mrissa | ba-ack

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So. I had connectivity all weekend, I just didn't feel like posting. I still don't feel like posting. But I feel like I should. So here we are.

Flying with vertigo: not my favorite thing. (Translate from Minnesotan to English for full effect.) The best thing about today's flight: the sensation that the plane was spinning quickly around its vertical axis, while we were in a cloud so that I had no exterior reference points to try to convince my brain that this wasn't happening. The pre-flight stuff in the San Francisco airport was pretty jolly, too. Completely the opposite of my experience in MSP on the way out, at pretty much every step. If it hadn't been for a random nice Korean Baptist lady who was traveling with seven small children to a grade school rappers' contest for Asian Christian churches (!!!!), I would have probably ended up in tears after I fell out of the wheelchair they were not letting me have yet and

timprov had to go away to stand in line without me. There were enough points of bad, bad stuff that I feel like I have to write letters to NWA, SFO, and possibly even the TSA. (I will also be writing to MSP. But my letter to them will be completely praise, and the NWA letter will be mixed praise and complaint -- their Minneapolis people were impeccable.)

timprov is a total Hero of the Revolution here. Also hurrah for the people who make peach-mango smoothies in the terminal Northwest uses at SFO.

And a completely different hurrah for my mom: all three of our bathrooms are now painted. They all turned out just as I'd hoped. In fact, I just went in to admire the nearest one again. They now look like rooms to me; they now look like someone thought through what would look good in them. I have the feeling that the poor people who lived here before us went, "Well, crap. We have ugly brown fixtures in two bathrooms and ugly yellow ones in the third. What goes with this stuff? Ummm...white! Or beige!" And, no. It made the rooms feel weird and disconnected. (It's a difficult brown. I am not completely opposed to brown.)

Hmm, I seem to be doing this in reverse order. All right then: yesterday we had dinner with a lot of folks, and I will now list them for you in alphabetical order so that they can spot each other's ljs:

arkuat,

athenais,

brooksmoses, David,

evangoer and his girlfriend who does have an lj but I don't know what it is, Jim who ditto,

logovore,

reveritas and her spousal unit,

wshaffer,

zed_lopez (Edit: I originally had this name wrong and have fixed it), and

zellandyne and her boyfriend who might have an lj, because life is uncertain. And me and

markgritter and

timprov. So it was a good mix of people I haven't seen in forEVer, people I've seen recently but not recently enough, and people I'd never seen before but was happy to see this time. I didn't feel that there was any one person I got to talk to enough, but I expected that out of a trip with the limitations this one had; I was glad that my friends were being friendly with each other. That's always nice.

(Edit again: oh, for the love of Pete. I do, too, know Jim's lj, because it's not Jim, it's Jym, yes?

jymdyer? Hi, Jym. We'd...uh...been pronouncing your name differently. Sorry. Poor

fairmer should be able to sympathize, since

porphyrin and I were calling her "murr" and it ought to have been "mare." Actually, uh, we still do call her "murr." Sorry, Mer. Sorry, Jym. Uff da. I haz the dumb.)

Jing Jing is still pleasant and accommodating, House of Nanking is still awesome, Vive Sol is still pretty darn good, Flying Fish Grill is still awesome, and Bodeguita del Medio is still awesome in a completely different direction from House of Nanking or Flying Fish Grill. The pizza place what serves langos: also confirmed as awesome. Laaaaangos. You've read Dzur? Fine. Then you know about langos. (You've not read Dzur? Go. Read. Drool. Envy my langos.) I spent most of the week leading up to this trip, including much of Friday, being nauseated by the very concept of warm food, so I was glad to get over that particular bit of vertigo-induced joy in time to not be a total PITA over food all weekend.

Amber's wedding was very good, in some ways very Amber without ignoring traditions of her family and Gerard's family. I also think that wee tiny bits of nifty artwork by the bride and Star Wars magnets from the groom are just about the best wedding favors ever.

There were lots of good bits. But it was a very difficult trip and a very tiring trip. I thought twice before doing this. I'm going to think three or four times before doing it again before I get All Better. Ideally I will get All Better fast enough that this will not come up.

And I am so glad to be home.

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One extends useless-but-sincere sympathy for the difficult bits. From my end, hey, I got to talk to *both* M and T, as well as you, and I had chocolate gelato.

And met some new cool people.

So that was the sort of evening I should be quite content to have again sometime.

Glad to hear it!

It has been my experience (and oddly enough, I do have experience in this) that random Korean Baptist women are lovely and useful people to have about when things are Not Especially Good.

I am sorry I missed you this trip. One of these days I will manage to meet you when you are here and greeting your public. This month has just been mad kinds of crazy.

I sympathize with the mad kinds of crazy. I do.

"a grade school rappers' contest for Asian Christian churches" is not a phrase I ever thought I'd read.

I'm sorry about the airport, though. *kicks it*

Thank you; you are much closer and thus can kick harder.

dear christmas, what a mess. i'm sorry SFO was such a goat fuck. it was fun to meet everyone though and to see you of course!

Good to see you, too.

re: Jym -- you don't properly pronounce it "Jim"? now i'm really confused. :)

You do pronounce it "Jim." That's where I got confused: we'd been pronouncing it as though the vowel in the first and the last name were the same.

=v= There are those who pronounce my last name as D'yer, in the manner of Andy Capp and Led Zeppelin. That rhymes with the first name. ;^)

And the scratches! There they are! You didn't have them, see.

Mostly I just has the dumb.

Sorry.

I am so glad you did make the difficult and tiring trip. In the meantime, I'm holding your All Better Right Now in the light.

Thanks; good to see you.

Oh ugh. I'm sorry that the rough stuff happened. Even more the parts that appear to have been preventable or where persons in a position of responsibility and ability to do something useful about them declined to do so or made them worse.

I think that was the thing: everybody seemed convinced that Not My Job was an extremely meaningful concept. And their jobs were extremely narrowly defined: the wheelchair guy, for example, was there to push the wheelchair for people who had checked their baggage, from the gate to the desk. His job did not include helping the person who had gotten out of his wheelchair up if she fell. He was not an up-helper. He was a wheelchair-pusher. Period. Later wheelchair-pushers were only wheelchair-pushers and not providers of information about wheelchair-pushing, so when they went past and we tried to flag them down, they did not respond in any way, making sure that we could not know whether they were supposed to be my wheelchair pusher and were going to cancel the request because they hadn't seen anyone who looked to them like they needed it. Contrast this with the electric cart-driver at MSP who gave directions or information to four different people while we were having the short ride with her from the gate to the elevators down to baggage claim. Two of them were not even eligible for her services, but she would not have dreamed of looking straight through them and pretending she hadn't heard.

Also, someone actually told

Memo to wheelchair pusher guy: Never mind your job as a wheelchair pusher. Your job as a human being includes helping the person who has gotten out of your wheelchair up if she falls.

"Also, someone actually told

timprov that it would not be fair to the other customers if I didn't have to stand in the same line as the rest of the coach passengers. You know, the rest of the coach passengers who can stand unassisted."

O _ O That person's line of reasoning is almost entirely unimpressive to me. I grant that there are different conventions around the notion of fairness, but the one being applied there is not one that I agree with. Nor especially the one that justified making timprov leave you 'alone' (I'm assuming with the wheelchair pusher).

Not directly bearing on the situation, but I wonder if this is partly an artefact of the (to me, rude and offensive, though not doing so can be insulting in other cultural contexts) tendency for certain kinds of people to treat service staff as only their narrow role and not as individuals. My father does this occasionally and lately doesn't really get it when my sister and I widen our eyes at each other.

Nor especially the one that justified making timprov leave you 'alone' (I'm assuming with the wheelchair pusher).

Uh, no. You're thinking sensibly. The wheelchair pusher was not allowed to push me through the checkout line I was supposed to stand in, so he took the wheelchair and went away after I fell, and we had to get a different wheelchair-pusher later.

I don't think it's a result of treating service staff as cogs, although of course I dislike that behavior. I think it's a result of deciding that rules exist for their own propagation rather than for a reason. The information the staff was required to fill out in their paperwork was far more extensive than the information the MSP staff had to fill out, and so they were spending a great deal more time on it. And one had the sense that they were given time estimates for how long they could spend with each task, with negative consequences if they had a passenger who took longer -- while at the same time they were doing very little to plan ahead or to think on a larger scale about why there are people doing these jobs in the first place, so that they were spending more time on less satisfactory behaviors.

For example, at MSP they had some wheelchairs waiting on the other side of security, and the security people who do the extra checks were checking a few wheelchairs at a time when nobody's bag had flagged an alarm, so that there would always be wheelchairs on the correct side of security. At SFO, they had to take the wheelchair (without the person who needed it) around to be individually checked, rather than just putting it in the queue and taking a checked wheelchair for the passenger who needed it.

At MSP, the minute we found some airport employee, they got on their walkie-talkie and got a wheelchair for me. It took me through the short line to be more efficient with the wheelchair pusher and her time, and as a result, I had a much more comfortable but also far faster experience.

I expect that many people who need wheelchair assistance at an airport have never gotten it before, or have never gotten it before at that airport. What are the odds that someone will know their exact procedures when they sprain an ankle or pop out a knee or have their vertigo get particularly bad? Not very good; even if someone has an ongoing and predictable condition, so that they could research it in advance or might have needed travel assistance before, the procedures between the two airports varied so substantially that I think it was correct and humane of MSP to take the position that I should not have to psychically know exactly what to do to get the help I needed.

Possibly this was because I was young and apparently able-bodied. I kind of doubt it, though. When they sent the disabled people to stand at the bottom of the jetway for an unspecified period of time, it was me and an old fella (and

timprov and the old fella's far steadier wife). They were just not thinking through, "Hey, what if these folks have difficulty standing? I have watched them walk through the gate area, and neither of them seems too steady." And yet there were people who needed assistance on each flight I was on, and I suspect most of the larger flights I've been on historically have featured at least a few people who have needed assistance, so this is something that's coming up multiple times daily for the gate agents. And they were still really bad at it.

It is generally my policy not to let wheelchair-pushers within five feet of my person. Whoever is flying with me is instead designated as my wheelchair-pusher. This is technically not allowed, but usually the combination of my Laser Glare of Death and the father's kind "She gets a little nervous, you see, will do it.

I didn't have the energy to fight to make them just leave the wheelchair for

timprov to push, and on Friday it wouldn't have been necessary. But I can see where it would be well worth one's time. Uff da.

I'm very glad you did make the trip. Dinner was fun. You know a lot of nifty people!

Thanks for the reminder to translate "Flying with vertigo: not my favorite thing" from Minnesotan to English! I came to the reminder, looked at the preceding sentence again, and said "Oh."

californian translation: It sucks big hairy, Republican donkey balls!!eleven!

I'm very glad there were good and worthwhile parts of the trip to at least somewhat offset the less enjoyable bits.

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"Men call me ......... Jym?"

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