Strangers on a plane

Tomorrow I will be on a plane going to Tampa, Florida (kind of like the tourist destinations in Florida...without being fun). Don’t get me wrong, I love my family, though there is a reason I moved very far away from them. It is very stressful to be around them, my dad and I are too much alike to be left in the same room for very long, and then my mom gets put in the middle of it and hates that. Then there is Miles who…well…he’s Miles. And now throw in a lot of family members who I haven’t seen in years (some of them since I was about 8 or so) and that makes for a Thanksgiving of ‘no thanks’.

Now would also be a good time to explain my irrational fear of sitting next to strangers. There should be a show about people with fears that don’t really make sense. I love meeting new people, but I hate/am terrified of having to sit next to someone I don’t know. Particularly at movies or on planes or a restaurant (if for some reason I had to sit next to someone I didn’t know). It may be that I don’t get to pick that I’m sitting next to them, or who exactly I would like to sit by, but am assigned someone to sit by. And that makes me nervous because I don’t know anything about them, and if I don’t like them just by looking at them and then get stuck sitting by them, it freaks me out. What if they try to talk to me? What if they try to talk to me about things that we have opposing views on and they think I’m crazy because I hate animals and children? Or what if they smell bad, or are kind of large and take up too much room?

Sidenote:  I HATE the ‘what if’ game…unless it’s about sitting next to strangers, or thunderstorms…because those bitches will kill you.