When I was younger, my mom used to say to me, "Scouter, you have to choose your battles." I was a pugnacious youth, never one to let sleeping dogs lie when I thought said dogs should bark. (Bit of a watchdog metaphor if you will.) It comes from an overwhelming need for justice in the world: kickball teams should have perfect talent distribution in gym class, people who say mean things should be punished, trains should run on time, and if I know it takes me thirty minutes to get somewhere, it shouldn't ever take me more than thirty minutes to get there, traffic and train delays be damned ... It is a finely woven system of everyone getting their dues that makes absolute sense in my head and, I think, fuels the slow-burn mania and anxiety with which I struggle daily.
Part of being systematically late is the sense of injustice I feel in needing to plan ahead, to succumb to the limits of 24 hours in a day, to wasting time arriving at the airport an hour before my flight when I know perfectly well that if I'm not checking a bag, I can get from kiosk to boarding gate in well under thirty minutes, from the knowledge that if I can stay home for twenty more minutes, perhaps I can finish drafting that eblast that is supposed to go out tomorrow, or make a new feather arrangement to clip in my hair, or shave my legs...
I think somehow I should be able to do more with time than anyone else is able. That if it takes a regular person an hour to do something, I can do it in 45 if I just cut out the dilly-dally. To be fair, it works a lot of the time. I've saved hours over the course of a lifetime by showing up late at airports and rushing to make my flight, caterwhaling to the front of security lines, sweet talking my way past the check in counter. I once showed up twenty minutes before a flight from Kansas City to Russia and made it. I talked my way onto a plane in Paris that I was supposed to have boarded in Moscow. I paid cash from an ATM with someone else's debit card minutes before my flight was supposed to leave for soccer camp. (That one wasn't all my fault.) I've also missed flights to come home for Christmas, to surprise my mom on her 60th birthday, and now to do my first big stand up set in Los Angeles.
I woke up absolutely on time this morning. I left the house within five minutes of when I told myself I should leave the house. And then I grabbed breakfast, missed two trains in time to feel the rush of the stale subway air as they passed me by, and arrived at the airport thirty minutes later than I had intended, which was twenty minutes too late to check in for my flight, but three hours and $50 before the next one departed. It is unfair. I should have been able to make the flight. Had the trains not conspired against me, had I not run into a friend in the deli and waited for her to purchase her vitamin water, had I better positioned myself on the trains to be able to run for the transfer, had the man at the check in counter typed just a little bit faster and the woman at the gate been kind enough to let me on a plane that was still sitting on the runway with my empty seat still totally empty, had I not revised my system last minute and decided that no one needs to be at the airport a full hour before a flight (unless you have children, in which case life is already complicated, annoying an unpredictable) and given myself just fifteen more minutes to make my journey, had any of these things transpired, I would be somewhere up in the air right now instead of listening to the beep, beep, beep of a cart transporting fat and old people from one end of the terminal to another.
But I didn't. I don't. I see x-factors as injustice, a system which, by ignoring, I can somehow overcome. But I can't. All the missed auditions, nights of making my friends wait, and rushed commutes elbowing tourists in midtown can't change the fact that I am not a superhero. I cannot stop time or make the trains like I think they should--which would be efficiently, by the way. Don't even get me started on the injustice of the MTA.
So now, sitting at gate 27 waiting for a Delta associate to give me a seat assignment, passing the time with an iPad and the unwanted company of the bellowing voices of a group of polo shirt clad southern businessmen, the type of gentlemen who use "good" as an adverb, eat fries at 9:30 in the morning in the airport, and drink those weirdly large sodas that are small on bottom so they fit in armrests and huge on top so you can speed up the onset of your type two diabetes while you are laid over. They're not in any rush. They're also wearing pastels, which is questionable at best. They're just staring out the window and talkin bout things like regular people. Their last joke ended with the punchline, "se habla anything." Maybe there's a mantra somewhere in that.
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