airport musing

I'm not on drugs, I'm just sleep deprived, and spending the night on the floor of La Guardia Airport so I don't have to pay for a hotel (look, I was only here for 24 hours, I don't care how disgusted you are with my life choices- I went to New York and back for under 200 bucks, so jokes' on you.)

So while here in my cozy little sleeping bag made from a sweater, a jacket and my backback, while sleeping in proximity to some other late night travelers and few actually homeless people, I'm frantically cleaning the score for "dreamcatcher" with Rebecca's notes and edits post-premiere, and cleaning the music for "Lockjaw" after the Nautilus Brass KILLED the premiere.

["Killed" in the cool, surfer guy way- not the snobby French critique way... And also, second premiere, technically, for those of you who read my last post on the origin story of "Lockjaw"... Nautilus guys, if you ever read this- the version you played relative to the "first" version I wrote was the difference between the 2015 Fantastic Four movie, and that weird1 990's Fantastic Four movie the internet loves so much... You know, the difference between really bad, and still kinda bad but looks prettier... and is in 2015... The Nautilus Brass, by the way, are a group of brass teachers and professional performers who are INCREDIBLE musicans and entertainers, and it was a pleasure to talk to some of them after the concert.]

Anyway before I go to bed I wanted to post a little musing I had while boarding my plane yesterday. If pretentious, existential and entitled thoughts on a trite concept do not interest you, then abandon ship now, yo:

"There's something weirdly but predictably eye opening about the first few times you visit an airport. It's basis is that all your life you've lived in this one very finite area. A little portion of a town in a state, and maybe you've seen parts of this state, and maybe you haven't. Furthermore you kind of trust that this little portion exists in a larger country filled with people like you- even though you've never met them or seen them. But you see on the news and trust on the internet that they're there.

Now one level deeper- you learn in school there are hundreds of other countries out there like your's, but with different people and different languages. And like the expanse of your own country you sort of trust that it's all there, in it's place, doing whatever it is that country does. But you sort of stop caring because you never interact with these hundreds of countries, and then after that you stop knowing (to an extent) that they're there.

But then you get to an airport and see these dozens of vehicles limitless in reach and it all becomes clear. This entire rich, busy world you stopped knowing- was there all along, and it was never on pause. It was living just as vast and just as complicated existence as your own, despite you... And all this makes you feel incredibly small and yet somehow incredibly big because your part of it all, and you e just been given the key to the candy store. You can go anywhere and do anything. And that reminds you that you will always be infinitely and comparably small. But you will always be limitlessly able to traverse the enormity of everything."

-Me, being a 21 year old who can count on one hand how many times he's traveled out of Texas and is slowly waking up to how important travel is to the development of a well rounded person and is trying to celebrate that fact and his discovery of it at the risk of sounding pretentious and annoying.