How To Get Better at Flights
How To With Shenai Chan (I)
In the HBO docuseries How To With John Wilson, filmmaker and self-professed “anxious New Yorker” John Wilson tells you how to do things. For example, in the episode How To Cover Your Furniture, he tells you how to cover your furniture. The episode begins innocuously enough—because his cat scratches up all his furniture, he commissions a custom-made plastic chair sleeve—but quickly it devolves through a series of tenuous connections into an encounter with a man who has a business selling contraptions to stretch back your foreskin (hey, that’s one way to cover your, uh, furniture), and finally, in a frightfully incisive self-jab, he commissions an exact replica of his chair and keeps the original in a temperature-controlled storage facility so it can never be damaged—or interacted with in any capacity. From plastic sheeting to a meditation on the perils and rewards of vulnerability in twenty minutes: that’s the kind of storytelling I’m very into, and so I figured I should try a sort of stylistic copying exercise.
As part of a commitment to my Artist's Way group, I'm going to be attempting an essay series for August. So this will look something like: I will post an essay every Sunday, loosely inspired by the gimmick of How To, which means at the end of the month I expect to have written five essays telling you how to do things, with varying degrees of success and digression. This week is about how to get better at flights.
OK, storytime: this week I had to spend the night in Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport after my flight in from New York arrived two hours late and I missed my connecting flight to San Francisco. I think this time last year I would have been extremely flustered about everything, and I think I was still definitely pretty flustered, but also simultaneously possessed by a sense of calm and clarity, sort of confident that like, OK, whatever happens, it’s just going to work out. In one way or another. And I was thinking about why that’s true, and I think it’s in part because I am just better at flights now, but I am also better at moving through the world now, just generally.
I guess here are some airport-specific but also some meta, emotional strategies for doing flights. To start with the basics, here are some things I wish I knew when I was like seventeen, and I hadn't gone on very many flights, and hadn't gone on flights alone at all:
Google Flights is great for comparing flight prices, but there are a few things to look out for, like how the cheapest United seats usually don’t include a carry-on, so you need to go in and toggle that option in the search filter, and how you should mentally be factoring in the cost of getting to whatever airport if you have multiple options (like, early morning Ubers might be more expensive; maybe you’re in New York and a flight out of Jersey is cheaper but it might cost more to actually get to Jersey, etc.) Also flights are definitely expensive, but sometimes you can get lucky/clever with it if you’re monitoring them closely and you’re flexible with travel dates? I've gotten ~$100 flights between San Francisco and New York, if you can believe it.
Airports are confusing on a macro-level, like if you try to simulate the whole thing in your mind before you even get there, but actually at every individual moment I think they try to hold your hand as much as they can. Airports are architectural/design marvels! They kind of drip feed you information—like, maybe you need to get to gate E20, but first, you need to find terminal E, and before that, you need to find security, and so on. Don’t think too far ahead. Just trust that you can play a kind of mental relay race and take it one step at a time.
Always make an account with whatever airline you’re flying with and download their app beforehand! That way you can accumulate credits to spend on later flights. Also the apps are pretty good. Shoutouts to those software engineers.
The sequence of events between arriving at the airport and actually sitting on the plane is something like this:
Make sure you’re in the “departures”/check-in/baggage check area. Usually airports come in two chunks—the chunk where all the gates and planes are, and then the chunk where everything else is, like: security, baggage check for folks now leaving, baggage claim for folks just arriving, and so on. What this means is that the very last step in an airport trip (baggage claim) is probably a floor above or below the very first step (baggage check). If you find yourself at baggage claim, don’t panic! Just follow the signs up to what will usually be marked as departures.
Security is probably going to make you feel at least a little bad. This is OK. You can anticipate this; create mental space for it. It always feels like a lot of steps, but after a few flights, you begin to form a simplified mental model for what you need to do, which is:
Find the line, and get in it.
Get ready to show your ID to the person at the desk, and maybe your boarding pass. Also some places, like SFO, will ask to see your boarding pass before you even get in line.
Once you get to the place where you need to put your shit in bins, DON’T PANIC! IT WILL BE OK! It seems like a lot of things to do with a lot of stressed out people around you but basically I just think, like: OK, I need to (1) strip as much as is publicly acceptable, and take my (2) laptop and (3) liquids out of my bag. Of course look up the guidelines beforehand, but that’s the gist of it.
(Actually, before all of that, you need to listen to the TSA people to see if they want you to NOT do any of these things, because the machines are getting fancier and fancier and can handle crazy things like you leaving your shoes on. It’s still OK if you take your things out of your bag, though. Like, what are they going to do, get mad at you for being too safe?)
In terms of physical and emotional wellness:
Don't get too cheap with food. I really hate buying airport food, because it's just so offensively expensive, but every! time I've tried to skip eating I've regretted it. In addition to sucking it up and buying the stupid $10 fast food sandwich, I would recommend bringing a protein-heavy snack to intermittently munch on... my defaults are Trader Joe's beef jerky and trail mix!
Also, I've found that the ambient energy/chaos of just existing on a plane or bus or train or something is distracting enough to make me forget to drink water or eat or move around, so like, maybe set timers to do these things?
If you have chronic pain like I do, try to spend the days/week up to your flight managing it extra closely? So usually for me this means low-impact but consistent movement, like walking a lot, and drinking a LOT of water, and sleeping well, and doing my physical therapy exercises consistently. Even if you don't have chronic pain I think you can still benefit from these things!
Sitting for a long time is pretty bad for the body. And I think there's this idea that if you just find the right position, you won't put strain on your body, which isn't true. Staying in the same position—any position—for a long time is worse than moving regularly between a bunch of suboptimal positions. So do the embarrassing thing and ask the person in the aisle seat if you can get out and “use the bathroom” every hour or so.
OK: one of the best things you can do for yourself is give yourself a lot. of. time. for. everything. Especially if you're not at 100%, like if you're sleep deprived, as is often the case with awkward flight times. I've gone through complicated travel gymnastics on three, four hours of sleep, and I wouldn't recommend it, but I just did everything very, very slowly. I gave myself fifteen minutes to figure out how to get from point A to point B when I would expect myself to take two to three minutes to do it clocking in at 100%.
Also, even if you are at 100%, it's OK and even preferable to do things slowly! There's so much ambient anguish around traveling for me that makes me feel like I need to do everything as quickly as possible, but it's literally OK to not even get into the security line until you've slowly and meticulously taken out your ID and boarding pass and you are consciously holding them in your hand and you've zipped up your backpack and chugged your water. And then you can wait in line and know that the moment you get to the front you can hand your ID to the person manning the desk, and you don't have to worry about anything.
You can actually do a lot if you're just really patient about everything and you only think a few minutes ahead at any given time, and you're constantly readjusting your trajectory based on new information. Just get really close to the texture of the world, which is maybe counterintuitive when the world seems overwhelming. But trust me that it's the right direction?
Also, I think just generally… be as soft and kind to yourself and others as you can. "Remember other people are human / you are human" is such a cheesy way to put it, but it's true! At the end of the day we're just little animals who want to be seen, heard, cared for; to avoid being sad, anxious, afraid, confused.
More storytime: so I was sitting on the plane at Laguardia (New York), which had already been delayed because the INCOMING flight was delayed, and I was feeling super antsy for us to take off, just tracking the expected arrival time and feeling increasingly uncertain about my ability to sprint through IAH (Houston) in time to catch my connection. And I asked the flight attendant if it would be possible for folks with connecting flights to get off the plane first—which is something I’d seen before—and she just shook her head at me and said that I’d have to wait my turn. That they could maybe try an announcement, but people don’t always listen.
And I just remember feeling so annoyed, so condescended to, and so… helpless? And then it just started pouring rain outside, sheets and sheets, and my weather app said that there was a flood warning, and I thought, well, there goes my connection. And then the captain’s voice came over the speakers relaying the news that we all already knew: it would be at least another hour before we left. Now that the uncertainty had been collapsed into—albeit the more unfortunate—certainty, I felt a strange wave of peace rush over me.
I went to the app and rebooked my flight for 10 AM. I called my dad, which is what the little kid in me always wants to do. I got up and talked to the flight attendants to see if United would compensate for any hotels or transportation. They said they didn’t know, but one of them animatedly pulled up a guide on her phone for how to rebook a connection. As she was reading it word for word, I remember feeling grateful: it wasn’t what I needed, but she was trying to help with such deep sincerity that I still felt touched and cared for. She recommended that I book the 7 AM connection instead, and told me stories of how she would sleep in IAH until early morning for some of her rougher flights. I discovered that she was from Houston, and when I told her I grew up in Dallas, she smiled at me—a little sweet, a little wry—and pointed out the rivalry between the two cities.
So I slept in IAH. Before going to bed, I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom when a woman came in and struck up a conversation, saying how smart it was to have brought my toothbrush with me. I learned she was going to Rio and all the terrible successive delays they’d experienced that led to them also having to spend the night in the airport. She was in sweats and her blonde hair was loosely coiled around one of those overnight blowout contraptions. (I remember thinking: her hair is going to look GREAT in the morning.) There’s something about airports, at night especially—seeing a stranger without the guards they hold up between themself and the world. Reaching for the familiarity of another human being, not a human mouthpiece for bureaucratic bullshit, in your worst clothes, as your whole unwashed self, and still being met with patience and gratitude.
I slept badly, but slept nonetheless. I curled up on the couches next to what I think was a girl’s sports team. Time passed bizarrely, viscosity varying every time I checked my phone for the time. The sky lightened, and I stretched out beneath the high archways of terminal D. I went to brush my teeth and I saw the same woman AGAIN at 6 AM and the timing of it all was just so patently absurd that we both burst into laughter. I took the train between buildings to terminal E, and watched the greedy expanse of Texas land recede endlessly into the distance. Wanting to cry a little, I remembered driving to school beneath those same skies, so lazy in their recurrence, the quality of the air overbearing in its warm embrace. The ineffable, unkillable love you have for the place where you grew up.
So what I am trying to say is, to bring it back to the fact that we are all just little animals: you can feel safe and secure even as you spend the night in a strange new airport; you can feel scared and lost even in the moments where it seems like you’ll still make your connection. Pay attention. Pay so much attention. In paying attention you will be kind. In paying attention you will be paid in kind.