The Terminal

Only without Tom Hanks or Catherine Zeta-Jones or any comedy, drama or story of any kind... Well, the last part is not quite true. There's always a story. Even if you have to delve into the inane to find it. And I do. A lot. Six hours is a long time to have to sit at an airport.

I have to confess something: I am a total tech toy geek. It’s an illness I’ve had since childhood. When the MacBook Air came out, I wanted one. I didn’t want to pay thousands of dollars for it (and what's the point if you can't get that solid state drive), but I wanted one. I think I found a reasonable compromise.

My latest purchase is the ASUS EeePC. For $360, I get the smallest damn laptop I’ve ever seen. It weighs two pounds and is… well, look (and I have small hands):

tiny little laptop…

It comes with Windows XP and (fairly zippy) wireless internet, AND, to my shock and glee, a built-in web cam and microphone (we were right over the Grand Canyon here):

looking at the grand canyon

The tradeoff is that it has no disk drive and an extremely small amount of storage, but for blogging and keeping up with e-mail, it's perfect. I have my iPhone (the last manifestation of my tech illness), but I’m terrified to do anything online with it while I’m in Europe- international roaming rates are… pretty high.

This should keep this blog sufficiently supplied with tales and pictures and videos throughout Cannes. As long as the free wireless I was promised is really free. I had to do some hacking to get it for free here at LAX.

A new adventure dawns...

I’m tired. It was impossible to actually sleep last night. I was fussing over my baggage weight. I got a large bag with swiveling wheels so that I could carry the publicity material for LOOP as well as my costume changes for the festival (and the makeup and hair care products/devices that entails). Then I realized that combined with my own luggage, everything weighed about 75lbs. There is a 50 pound-per-bag limit for checked luggage before you are charged an extra $50-$100. You can have TWO such 50lb bags, however. I ended up packing a 25lb bag within a 50lb bag for easy transport and split them up at the luggage counter. Problem solved. I don’t know why that makes them happy, but it does. That and putting your shower gel bottles in a ziplock bag...

I took the bus at sunrise to get to the airport where, after pulling my matryoshka luggage trick, I stood in the security line for an hour and argued with them over why it was NOT okay for the Betacam screening copy of LOOP to go through the x-ray machine. “It should be okay,“ said he. “Should be.” Well that makes me feel better. It’s only like the most important piece of this trip… They finally agreed to a hand inspection explaining that for security reasons everything MUST get x-rayed but that they were doing me a favor. Meanwhile, my pencil sharpener (read: razor blade) managed to miraculously get through these "magical" x-rays… Not that I intend to use it for evil. Unless I draw an evil character, and even then, I’m sure I will be putting him to good use.

Now I have to wait at LAX for six hours before I actually leave for Cannes, which is then a ten-and-a-half hour flight... Why I am going from Colorado to California to France (well, London, then France) is a long story. Suffice it to say, I’ve only completed the first few hours of my journey and I’m already tired.

We hit some heavy turbulence leaving Denver. That’s pretty normal going into the mountains (that rugged terrain makes all sorts of exciting air currents and is one of the reasons you hear of planes going down in the mountains). I don’t like flying. Actually, that’s not true. I love flying. I don’t like the idea of crashing. It doesn’t seem like it would be pleasant. Probably shouldn’t have brought the entire first season of Lost on my iPhone, but… I suppose if I had to crash, it might as well be with Jack and Sawyer and Kate and the gang of cool characters on that show. Especially Sawyer… ahem.

Wormholes and time warps and magical islands notwithstanding, my only major obstacle getting to France should be fatigue.