Barrett Dorko
12-05-2007, 05:05 PM
It’s been a quiet week in Cuyahoga Falls…
It’s just a short flight from Cleveland to Cincinnati. The plane is very small, making it a little harder for me to avoid speaking to anyone though I usually manage this with my naturally silent presence and carefully cultivated air of disinterest. I’m not easily approached while I travel and I prefer that. This changes when I teach, of course.
But on Tuesday my seatmate seemed not to notice my manner and soon after he sat beside me he complained: “These have got to be the worst seats!” I suppose he was expecting some assent from me, perhaps a mutual complaint about the pain I was surely already feeling, maybe a little story about how Continental seats differed from Southwest’s and how the best were on United but even thinking about this started to make my eyes cross so I just shrugged noncommittally and that did it. He never said another word.
Anyway, I felt fine, and my seat wasn’t any better than his, to say nothing of the fact that I’m thirty years his senior. I could have pointed out that the problem wasn’t the seat but the body he’d placed in it. I could have speculated about the adaptive potential ( http://www.barrettdorko.com/articles/adaptive.htm) he obviously didn’t possess and how this probably signified a persistent abnormal neurodynamic leading to the immediacy of his ischemic discomfort. I could have suggested he abduct his hips a little and change his breathing but I didn’t. I suspected that any of this would only lead to some conversation. I don’t want that.
I slept through takeoff and wakened to some nearby disturbance after ten minutes. The guy with the painful neural tension beside me was in a protracted battle with the man in the seat ahead of his. It was hard for me to ignore because all of this was occurring about six inches away. My friend had placed his briefcase behind his lower back in order to add some blood flow to his nervous tissue (I assume. I didn’t mention this, of course) thus driving his knees forward several inches. His opponent had decided to recline but found he could not. Every few seconds the man ahead of us would ballistically contract his spinal extensors in an effort to get where he wanted (“More neural tension there,” I silently surmised) while the man beside me drove his knees even further forward in order to block him. There was a steady escalation of this melee as we descended toward Southern Ohio and it actually got noisy. I watched it silently though I’m sure my expression revealed a growing alarm. The small smile on Mr. Briefcase’s face was especially disturbing. For my part, I wondered what would happen once we landed.
The wheels touched down for me as they have several thousand times before but my mood was anxious and full of dread. I noticed the consequences of empathy rise in me though I was not personally involved in any way in this conflict. In fact, I wrote about something similar a few weeks ago here ( http://www.somasimple.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3455). I suppose that this is just part of my being human, but I’m working on that.
These two men stood as soon as we arrived at the gate, gathered their things, behaved as if nothing whatsoever had been going on during the entire flight, and then walked down the aisle toward the door. I watched this carefully and felt two things, relief and disappointment.
I told two classes about this during the tour and while they found it funny on a certain level no one has yet been able to explain what all of this might mean. I mean, there’s got to be something here – otherwise I wouldn’t still be thinking about it.
Maybe someone reading this can help.
It’s just a short flight from Cleveland to Cincinnati. The plane is very small, making it a little harder for me to avoid speaking to anyone though I usually manage this with my naturally silent presence and carefully cultivated air of disinterest. I’m not easily approached while I travel and I prefer that. This changes when I teach, of course.
But on Tuesday my seatmate seemed not to notice my manner and soon after he sat beside me he complained: “These have got to be the worst seats!” I suppose he was expecting some assent from me, perhaps a mutual complaint about the pain I was surely already feeling, maybe a little story about how Continental seats differed from Southwest’s and how the best were on United but even thinking about this started to make my eyes cross so I just shrugged noncommittally and that did it. He never said another word.
Anyway, I felt fine, and my seat wasn’t any better than his, to say nothing of the fact that I’m thirty years his senior. I could have pointed out that the problem wasn’t the seat but the body he’d placed in it. I could have speculated about the adaptive potential ( http://www.barrettdorko.com/articles/adaptive.htm) he obviously didn’t possess and how this probably signified a persistent abnormal neurodynamic leading to the immediacy of his ischemic discomfort. I could have suggested he abduct his hips a little and change his breathing but I didn’t. I suspected that any of this would only lead to some conversation. I don’t want that.
I slept through takeoff and wakened to some nearby disturbance after ten minutes. The guy with the painful neural tension beside me was in a protracted battle with the man in the seat ahead of his. It was hard for me to ignore because all of this was occurring about six inches away. My friend had placed his briefcase behind his lower back in order to add some blood flow to his nervous tissue (I assume. I didn’t mention this, of course) thus driving his knees forward several inches. His opponent had decided to recline but found he could not. Every few seconds the man ahead of us would ballistically contract his spinal extensors in an effort to get where he wanted (“More neural tension there,” I silently surmised) while the man beside me drove his knees even further forward in order to block him. There was a steady escalation of this melee as we descended toward Southern Ohio and it actually got noisy. I watched it silently though I’m sure my expression revealed a growing alarm. The small smile on Mr. Briefcase’s face was especially disturbing. For my part, I wondered what would happen once we landed.
The wheels touched down for me as they have several thousand times before but my mood was anxious and full of dread. I noticed the consequences of empathy rise in me though I was not personally involved in any way in this conflict. In fact, I wrote about something similar a few weeks ago here ( http://www.somasimple.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3455). I suppose that this is just part of my being human, but I’m working on that.
These two men stood as soon as we arrived at the gate, gathered their things, behaved as if nothing whatsoever had been going on during the entire flight, and then walked down the aisle toward the door. I watched this carefully and felt two things, relief and disappointment.
I told two classes about this during the tour and while they found it funny on a certain level no one has yet been able to explain what all of this might mean. I mean, there’s got to be something here – otherwise I wouldn’t still be thinking about it.
Maybe someone reading this can help.