I used to brush my teeth immediately after disembarking from an airplane. Steering myself towards the bathroom, I'd whip out my toothbrush and remove the grime from my mouth. A clean mouth feels refreshing after the dull ick of travelling too close to other people on a stuffy airplane.
Now I don't even get to carry toothpaste in my bag. In return for foiling a major terrorism plot, we lose the ability to carry the items we need to clean ourselves. Or moisturize ourselves. Or quench our thirst.
Travelling by air has long become a demoralizing, joyless experience. Sitting for hours on a dingy airplane dizzyingly close to inevitably annoying people with disgusting habits like picking at their nails or sucking on their thumbs or smelling bad or snoring or taking the armrest when everyone knows that the poor schlub in the middle seat gets BOTH armrests!
Landing and brushing my teeth was my personal way of putting aside the experience of flying. a small private ritual. Which has been replaced by the empty security line rituals that only strip away our meager travelling dignities. We are left with bare feet and empty laptop cases, scrambling to gather our things (but not toothpaste!).
Really, neither ritual leaves me any safer. Scrubbed teeth don't keep annoying people away, and I don't think removing my shoes will actually prevent a determined someone from blowing up a plane some day. And yet I keep flying.
2 comments:
Good points. I was thinking about it the other day, how we can either combat our need for little ritutals or little things to go a certain way or just give in and ritualize and salve our anxiety. Like my sis, who agonizes over her hair every single day. I gave up on that when I was about 14, but I remember how important it once was to me to have my hair lay on my head in a certain way. You could make the argument that it's saner just to let go of needs for these little controlled things, but sometimes it occurs to me that these things go away from us when we are ready to let them go and not before, so we should just go with it. Of course sometimes the NTSA begs to differ.
The consumer industry, ever the oportunist, has come up with travel size toothpaste (that falls within the 3oz limit) which you can use and conveniently carry in your pocket even! (Should you wish to do so). Just FYI. Seeester.
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