... in the airport

I'm the happiest girl in the world. Have to say, I absolutely, truly, without a doubt, love, love, love being in the airport. In fact, I even wrote my college essay about my love for airports.

One of the most important things to know about airports is the fact that Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is the best airport in the world. Some find it to be overwhelming, which is understandable, considering it is huge and always filled with a ton of people. That's part of what I love about it, but it's not the whole story. I think the best part of the Atlanta airport is how well designed it is. It's like a spine with ribs coming out. Six terminals and a train that runs in the middle of them. When you walk out of the train, you're right smack in the middle of the terminal, so you never have to walk more than the distance of 20 gates. Compare that to JFK. Or Denver. Woof.

For some reason, airports just seem to relax me. Normally I would say that I'm a bit tightly wound. Or extremely. Yes, I think we'll go with extremely tightly wound here. But traveling gives me a rare opportunity to honestly let go. I'm sitting here, and my flight has been delayed 3 hours due to gale-force winds in central VA. (Pause. Consider nature.) I'm all by myself, reading and writing. I love doing those things. So much so that I always buy the unbelievably overpriced books at the bookstore, but only after spending at least 30 minutes considering all of my available options. (can we call this self-awareness?) Where I really get my time to shine is when the nice (read: terse) Delta employee informs me that the flight is going to be delayed even more.

I always try to remember what my Uncle Jim says about how we process and react to information: we're conditioned, from a very young age, to react emotionally in every situation. Usually this means acting like a 5'8" version of a 5 year old. With screaming. And dramatic facial expressions. Also that weird hair-ball-in-the-throat noise that nobody ever wants to hear. Knowing that we react this way gives us the opportunity to pause and make a conscious decision about how you want to act and what you want to do in the situation. Trust me, I'm just as bad as the next girl about living my day-to-day life like this, but for some reason, I remember in airports.

They just changed our departure time to 10:10pm. Good thing this airport has WiFi and a couple good people to watch.