Watch part of movie, pee, sleep. Repeat about 13 times.

A number of events conspired to prevent me from reaching the Land Down Under:

• I nearly missed my flight to San Francisco because United only had one and at most two agents checking in 30+ customers in economy. Fortunately, the check-in agents began pulling people on that flight out of the queue, and boarding for the flight was delayed anyways.


• I waited an extra 1.5 hours for my flight to Sydney (increasing my layover time in the San Francisco airport to 7.5 hours*) because United wanted to hold the flight for 40 people who were delayed in leaving Chicago on account of the massive thunderstorms in the Midwest. Naturally, this caused me to arrive in Sydney well after I was supposed to and I missed my flight from Sydney to Melbourne. Fortunately, the Qantas ticketing agent allowed me to take a later flight without penalty, but next time, I am flying the same airline all the way to my final destination in Australia because it was a major pain in the ass to have to switch terminals like that.

(*which was passed by talking to Nicki and Evan to a much lesser extent and playing around with my new Wi-Fi-enabled PDA, and not by shopping in Sephora as I originally intended because the store in the San Francisco airport closes early. Grrr.)

The flight to Sydney wasn't as bad as I feared it would be, mostly because I settled into a routine: I would watch part of whatever movie happened to be showing at the time, drink some water, visit the lavatory and then watch the movie some more until it put me to sleep. (This occurred on an hourly basis, and the flight was about 13 hours... hence the title of this post.) Normally I enjoy watching movies and don't fall asleep while viewing them, but the movies that were shown were extraordinarily bad and incapable of holding my attention for very long. First off was Something New, an embarrassingly cliched movie about interracial romance, and then Eight Below, which had that guy from the Fast and the Furious driving a dogsled team instead of cars, followed by Take the Lead, in which Antonio Banderas teaches ballroom dance to a bunch of inner city kids who are more interested in hip-hop. The final dance competition scene was filled with so many unreal moments it boggled my mind, but at least it was fun to watch the choreography. I wouldn't have minded watching The Ice Age: Meltdown, but the sound kept cutting out and the picture quality left much to be desired and I fell asleep. The only movie that I actually watched from nearly the beginning to the end was V for Vendetta. It wasn't as horrible as Alan Moore would have you believe, but then again, it wasn't as powerful and subtle as it might have been if someone other than the Wachowski brothers had written the dialogue.

Given the number of times I peed, it was a very good thing that I was sitting in the aisle seat. In contrast, the man in the window seat in my row was completely passed out for about 7 hours, prompting me to wonder if he had drugged himself or if he was still breathing.

Although I've been in Melbourne for 1.5 days now, I haven't taken any photos yet. I know, that's extremely unusual for me, and I'm going to blame it all on jet lag.