, AIRLINES) I could see there was already someone sitting in my seat. I hate when that happens, mostly because I always feel like the person who beat me to my assigned seats has squatter's rights. But I trudged ahead and told the elderly gentleman to get his narrow butt off my seat and to take his vomit bag with him. Except what came out was, "Um, I think you're, um, in my seat? Maybe?"
"Oh, yeah, probably," was the cheerful and unrepentant reply. Which is not how I thought the conversation would go. Usually they make a big show of checking their ticket against mine and seem very perplexed about the whole thing, like it's totally normal to get 8A mixed up with 29C, as opposed to what they were really up to: jumping the gun because they want a separate seat for the suitcase they didn't want to check, or their infant, or whatever.
"Um," was my fast-thinking reply. "Yeah. So. You're in my seat. And, um, maybe should move? Or something?"
"I've got 9B," said the elderly women in row 8. Wait, so she wasn't in her assigned seat, either?
"No, I've got 9B," another senior citizen corrected. (Which sounded like "what a dumbass to not know the seat you haven't bothered to claim, dumbass!") "You've got 8B."
"That's mine!" another woman said (hint: she didn't say it from 8B). By now I'm staring around in total conclusion. For whatever reason this pack of retirees went rogue all over coach and I would be forced to pay the price in blood, or aggravation.
"Okay, so…wait. Am I the only one out of the eight of us who actually paid attention to their seat assignment and, weirder, wanted to sit in the seat assigned to me?" Rhetorical, by the way. Of course I was. And I had eight butts in wrong seats to prove it.
So I hail the flight attendant over by frantically flapping my boarding pass at her and pretending not to be terrified. "There's a mix-up," I told her, which was the truth. "We'd like help straightening it out." Which was a lie, since only one of us wanted help with that.
"Wrong seats?" she replied cheerfully, coming down the aisle and looking at my boarding pass, then at the guy sitting in my spot. "Yes, sir, may I see you--thank you. Ah. Sir, you need to be across the aisle. And--"
"I'm in the wrong spot, too," 9B pointed out (which sounded like "Why is he getting all the attention? I'm an entitled jerk, too!").
"Yes, I see…" She was suddenly faced with a blizzard of boarding passes. "Ah. All of you. Okay, well, who was the--"
"He did it!" 9B shrilled, pointing an accusing finger at the squatter in my spot. "It was his idea to switch!" Ever see a sweet-looking little old lady turn informant? It's not pretty. You could almost hear the unspoken, "Take the children, but spare my life!" I've never seen anyone roll on an accomplice so quickly. It made me dizzy.
What followed was a gabble: "--sit by the window--" "--told you you'd get us in trouble--" ''--but what difference does it make where we sit if everyone--" "--you arrogant ass, you've killed us all--", etc., etc. Since there were extra spots, and since I didn't care where I sat as long as I could ride the plane to Minneapolis, I offered to sit…I dunno, somewhere, some seat the senior flybunnies had eschewed. Which is how I ended up in 22A. I'm not at all sure how that happened, but okay.
Again, not complaining. It was the final interesting, odd touch on what had been a wonderful weekend in Tucson. Plus I had something to blog about if Isaac Marion slapped a restraining order on me. Win/win!
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