Caffeine Overdrive

This is from a few trips ago to LA, but very much like the airplane ride I just took. Damn kids.

For my 8:30am flight from New York to Los Angeles, I came prepared to sleep. I was completely unprepared for the trip, and spent most of the night dreaming of things I forgot to do, only to wake up every 30 minutes and write them down. I know that I still didn’t do everything I was supposed to, mainly because I couldn’t read my dream filled handwriting. I’m still not exactly sure what “Take alligator repellent” means.

While waiting to board the plane, I saw one hindrance to my sleep plan: a 5-year-old boy holding a Grande Mocha Frappucino with whip. As a longstanding customer of Starbucks, I know my frappucinos, so much so that anti-Starbucks militia would probably throw cheaper coffee on my over-caffeinated body like I was wearing fur and they were carrying fake blood. And any idiot who has ever been to a Starbucks could safely this boy were going to stay awake for the duration of the 6 hour flight. Undoubtedly, the kid sat directly behind me and his mother and father, for some reason separated, sat all around me, so the kid was free to run back and forth in the aisles screaming about god knows what.

Strangely enough, this didn’t start happening until well into the flight, when I was dead asleep dreaming I was on a bus being taken to a Hertz station that looked like a federal penitentiary. And I had to wait there for my boss. For 6 hours.

Luckily, the screaming children and the annoying high schooler on her way to soccer camp, who kept elbowing me because she had obviously never flown in a plane in her whole entire life, woke me up.

That dream was awful and my body was definitely uncomfortable, and I still had another three hours of flight time. Additionally, now that the caffeine had kicked in, so had the boy’s ability to kick the back of my chair.

See, when I was little, I wasn’t allowed caffeine. I needed a lot of it when I landed in LA.