In Flight

I am a notorious scavenger of print media. Walking off of a flight, I always scan the seat back pockets for reading material left behind by other passengers. (The first class cabin is particularly fertile territory.) Anyone can snag a Times (New York) and a Journal (Wall Street) on a flight out of LaGuardia, the USA Today is available for free at hotels across the country, and there's occasionally something intriguing in the in-flight magazine. For me, an interesting find might be a Washington Post, an LA Times, the Economist, Harpers, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair. (And I have to admit that every once in a while when I'm feeling totally brain dead, I do indulge in Cosmo or People... and make myself even more brain dead.) I enjoy collecting papers from several cities on the same day and then checking who headlines what where. I like comparing the 25-cent dailies in a city to the main publication. I do sometimes feel badly about mooching and not supporting the publishers, but I figure I'm saving paper and money and flight attendants' time, so it can't be all that bad.

When it gets dark I often just look out the window and think... and sleep :-)