speaking of holiday cheer

the beautiful thing about southwest's boarding group scheme is that it shows which people, plain as day, are immoral dirtbags looking to dick everyone else over. thankfully there are very few of these, so you know that most of the other people on the plane got your back. although if your life depended on it, they might not give you their second bag of peanuts. who can say.

i anticipated an easy flight home last night, despite my BWI layover. i mean, everyone is fat and hungover from xmas, everyone is broke but still got presents. nobody is in a rush to get home to go back to work (except me, of course). it should be pretty chill.

i got to the airport early amid mass hysteria about 'new search protocols' and 'unusually high volume' (the only thing that causes 'unusually high volume,' in my experience, is a combo of greasy food and 5 or more beers). so i was first in line in the A boarding group; great. 2 hours tick by.

the other flight lands, people deplane. a middle-aged muslim woman in a head scarf with her poor subservient daughter in tow was squaking in line C, exclaiming that she had an A boarding pass. several helpful samaritans pointed out that she was in the wrong line and had best go over to the end of our line. she went off about how long she waited and how she was not going to get behind other people, despite her error. as we were leaving raleigh and half of the patrons were black women, i did not think her tactics were going to be successful, since they all know what it's like to have to go to the back of the bus.

i waited for her to approach me and ask if she could get in line ahead of me, like all the devious old bags at the post office who remark upon the "complicated appearance" of my mail and wouldn't i like to let an old lady just go ahead and buy some stamps. and of course i would, because i'm a considerate young person. but no; she did the unthinkable. she retracted the aisle tape herself (egads! but no alarms went off) and made to jump all 3 lines.

disinterested and obedient drone that i am, i watched to see how it would all unfold. the airport dude came over and removed the aisle tape from my line and i approached the boarding kiosk. burka lady tried to match my stride with her waddle, but her miniscule stature and bound feet (wait, wrong cultural cliche) were no match for my strident aryan-ness. i pushed my boarding pass past hers amid her garbled protests. the dude was confused and asked what was going on. i said the lady had made a mistake in her boarding group but somehow expected to cut the entire line without asking, which triggered her pent-up string of defensive slurs hissed at me in a contemptuous voice. i attempted to reason with her in the "fair's fair" language of our glourious nation, but she said "i don't want to talk to you anymore" and spat a hateful string of urdu curses likely defaming my mother's goat and its progeny.

by this time the dude at the kiosk had a tentative grip on my boarding pass, so i spun on my heel and headed toward the plane, first to board and rightfully so. in response to burka lady's continued curses at my back, just for good measure i threw over my shoulder "yeah? well if you don't like how it works here, go back to your own country." i couldn't hear her response among the unmistakably ethnic "mmm-hmmms" and "damn rights" emanating from the crowd at the gate.

'tis the season.