Flying: The World Getting Bigger

As Flight attendants we spend the majority of our workday on airplanes.  We feel like bartenders sometimes, listening to peoples problems while we serve them cocktails in the back galley.  With all the cutbacks in flights and service, and the new price hikes on food and drinks, their problems inevitably seem to deal with the declining level of service in American's Airline Industry.  

The flights are getting expensive, there are less of them, and you get less while you're on the plane.  Yes, it's all true.  

To a certain extent it's fair to blame it on the Companies.  Most of the major carriers in the United States were short sighted when it came to fuel costs.  They didn't see the days of $140 barrels of oil coming, but can you honestly say you did?  Only Southwest had the guts to hedge an enormous amount of their fuel back at $60 a barrel (oh for the wisdom of hindsight). 

The days of cheap tickets are gone.  The airlines have had to raise ticket prices and fill all their flights to capacity just to stay in business and the consumers are livid about it.  Why hasn't anyone invented an hybrid plane yet?  

It's just not fair that passengers only get what they pay for.  Remember when you could by a middle seat and be pretty confident that at least one of the seats next to you would be empty? Twice the space for half the price of a first class ticket.  It can't happen anymore.  These are publicly traded companies and even with full planes they're losing money.  

Frequent fliers are complaining that they're getting nickel and dimed to death every trip. They paid a bundle of money for the ticket and then they have to pay to take their bags along?  Don't make the mistake of thinking that airlines are adding fees for the extras to pad their wallets, they're doing it to keep the price of the tickets down.  The logic is that if they keep the seats as cheap as possible, and tack on fees for the food and luggage, they'll get more people on the plane and it's working.  Should they simply raise the price of the ticket to cover the fuel and food and provide top quality service?  That's what people want isn't it?  No, it isn't.  Most people are booking their flights online through sites like Orbitz and Travelocity.  These websites list ticket prices side by side and the consumer, nine times out of ten, will select the flight with the cheapest price.  The websites don't compare the levels of service, or the additional fees, they just list the cheapest possible ways to get your butt in the seat. Consumers have to pay for the extra's but apparently they don't want to know what they're paying for.

It's perfectly natural for people to complain when a situation, such as airline travel, changes for the worse.  But the hostility is misplaced.  Grumble about the excessive oil speculation that is driving fuel prices up.  Grumble about the people who were so concerned with esthetics that they wouldn't allow oil rigs or windmills to be built off the coasts of their million dollar beach homes.  Please, don't grumble about airline prices reflecting their expenses.

My concern isn't because I'm tired of hearing passengers complain, it's because they're starting to complain to the government.  Fliers are quickly ensuring their own misery.  Our government has been greedily eyeing the airlines for a decade and nationalization of the industry is just a few senate bills away. 

If you're unsatisfied with the level of service now, wait until the airline no longer has to be profitable.  Don't like CEO's?  Replace them with bureaucrats and see if you get any service at all.  If you think the boarding lines are long now while the private companies are in charge, wait to see what happens when the people that run the DMV are in control.  

The industry is scrambling to balance the demands of the passengers with the skyrocketing costs of maintaining their business.  Once prices have leveled (we can only pray that eventually they will) flights will be as predictable as they ever were, which still means that flights will cancel and delay, but in smaller numbers.  Please give them a chance before we hand the industry over to the government where it will become predictably horrible. 

Flying: Exploring a New City

"There are only two things I hate in this world.  People who are intolerant of other peoples cultures... and the Dutch." 

~Michael Caine as Nigel Powers in Goldmember

Yesterday I returned from my first trip to Amsterdam.  After only 26 hours in town, I can say it's already one of my top four favorite European cities (in the company of Berlin, Prague, and Munich, not necessarily in that order).  There are several methods of exploring a city and a culture and depending on my mood or my traveling partners, I've tried most of them.  

Of course, the best way to discover a city and to really come to an understanding of the people and culture is to live there for a some extended period of time.  I haven't had the luxury, and anyway, I'm still trying to discover the pluralistic culture of the United States and I've been here for exactly 23 years tomorrow.  

My explorations are simply the wandering inquisitions of a traveler.  I hesitate to say tourist (though that's clearly what I am) because I have a strong distaste for being seen as a tourist.  I don't like to see the overweight Americans in their hawaiian shirts and flip flops walking around with goofy hats and large cameras.  It's embarrassing to be seen as an American, and not because of our current political mishaps.  It's embarrassing because I've seen so many obnoxious tourists who show up to take pictures and then want everything else to be like home.  They want foreign pictures and their own culture.  They will assume that everyone speaks english and get irritated if someone doesn't understand them.  The typical American tourist wants to see the sights but is unwilling to learn about or explore the culture that produced them.  They radiate ignorance.  I suppose that I'm being judgmental but its human nature to generalize.  I don't know if my generalizations are more or less fair than those cultures whom we impose ourselves on, but either way, I'd like to be exempted from them (this is probably also human nature).  

To avoid the discomfort and so I can comfortably sit back and judge other people (I don't mean that to sound arrogant, I'm just pointing out that I can see the hypocritical edge of what I'm saying), I usually go out alone the first time I'm in a city.  Our flight into Amsterdam was delayed by a few hours by a small mechanical problem with the auto-throttle.  We made up some time in the air but still arrived about three and a half hours late.  I took a two hour nap to save up some energy for a day of meandering and headed out into the city.  

I made an assumption about the city which I quickly discovered to be wrong.  Europeans, in my experience, dress significantly better than Americans.  If you're wandering around Paris in the summer for example, and you see someone dressed in shorts and sneakers, or sandals,  the smart money would say that they're an American tourist (although Australians and Americans dress about the same).  

When I got dressed to walk around town, with my previously stated attitude about being seen as a tourist, I tried my best to dress like a European.  Black Lacoste Shoes, fitted jeans, and a polo shirt.  I picked up a map at the Hotel's front desk and set off towards one of the Shopping districts.  One of the more charming aspects of Amsterdam is it's abundance of pedestrian only side streets filled with small restaurants and shops.  At first I was surprised (and not the nice kind of "oh, you remembered that my birthday is tomorrow" surprised) to see that the shops and cafe's were full of people wearing t-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops.  It looked like the city was 70% tourist.  Then I noticed the languages.  There was a contrast in what I thought I should be hearing and what I was.  I heard an occasional American accent above the flip-flops but mostly, those shoes were carrying Dutch speakers.   

The expensive shoes with nice shirts were carrying different languages, English english, German, and French, the real tourists of the city.  My outfit was a disaster.  I was more likely to be mistaken for French than American.  I should have worm my shorts after all.  

Holland's relaxed culture, in comparison to the rest of Europe that I've visited, blew me away.  How was I supposed to prepare for that?  It was a good start to the day.  A reminder that I should be less assuming about the places I visit, which is an American practice that I rail against.  The Dutch proved themselves to be the least judgmental and most kind people that I've encountered as a whole.  The fact that they're all enormously tall and beautiful (almost as beautiful as my girlfriend) didn't hurt either.  Amsterdam was a city far out of my previous experience, from the hookers (I just looked) to the marijuana (I didn't inhale).  

After a few hours of wandering along the tree lined canals, and sitting in a square for a while I returned to the hotel, changed into shorts and flip-flops and met up with the rest of the crew for some drinks and Dinner.  

Writing: The Days I Dream About

Yesterday was one of those encouraging days as a writer that happen only occasionally.  I couldn't stop writing.  Usually, I can't stop thinking or I can't stop daydreaming or I can't stop wasting time doing the assortment of other things I do.  But yesterday, I sat down at my computer at 9 in the morning, opened up the word file that contains my novel draft and just started typing.  It was flowing and the best feeling of all was that it didn't feel like it was flowing out of me.  It felt like the story caught a hold of my idea and started running away with it and it didn't stop until someone was dead.

The problem I have now is the days that aren't like yesterday, which is most of them.  If the story felt so very natural then, what about the days when it doesn't feel that natural?  Are those pages I'm going to have to go back and edit or were they completely wasted days of writing.  The second draft, which is the one I'm working on now after my disaster of a first draft was filed away, is up to 94 pages now.   Most days I get about 3 pages of decent prose written but I can remember three days, including yesterday, when it flowed so naturally that I got about 15 pages of decent writing done.  

I can't claim to be an experienced novelist but that doesn't stop me from forming theories about writing novels which I can espouse here.  As I've said before, writing is work.  The stories which seem so important and exciting  when they're floating around our heads require hard work and discipline to make exciting and important on paper.  But I've found that reading a novel is a lot like writing one.  It has to grab your attention and flow quickly in the beginning or it's not worth continuing.  Then there are parts that are work.  The characters have to be developed and nuanced.  It takes effort and can be slow in both the reading and writing.  Then comes the payoff.  The sections or chapters of the book, interlaced between the work, that are fun and quick, both in the reading and writing.  It's why writers write and readers read. 

So thats the encouragement for both you and me, mysterious readers.  I've put in weeks of work and yesterday was payday.  It feels good to know that the work I've put in has a payoff and it makes it easier to go into the next section or weeks of work with the memory of success still in mind.   

For now, with the encouragement fresh in mind, it's back to the fiction factory and on to the next blank page with the words that have yet to be written.  

Flying: On the Verge of Unemployment

It's been about 24 hours since the airlines posted their second quarter earnings report and as expected, they all lost billions.  My airline lost just under 3 billion dollars and concurently anounced that they'll be cutting thousands of jobs.  Over a thousand salaried positions and 5,500 front line employees by the end of 2009, which means Pilots, Customer Service, Mechanics, and of course Flight Attendants.  They've already announced the furlough of 950 Pilots, which is part of that 5,500 so that leaves 4,550 jobs to be cut from the other three categories. 

Lets do the math The company employs about 16000 Flight Attendants (of which I'm about 400 from the bottom), 6600 Pilots, 7000 Customer Service Representatives (CSRs), and 5500 Mechanics.  To achieve the goal of cutting 4550 jobs they need to cut about 16% of each of the remaining three.  That means 1,120 CSRs, 880 Mechanics, and 2,550 job cuts from the ranks of the FA's.  

Flight attendants tend to have a higher rate of attrition than most other groups of employees, probably because along with the CSRs we tend to be treated the worst, so we can assume that in 16 months leading up to the end of the 2009, anywhere from 1,100 to 1,700 flight attendants will quit, retire, or be let go due to breeches of company or FAA policy.   That means that the company will have to let go of between 860 and 1,460 flight attendants.  

But ah, the beauty of a Unionized Job, and believe me, I don't say that often.  According to our contract, as with most flight attendant contracts, the company can't just say, "Well nice having worked with you, you're fired."  We have furloughs.  The company can place us on involuntary furlough status starting from the bottom of the seniority list, about 400 people below me and working their way up.  An involuntary furlough means that we aren't working, we aren't getting paid, and we don't have any benefits, but the company has to hire us back before the can hire any new people, obviously hiring back in seniority order from the most senior to the least.  However, there is also such a thing as a voluntary furlough.  Voluntary furloughs are awarded to FAs who request them, from the most senior to the least.  If you take voluntary furlough you continue to accrue seniority (which is good because our pay scale gets higher the longer you work for the company)  and keep your medical benefits and free flying benefits.    Because I make about $20/hr less than some of the more senior FAs, the company usually likes to offer voluntary furloughs before involuntary.  

My job comes down to how many voluntary furloughs they offer and how many people take them.  I really don't want to leave the airlines.  Not yet.  I may occasionally complain about passengers, or management, but after all of that, after I'm off the plane and wandering around the different cities of the United States, Europe, Asia, South America, or occasionally the Middle East, how can I really dislike my job?  I find myself looking up at the Eiffel Tower, or raising a glass at the oldest Beer hall in the world, or pouring a glass of Argentina's best wine a mile from where the grapes were grown and fermented and it's hard to believe that they pay me to be there.  Well, they used to pay me to be there.  The best I can do is wait and see how much longer it can last.  

Writing: Beating Writer's Block

I'm back at home today, not scheduled to fly any trips and so, as usual, I intended to work on my story.  I got about a page written then stopped.  I'm sure it's top quality stuff, I don't know, I haven't read it, but it isn't enough.  I'm having writer's block but I don't believe in writer's block, especially not in the middle of a story.  This might not be true for all writers.  For some of the great geniuses of writing, creativity may come and go with their personal muses.  But for most writers, and by most I mean some fraction upwards of 99/100, creativity comes from hard work.  

The notion of writers block implies that there is that universal creative muse or muses that comes and goes, jumping from writer to writer, who ever the gods are smiling on that day.  Ok, so maybe it doesn't imply anything about a mythical creature, but it does imply that a person can be creative and innovative one day, and then a bad, inspiration-free writer the next day.  My senior year in college, Michael Chabon came in as a favor to our professor Chuck Kinder, who was also his former Senior Seminar teacher and did a Q&A for some of the seniors and the MFA students before a reading he was doing that night.  He had a slew of good anecdotes and stories from when he was starting as a writer.  One thing that I remember him saying he learned from a roommate while working on his MFA at the University of California at Irvine, "In order to be a good writer you have to sit on your ass."  

Creativity and good writing doesn't come from inspiration, it comes from making mistakes and then fixing them.  That means that my writer's block isn't a lack of inspiration, it comes from a lack of discipline.  I'm lazy and I can't let there be too many days where I just don't feel like putting the work in.  I suppose it happens to most writers.  

Somedays, like today, it's hard for me to see the big picture.  A writer, at least a beginning writer in my position is an artist because he puts seemingly endless effort and energy into something that he hopes someday, someone will value.  There is no promise of a pay out.  There is only the hope of a paycheck someday, even a strong belief that the work will stand on it's own.  But it's easy to lose sight of that goal, or dream, or belief in the work when there is no paycheck or praise but there is a TV with 500 high definition channels and a book that I'm half way through or a nice cozy bed where I never seem to spend enough time.  I hope I don't end up like John Kennedy Toole, who's "Confederacy of Dunce's" was published and won the pulitzer after he killed himself in despair.  Alright, so I'm not even close to despair.  Just frustrated.  

This post isn't really intended for you, oh mysterious reader, this is for me.  This is a warm up and a reminder that what I'm doing has value somewhere, sometime, and it's worth my time even if I can't see why.  

Thanks for reading.  I wish I had more to tell you, but I have a novel to write.  

Writing: Working around Genre

There is something that has been bothering me about my writing.  It's not a new question or one that is in any way unique to me but here it is.  Is what I'm writing Literary Fiction or is it Genre Fiction?  You can't answer that because you, unless you are one of my very few and confidential readers, don't know the story.  But even as a stranger to me, I'd like you to think about what makes something literary and what casts a novel into one of the genres (I'd like you to think about it because then I won't be alone in my thoughts here).  

My guess is that because I have a degree in fiction writing, and in a sense I aspire to write true Literary fiction, I worry unduly about being cast as a Genre Fiction writer.  I shouldn't think about it.  My only thought should be about writing something that is good enough to be published and sold but I can' help myself.  It's my professor's fault, I think.  They push so hard for their students to write Literary Fiction, by which they mean fiction with lasting value, that create a sort of paranoia about publishing something that is not worthy of the prestigious teaching by which we were instructed.  But what is it that I feel I'm supposed to be writing?

 It's easy to prove that the genres overlap each other.  Go into half of the bookstores in America (and I suspect around the world though I can't always read the language) and you'll see a section of books under the category "Science Fiction and Fantasy" (since both are technically categories of Fiction it would more accurately be called Fiction: Science and Fantasy). I'll grant that sometimes the distinction is obvious.  For example a book about Robot's becoming more powerful than Humans is obviously in the science fiction category while a book about a teenager who finds out on his eleventh Birthday that he's a Wizard is clearly more in the fantasy section.  

Where the lines becomes blurred is when it comes to little green men.  There are little green men in both the fictional world of fantasy and the fictional world of science.   In fantasy they're called goblins and in Science Fiction they're called martians, or Venutians or Plutonians or something along that line of thinking.  They both exist in a fictional world that the human race has yet to discover.  They can both be living among us without our knowledge and they can both be good or evil, depending on the authors needs.  In fact the only difference I see between them is whether they are killed by swords or by plasma ray guns (and even those can switch back and forth between genres).  

Genre's are really commercial tools used to rope people into buying more books by this or that publishing house.  I don't really like them but I understand their use and even necessity.  But since it's used as a marketing tool, then do we have to consider Literary Fiction a genre as well?  I think so.  But the problem is, there is no definite distinction between what falls into literary fiction and what falls into one of the other genres.  Generally, I suppose, Literary Fiction is fiction that deals with characterization more than plot.  Fiction intended to give us a deeper understanding of the human condition.  

My general question is this: does "The Lord of the Rings," which vividly depicts Bilbo Baggins age old struggle with power and metaphoric sin, do less to describe the Human Condition than "To Kill A Mocking Bird," which depicts a society struggling with it's age old condition of the Power of the Majority?  I don't think so, but "To Kill A Mocking Bird," won the Pulitzer.

That is the crux of what defines a literary book as opposed to a genre book in the long run. First, it's Post-Modern.  Second, it made the short list for some Literary Award.  I think that as a writer I can't write to win awards, I can only write the story I have to tell without worrying too much about genre.  My only hope, and it is perhaps a vain and unimportant hope, is that if the writing is good that it can make your short list, oh mysterious reader.  You are the true audience.  You and I are the only ones that matter.

Flying: The Dreaded 747

I'm headed to Frankfurt tomorrow and I won't be back until Sunday night.  I'll try to update this as soon as I can but on Sunday I'll have just flown for 8 hours and not in one of those comfy first class suits with the 15" On Demand TV's.  I'll be sitting on a cold hard jump seat when I'm sitting at all and the rest of the time I'll be catering to 310 large Germans and even larger Americans who have been crammed into the Economy section of the plane and served food that isn't easy on the digestive system.  Glamorous, isn't it?  

I don't normally complain but tomorrow I'm flying on my least favorite plane, the Boeing 747.  That's the older plane with two levels and the economy section that stretches from LA to DC.  I'd like to take a minute to beg for mercy or at least a little understanding from those of you, mysterious strangers, who will be  riding in the back of our 747 at some point. 

 There are typically six flight attendants in the back who are responsible for the service and safety of 310 passengers who think that we're waiters and should provide service accordingly.  We aren't waiters.  I can assure you that if the FAA didn't require flight attendants for emergencies, the economy cabin would have three vending machines.  But we're nice people.  At least, some of us are nice people, maybe even most of us,  so imagine the predicament we find ourselves in.  We want to provide you with the best service we can.  But restaurant quality, even bad restaurant quality isn't possible.  

The situation: Lets say that on a busy night in a restaurant one waiter is given five tables that seat four people each (I know, I've worked in a restaurant).  That means that at any given time, he has no more than 20 people to attend to.  In addition to that he has a fully functional kitchen, a soda fountain, and one set of staff in the kitchen dedicated to cooking and another dedicated to cleaning.  

Now in the back of the 747 there are just the six of us.  In a restaurant that would be enough to cover 120 people.  We have 190 more than that.  In addition we are given about 200 chicken or beef meals and 110 pasta meals which supposedly is the breakdown of what people ask for.  It isn't, trust me.  If that isn't enough to ensure a disappointing service, our kitchen is the size of most people's bedroom closet and consists of 5 carts of food that plug in to cook themselves and 5 carts of drinks with cupboards full of extra coffee and water.  We can only fit one cart down the aisle at a time and no, I'm sorry, we just don't have room for your trash on the meal cart, you'll have to sit with it until we come back with the trash cart which is really just the meal cart after we've given out the meals.  Oh, and if we run out of food, we have an apology card that we'd like to give you for some extra frequent flier miles.  But at least we can take your trash right away.  

"Is beef alright?  No?  Would you like a piece of bread instead?"  

I feel bad for the passengers.  At least I feel bad for them until they start yelling at me.  

Okay, so it's not all that bad.  A dinner service, a few water services, a breakfast service and by 8 am I'm in Frankfurt, Germany in my downtown hotel room taking a quick nap before I go out.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet, but I'm sure it's going to involve Gummy Bears and Beer (not at the same time).

  

The Birth of a new Weblog

I've been thinking of starting a blog for a while now.  I'm not sure if I'm ever going to share it or not but the blog is the modern day equivalent of keeping a journal and I've been told that writers should keep a journal.  I don't actually know any writers that keep journals.  They tend to be private things and writers are in the business of putting their writing 'out there.'  A blog seems to be the most natural combination of the two.  

So here I am, in case I ever share this site.  I'm about to turn 23 and currently working as a Flight attendant for one of the Legacy Carriers.  Airlines tend to be picky about what is said about them so I'll leave their name out just incase they ever go looking for an excuse to fire me.  I graduated in April of 2007 from the University of Pittsburgh with a B.A. in Fiction Writing.  

My life right now is hectic.  I'm working on the second draft of my first novel, tentatively titled, "Play to the River."  Darting across the world and finding time to write is challenging.  I just returned from Paris two days ago where I wrote until my laptop battery died (note to self: buy a power converter).  

It was raining.  I tend to get a lot of writing done when I'm in a hotel room and there's no where to go.  This isn't usually the case in Europe.  I prefer walking around town and drinking in the sights, the culture, and the wine (or beer if I'm in Germany).   

Then I come home and I have to balance writing with a relationship (my beautiful girlfriend is pictured with me in my profile) and the knowledge that I have to go back to work the next day or after some number of days if I'm lucky. 

Now, there's something I have to tell you in case you haven't noticed: I'm really, really good at grammar and spelling.  Really?  No.  Not really.  The sad truth is that I just don't care all that much.  When I'm writing I tend to ignore them both and focus on the content.  I usually plan on correcting them later.  My copy is pretty well cleaned up after the second or third read through. Ok, fine, it's readable by the fourth or fifth.  Who's counting anyway?  

I'm going to try to be better.  It makes life easier to get it done right on the first post but it just isn't always possible.  Mistakes will be made.  If you, oh mysterious stranger reading my blog, notice something grammatically incorrect or an error of punctuation and would like to comment on that, I accept your admonishments.  I'll go back and fix it. 

I realize that up until now in my first post you may not know what the whole page is about.  That I hope to amend.  Tentatively, this is how my blog is going to work.  Some of my entries (I can't bring myself to call them blogs, it sounds too unpleasant.  Before the internet, if someone asked me what a blog was I would have probably guessed that it's the stain that dog vomit leaves on the carpet) will be about my life as a flight attendant, some will be about my life as a writer.  It will depend on what mask I'm wearing at that particular moment.  If your only interested in one or the other then I'll make it easy for you to skip around in the posts.  They'll be titled "Writing:" or "Flying:" and I hope you can enjoy one or the other if not both.  

So here it is my mysterious new friends, The Writing In The Sky.