up in the air

A word on airports.

I’ve spent a lot of time in airports. I’m kind of like an airport anthropologist, constantly people watching and analyzing ‘air world’ culture. Not as exciting as it sounds though. In the last year I’ve clocked sixteen separate flights on the Chicago-Atlanta route alone. So while I’m fairly well-traveled, I often spend most of my time “traveling” sitting in terminal E12 of O’Hare International.

Airports fall into a pretty definite dichotomy. There are the airports with energy, and then there are the other airports. Airports with energy, that je ne se quoi of excitement and the promise of world travel, are awesome. Businessmen striding purposefully off to make multi-million dollar deals and bragging about their frequent flyer miles, people from every country walking around, dramatic send-offs for loved ones. Great for people-watching and for the feeling that at any moment your life could change: you could swap out your boring domestic ticket for Berlin, Paris, Shanghai or Sydney. You could sit down on the plane and your seatmate could be a media mogul, an actor, an international jetsetter. This has a lot to do with what kind of city its in. LA, New York, London all have it. The Dallas and Atlanta airports, surprisingly enough, have it. Major train stations in Europe have it. That feeling that you are somewhere where things are happening.

But then there are all the other airports. They mainly do domestic routes. They are filled with families with small children, people going to routine business meetings and people from the suburbs going to visit their relatives in Ohio. The airport is lackluster. You sit down next to a mid-level businessman from a small company somewhere in the flyover states. It is utterly predictable and utterly devoid of anything interesting after about the fourth time you fly. This only gets worse if, like me, you end up in the same gate of the same airport two out of three times.

Also, the show Pan-Am has been ruined for me. Don’t get me wrong, its entertaining and I’m kind of hooked but after growing up with my dad in the industry I can’t really romanticize being a flight attendant.

The upside is, I rock those airports. Spending that much time anywhere, you start to figure out how things work. 

williston.

hi georgia friends.

this is my home for the year.

It's kind of historic.

This is my little side door that I go in to get to our corner room on the first floor.

Because its so cozy and tucked away, we have christened it "The Hideaway".

No one calls it that except us.

And when its nice and clean and has good lighting, it looks like this:

{flowers drying from the birthday}

My cluttered desk (Emily, I have no idea how your room is so awesomely minimalist. Teach me.)

So basically, Williston is adorable. Its also over a hundred years old, which means its "quirky". Like the power sometimes randomly goes out. And the layout of the rooms is really hard to work with. To make everything else fit, we triple bunked our beds. One of my roommates' dads said we looked like an orphanage.

So this is home for the year. Its sometimes really cute and most of the time really messy and I sometimes want to just donate all of my stuff to Goodwill except my laptop, bible, and some clothes and start fresh. I'm incredibly blessed to be living with friends and even though I complain about dorms, delaying the onslaught of "real life" is nothing to sneeze at.