Here is something that has always irritated me since I can even remember, and probably before that. After a long airplane ride, like six hours, and the plane lands, you naturally want to get up and get out of the plane, right? I’ve been flying long distances since infancy and even though I hold it in now, I’ve never stopped being the baby on the flight who’s wailing away in anguish. Sitting there, completely still, crammed into a seat between two other people for multiple hours, is a horrible monotonous experience I have to endure far too often for my sanity. There’s a lot of things you have to put up with when you’re flying.

In my travels via flight, I have been seated by many memorable characters, including a puking girl, a man with constant diarrhea, a kid with a squeaky voice and a never-ending arsenal of dumb questions, a mentally-challenged fellow with an irresistible urge to make cow noises while rocking back and forth, and a couple who were both cranky and fat as well as old and smelly. Have you ever sat by fat people on a plane? Two at once? I’d have to really have some hate to wish that upon anyone. Fortunately I wasn’t between the two cranky piles of lard, but with the width of their asses combined, I spent the flight with only one of my butt cheeks on my seat and the other in the aisle, all while dealing with people in line for the bathroom, spewing nasty smells even worse than the body odor of this unpleasant couple.

This is the kind of shit you have to put up when flying. Then when the plane finally lands and you want to get up, scream, and run, or at least briskly walk out of the plane, no one else seems to have this same desire. Passengers slowly lift themselves to a stance. I watch them and feel as though I’m the only one in the vicinity without suffering from arthritis. No matter their age, each moves like a 120-year-old sloth, groaning like they’re lifting a truck, stretching as if they are competing in the Kona Ironman tomorrow, and taking their sweet-ass time retrieving ridiculously large carry-on luggage from the overhead storage compartments.

Meanwhile, I could have grabbed my backpack and walked off the plane within mere seconds. It’s not difficult to do. No. People have to take their time. I often say, “Excuse me. Pardon me. Some of us would like to get out of the plane.” Others apparently like to relish being inside the plane, breathing the odor-thick air, listening to babies cry. I can’t blame the babies. They are only expressing how I feel and they don’t have inhibitions yet. Later on in life is when they’ll need to alcohol to express how they feel, but for now they haven’t developed that dependence yet. They express how they feel, which is hungry, thirsty, bored, and needing to relieve the bladder.

Please get me out of the plane! This is always how I feel, especially if I have a connecting flight. Too many times I have had to run across airports to make it in time to sit for another several hours, covered in sweat, hungry and dehydrated with the lack of time to stop and get something to eat at the overpriced airport restaurants. I’m dehydrated especially, since now they don’t let you bring fluids into security.

Security gets tighter and tighter. Okay, I know why we think we have to have elevated security. The world is full of messed-up people with strange beliefs, so we have to worry about getting blown up on planes. Still, I think I’d rather take a chance. Honestly. If someone wants to blow up a plane, making everyone dump their water bottles is not going to stop it. Have you ever noticed though, that they have to search through your bags before getting on the plane and they make announcments not to leave them unsupervised, but when your bags show up late, they leave them out in the open? Someone could put a bomb in it before you go home.

Just between you and me, I don’t think it’s about security. I think it’s about making a few bucks. Think about it. You can’t take a bottle of water through security, but once you’re inside, you are provided with restaurants and vending machines full of ice cold beverages for your enjoyment at a not-so reasonable price. A terrorist could mix that shit up with the other ingredients and have a bomb ready in no time.

They don’t care about you or your safety. The whole security thing is to keep paranoid people calm. If a plane was really such a dangerous place to be in, and they truly were concerned about your safety, they would open the damn doors and let you out faster. Passengers at risk for an unnecessary amount of time? Screw that! Let them out! No. That’s not the way it is. They don’t care about you. They care about your money. It’s no different than any other business. Figure it out. Once you’ve paid for a ticket and you’re in the plane, they don’t care about how crazy you go while sitting there enduring what your surroundings dish out.