Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Pre-flight instructions

Promised myself a lovely snooze at the gas station to make up for the all-nighter I pulled last night making my report. Was pleased to have slept a good 3 hours in the car while parked underneath the lovely shade of an acacia. I now feel a bit refreshed and ready for the drive home... but not just yet...

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In a few hours, I will be boarding my flight to the City of Golden Friendship. Don't ask me why Cagayan De Oro is called as such, I have yet to gather enough interest to google it. Apparently this city and its periphery has a lot to offer: ziplines, white water rafting, major waterfalls and other eco-tourism destinations. In my 5 or so visits this region, all I have to show is a t-shirt bought from SM, a meal of ostrich eggs, a visit to Limketkai mall and pictures of me donning a hardhat and stuffing gigantic ferro-nickel ingots into 20-ton container vans. Truly exciting.

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Despite the countless number of times I've boarded airplanes, there always is the inevitable thought that this might be the flight that crashes and burns... or drowns in shark infested waters. As the flight attendant demonstrates the safety features of their plane and how to use them correctly, my mind wanders in search of instances where the plane plummets to a crash landing but leaves the passengers and crew unscathed. There's the movie "Alive" of course where a good number of its passengers survive to find themselves stranded on the Andes... and subsequently survive by eating those that didn't make it. Not really that much of a relief.

Of course, being blessed with superpowers I have yet to discover, I convince myself that I might likely survive the crash. Then faced with the odyssey of finding my way back to civilization, I will be forever thankful to lazy weekends spent watching Man Vs Wild. As long as I don't have to drink my own piss, scale sheer cliff walls or encounter carnivorous guinea pigs... I should be fine.

If, let's say the unthinkable (hmm... I've just thought of it, how can that be unthinkable?) happens and I find myself lost in the wild and survive, shall I treat this as a situation wherein I suddenly realize the value of existence and try to make the most of my second chance at life? Or do I wake up at 6 in the morning, take a shower and get ready for the usual daily grind? Movies have always demonstrated how such situations suddenly call for an epiphany and your paradigm suddenly changes, making life as you know it seem worthless. But of course, that's in the movies, and the sequel that is real life can be frighteningly intolerable of such departures from the script.

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As usual, I'm daydreaming too much. Better make my way home and pack.

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