Duh, I spaced for a few days. I meant to post another entry from my NCY travel journal. For you repeat visitors, you'll be happy to learn this chronicles yet another bad experience with a kid.
August 3, 2006, Day 5 of My NYC Trip
Non-smokers have it easy. If someone is smoking around them, they can say, "Excuse me, would you put that cigarette out, please? It's bothering me."
For those of us who find kids annoying, we are not as lucky. I think child perverts are regarded more highly than we are. After all, they love kids, albeit, too much and in the wrong way. For people like me, who would rather stick thorns in our eyes than have to sit next to a kid on a plane, there is no sympathy. There must be something wrong with us, people think. We have unresolved issues, we are told. Yadda yadda yadda, would you put that kid out, please?
I sat in row 42A on Continental Flight 569 today. It is the window seat on the last row. A 12-year-old girl sat next to me and she felt that the armrest between us belonged to her. She didn't actually mind sharing, to her credit, we just had to have our arms touching. I didn't want kid cooties, so I huddled over as far as I could to the far side of my seat. It didn't matter, she kept elbowing me. I counted. She invaded my space 36 times on a 5-hour flight. I kept saying, as politely yet frostily as I could, "Excuse me." Meaning, "Excuse you." She kept saying, "Sorry," in a tone that suggested she resented having to apologize. Her mother kept talking about me as if I wouldn't hear. "Just give her room. She's one of those." I'm not sure what 'one of those" meant but I assumed she meant I was either a) weird or b) a child-hater. By the way, I don't hate children. I loathe their parents for having them and then forcing them on me. Big difference.
At one point, the kid got up and the mother leaned over and said, "I'm sorry if she moves around so much. She has a condition."
The child seemed fine to me, just rude. Perhaps that was the condition the mother meant.
