LOST in the skies

Aloha.

I write to you from the beaches of Hawaii where I’m supposed to be helping my company run their annual convention. Thus far, I’ve scouted out the nearest Starbucks and walked along the beaches at 5:00 am. (This time zone change freaking sucks!) Rule to the wise, the nicer the place is for a convention, it exponentially decreases the chances of me being helpful.

I landed yesterday after 10 hours of recycled air hell. Connecting through Denver left me on the next plane for 7 hours straight. For those of you keeping score at home, I hate being cooped up for any period of time, let alone on a window seat when I have the bladder the size of a marble. The poor guy next to me would get his laptop all set up and then the Gods of urine would sing their chants. This dude heard ‘excuse me’ more times than I would have preferred.

The great part was that I upgraded myself to First class. Worth every mileage point I’ve ever earned. I was also thrilled to learn we’d be flying on a 777, which are known to have a TV in the back of each seat so that you could watch any of four movies you wanted. Not so with this plane and all of those in our section had to watch one pull-down screen of 16 Blocks with Bruce Willis. Truth be told, I was bored after about the first 3 blocks.

So to kill time and prevent my seat mate from having to get up every hour, I plugged into my iPod and began surfing through the music and videos I had downloaded.

Recently, we have gotten hooked on LOST. A while back, I downloaded the first two episodes, realized it was worth watching and we’ve since watched the entire first season from NetFlix. Luckily, the first two episodes we’re still on the iPod. Jackpot! Another 90 minutes I can distract myself. And since it’s filmed on Hawaii, I thought that would be an awesome tie-in with the trip

Did I forget to mention that the series is about a plane crash? Uh huh. The plane crashes over the Pacific on a strange island …AFTER dropping thousands of feet in the air and losing its tail section mid-air.

And the best part of the opening two episodes is that they recreate the crash scenes OVER AND OVER. People hitting the ceiling of plane; people being sucked out of the plane; luggage hitting people in the head and they die.

Seven different times I had to hit the pause button. Once I even contemplated taking a hit from my inhaler I was breathing so hard. As hot as Jack the doctor is, I had to make a decision.

16 Blocks still sucked, but at least no one fell out of the sky.