In Continuum.

I don't remember when I fell in love with the idea of air travels, perhaps it was the idea of flying in a giant metal bird, one of those childish fantasies when I was younger I suppose. It was the closest I could get to emulating the likes of Superman, an astronaut in a documentary on television, or Voltron himself. Nothing beats soaring through space with a giant sword and fighting bad guys, not to mention the fact that he is made up of a dozen different vehicles driven by pilots, some of those vehicles flew like giant metal birds in the sky as well. And yes, I did prefer the vehicle Voltron more thn the original one, so sue me. Anyway, the frequent travels back and forth from Taiwan sowed the grain of love for flying in the past, and that has been the way for many years. Perhaps it was the association of flying and going back home, or maybe it was the kind and beautiful air stewardesses whom I had a childish crush on. Whatever it was, every June and December holiday were holidays that made my fantasies come true.

I haven't been traveling a lot these days, however, school has taken up more time, not to mention other obligations. I love to travel, and has always been a fan of it. But there's always the financial reasons, not mine but that of others. You see, my friends aren't nearly as willing to invest a hefty sum of their money on traveling to a foreign country they can just as easily discover on the Discovery Travel and Living channel. My parents aren't exactly the traveling type either, preferring the constance of everyday life to that of the unknown. My sister has a love affair with only so many countries, namely Taiwan and Japan. Every other country is secondary and, thus, unimportant. She had second thoughts about her exchange program to Europe, a hesitation which I thought to be both absurd and unwise. It was a golden opportunity for her to travel, and yet she had second thoughts about going! I would have jumped at the chance, since my trip to Europe was abruptly and very rudely interrupted by that event. Anyway, I haven't the time to travel, and hasn't been doing a lot of those ever since my Junior College life ended and my army life started. Now that I have left that behind, even the new college life does not allow that much of a breathing space either, since I was stupid (or smart) enough to pick a three year course which should have been a four year one. That meant a faster graduation but at the same time, no summer breaks. That's why, on the brink of the end of summer, I am now on a plane traveling back home to Taiwan for a brief visit that'd put the word "brief" itself to shame.

They say that scarcity makes the heart grow fonder, perhaps the same can be said about air travel. Today, just today, I beg to differ. All of a sudden, a dozen symptoms of the air traveling disease attacked me today, everything from the check-in gate to the trip itself. I am now about half an hour till landing in the TaoYuan International Airport, and the past four hours or so has been spent on watching multiple episodes of House on my Macbook (thank God for that) and thinking up ways to severely mutilate the passenger sitting in front of me. You see, she has been less than considerate and more than an imbecile. More on that later, since I do intend to dedicate a generous amount of words and lines to this prick of a human being. Before that, however, the excitement of the flight itself seems to have faded out a little. Sure, the view outside those thick little holes in the walls of the plane is still pretty much the same, I even recognized one of the air stewardess that served me last December when I flew back home. But something was amiss, something was a little off. I blamed it on the time of the flight initially (I'm really not a morning person), but it soon dawned on me that flying has suddenly turned into a kind of routine, the kind you get bored and tired of. Like the businessman who's travel via plane for one too many times, or the rock star on tour for the thirtieth time in his entire career. It gets stale, like old gum, and I was growing weary as I was stuck in between two old ladies, one of them had a kid who was sedated enough to keep her mouth shut for the most part of the trip.