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alert the media
by lizard at 04:52 PM on December 26, 2003
imagine the security measures in force at a major international airport on christmas day during a high terror alert based on credible threats to that particular airport. imagine driving into the airport in a car you've been living out of for months, and prior to that were keeping messy chiefly to annoy the sort of person who tends to be annoyed by that sort of thing. now imagine the vehicle inspection.
it went a little something like this, only without the words: "are you white? excellent. carry on." i could have been carrying several hundred pounds of c4 in the trunk (or concealed under the large pile of crap that occupies my back seat, for that matter). on the floorboards of the passenger side in plain view was all my spare computer crap - a mass of wires, keyboards, enough stuff to build something quite nefarious i'm sure. and they waved me on by. to their credit, they may have taken one look at my fluorescent tangerine hair and figured "this person can't possibly be up to something, you can see her hair from space", failing to make the connection between punky colour and dangerously subversive anti-government tendencies. whatever. my point is, i entered an airport looking fourteen kinds of freaky in a suspiciously nondescript 9 year old grey buick during an orange alert, and i did not feel inspected at all. i believe a good inspection should involve latex and astroglide and handcuffs and maybe a nice spanking, or maybe i'm thinking of something else entirely.
i would have stopped and *demanded* the cavity search i so richly deserved, if i hadn't been late due to unnaturally disasterous weather conditions, by which i mean, water. there was water, coming out of the *sky*. as you might expect, many of the natives became agitated and confused, often maneuvering their cars sideways into palm trees beside the road, possibly to get a better look at this bizarre atmospheric phenomenon. i myself might have joined in the widespread panic, had i not been focused on the entirely terrifying prospect of meeting someone i've been madly mentally / emotionally / otherwise involved with over the internet, for the first time in the flesh, at the airport. frame of reference for this? comparable life experience? none. nothing even remotely close. thankfully, i was in overload overdrive over having survived some fifty miles on the los angeles freeway system with no brakes in whiteout rain on christmas afternoon, so i appeared almost ... calm? normal? put it this way, no one called security about me, i was not detained, questioned, or probed in any way. which means that in the future, i'll just have to try harder.
the entire airport adventure lasted about five hours. that's three hundred minutes of nonstop white-knuckle heart-pounding e-ticket adrenaline weeeeee, and all of it utterly worthwhile for so many reasons, not the least of which is this: i got laid.
comments (8)
It seems clear that the references to Friday turned out to not be at all figurative. Getting laid is not figurative. Wanting or wishing to get laid can be approached figuratively, but the actual act requires actual activity of the non-figurative type. Congratulations.
by jadedju at December 26, 2003 9:12 PM
Congrats Liz, you womanly woman, you! I wish you the best with this exciting new relationship!
LAX baggage screeners once let my blonde-haired, blue-eyed Midwestern friend right through a check-in line, but found my 5'1" self to be so dangerous that they had to look through my $80 LeSportsac carryon and make me take off my $120 Birkenstocks. Maybe the Birkenstocks had caused them to infer that I was a liberal arts major who had read the Communist Manifesto in its entirety. They would be right, I guess. But why would I ever want to hijack a plane? I might break my glasses, and they were bitchingly expensive to buy.
Put it another way: I have a life's worth of proof that I do not look menacing. Grade school: caught defacing the bathroom wall? She looks innocent. She can't be guilty. She's an honors student. Suspected of serially ditching science class every week for a semester? Impossible. Look at that face. Knowingly allowed her traffic violation ticket to balloon to three times its amount in late fees? Judge will go easy. People are always surprised to learn after a few months of knowing me that I'm not the goody two-shoes they assume I am. But it takes them that long. I'm a lifelong Angelena and I think that any other Angeleno can tell that (I can spot them, anyways). Walk into LAX, I guess, and all that is out the window. Airport security is not making us more secure.
by jean at December 26, 2003 10:38 PM
The airport cavity search which didn't happen may not have left you feeling more secure, but if the after airport cavity search that did happen also didn't leave you feeling more secure, I hope it left you feeling more relaxed and perhaps a little tingly :)
by chris at December 27, 2003 3:01 AM
Yeah I too hope your cavity search went well and involved latex. But this airline screening thing irks ne even though I will never fly again. They search a random sampling of persons, being careful not to single out young, single males who appear to be Arabs. Who has perpetrated most of the international terrorism involving airplanes? That would be young, single males who are Arabs. Is it prejudicial to see things as they actually are and play the percentages accordingly? Or should they search grandma and seize her knitting needle? When freaking lives are at stake I think PC dogma gets kicked to the curb.
by anna at December 27, 2003 9:50 AM
i'm sure some prejudicial searching bias is sensible. however ... http://dotlizard.com/pics/jackedup.php -- can you see the *stuff* in that car? there was only slightly less stuff when i entered the airport with the passenger floorboards up to the seat *full* of cat5, keyboards, mice, other miscellaneous peripherals, i mean c'mon. i'm middleaged & white & therefore harmless?
the prejudice that results in me having an easy time at the airport is more what i protest than any prejudice that results in young angry sweaty nervous looking arab males receive at the airport. how do they know i don't have a hot young swarthy angry arab lover who's converted me to whatever that new version of their beliefs that has them drinking and cavorting with easy women the night before they martyr themselves? there are some modern thinking terrorists out there. how did they know i wasn't fucking one of them?
maybe i have sex on the brain.
by lizard at December 27, 2003 9:33 PM
Yeah, you probably DO have sex on the brain. Good isnt it?
by Jun at December 28, 2003 8:22 AM
Liz you raise a good point about those Saudi ass-wipes. I think they also frequented strip clubs while lurking in the infidel West. They don't have that sort of temptation in their country. Although I did read that there's a thriving drug trade there.
by anna at December 28, 2003 9:44 AM
ABOUT 'FUCKING' TIME!
by BaldFatGuy at December 28, 2003 8:08 PM