Good afternoon everyone! I hope everyone's having a fantastic week. It's already Thursday, which means the weekend is approaching and after a few more classes and homework assignments there will be plenty of room to chill.
So as you know from my last blog post, I had the opportunity to go to the lovely west over Labor Day. I wasn't ready for what Idaho and Wyoming had in store for me. Idaho's a crazy place, I'm lucky I got out of there alive with all the fun I had. And on top of all of it, I got to visit the worlds busiest airport... Atlanta.
Atlanta to me is one of the coolest places on Earth. It is the central hub for a huge percentage of all airline traffic. Think about that; anyone who calls themselves a traveler knows Atlanta as the command center of the world. More pairs of flights meet in Atlanta than any other single location in the KNOWN UNIVERSE. More people come and go out of those 7 buildings than anywhere else on Earth. There's 500,000 people packed into the square mile of terminal space at any time of the day, any day of the year, consistently. Three huge planes carry up to 500 people are taking off and landing every 45 seconds. 45 seconds... That means in the time you can hold your breath, over a thousand people have just blasted into motion.
Atlanta reminds me of Buzz Lightyear's impression of Pizza Planet in the movie Toy Story. Loud and booming jet blasts are consistently audible from all over the complex; announcements are being made in seven different languages every couple seconds; trains are hauling thousands of people across to connecting flights. It's just so fucking cool.
Inside the concourse, from standing in the middle of the long rectangle-shaped building, you literally can't see the end of the complex in either direction. It's huge. And the wide hallways are crammed full of fast-walking people headed towards one of the 50 planes parked at that particular concourse. And there's SEVEN of those concourses.
And what's perhaps the most impressive aspect of Atlanta, is that in order to transfer a half a million people every two hours, there has to be an army of thousands of workers ensure everything runs perfectly smoothly. The operations involved to have such a spaceport is beyond our time. It's futuristic. It's a marvel of engineering.
And no one but me respects it! Everyone complains and bitches and moans about having to connect in Atlanta! No one seems to realize how much of a privilege it is to get to see such advanced creation of human technology! If we met an islander from a third world country, who's never experienced western culture at all, and we took him to the Atlanta airport... his head would explode. Zero percent of stressed travelers seem to realize that when changing planes in Atlanta you're experience the peak of human intelligence in attempt to shrink the globe.
If places like Atlanta don't exist, then mankind would have no chance at shrinking the solar system, or shrinking the galaxy, or the universe. After flying across the globe we can learn to fly across bigger things. It's progress and it's not going anywhere. 100 years ago, if we told the president that one day we'd pass 100,000,000 people through a single point in the map every year (and that's only one airport!) he wouldn't believe it. We're living in the future, and it's fucking cool.
Next comes space travel, to which Virgin Airlines begins service in 2014. And in 50-100 years when that becomes the norm (like air travel is today), everyone will be bitching about having to change spaceships on Moon rather than flying direct to Mars. Then a century after that everyone will bitch about space-lag due to the year and date change involved with interplanetary travel. That's exciting. Thank God the dark ages are over and we can use are unnecessarily developed minds for cool shit now.
In other news, tomorrow I'll be heading over to a comic book store to buy some Magic the Gathering cards! That's right, I'm getting in touch with my inner-nerd. I've always enjoyed the works of make-believe and fantasy; my entertainment history proves this to be true, World of Warcraft, Skyrim, etc. So the reason I've seemingly arbitrarily landed on Magic the Gathering cards as a medium of appeasing my imagination is because many of the guys in my dorm are really really into it. And I am not above conforming.
See, a lot of people think conforming is the devil. They think since you are an individual, you should make your own decisions with no exceptions! Those people usually don't have many friends. I'm not one of those people; I'm not above joining someone in their interests. I mean right now quite a few of my RA friends play Magic the Gathering, and it looks like fun. And since they are my friends, I will probably have a lot of fun if I join them. So now I'm excited to go to the comic book store with my friends. Sure I'll probably look like Leonard, Sheldon, Howard, and Raj, spending a Friday night in a comic book store, but I'll bet money I have a blast.
So that wraps up this blog post. Hopefully after reading this you'll never bitch about flying through Atlanta again. I'm off to ROTC class soon, and then I have some homework to wrap up, then I'll hit the gym, then I don't know what else is in store. Tomorrow after my two hours of classes, I'm going for a nice fast ride down Old Frankfort Road through the horse farms and then I'll have time to myself until the comic book store trip. Then it'll be magic magic magic all weekend. #Stoked. Until then...
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