I AM NICE AND NORMAL AND HAVE A HEART. . .

. . . compared to the chuckleheads with whom I shared an airplane flight yesterday evening. As promised, here are the results of my further adventures in unabashed voyeurism (for Character #3, I actually leaned in so I could hear better), taken almost verbatim from my real-time written journal entries (I had to write it down as it happened or else I would forget the utter charm of it all):

Character #1
Before take-off, in the window seat in the group of seats across the aisle, sits a Hispanic woman wearing a huge brace on her right leg. A young blond woman, dressed trendily with a bared midriff, with long and slightly stringy hair, wearing the slightly pursed sour, bored and snotty look customarily worn by privileged prissy bee-yatches, comes to the row. Without even a cordial for-strangers smile, she tells Hispanic Woman that she, Blond Girl, belongs in the window seat. Hispanic Woman, apparently not very comfortable with the English language, signals timidly, as if to ask if she could sit by the window, so that she could stretch out her heavily-braced and unbendable leg in the little space between the seats and the plane wall. Blond Girl, in response to the timid signaling, says "Yes, that's my seat," still without smiling. There is no emotional generosity emanating from Blond Girl AT ALL. Brrrr.

Blond Girl stands impatiently in the aisle, glancing mutinously at the passengers around her as she waits for the man in the aisle seat to get out. She then watches as Hispanic Woman struggles her way into the aisle while trying to balance her purse, a huge poster tube with the label "Papyrus" on it, and her cane. Neither the guy nor Blond Girl make any move to assist Hispanic Woman as she inches her carefully-balanced self out of the row. Certainly, it hasn't occurred to Blond Girl to just let Hispanic Woman have the damn window seat.

Without so much as a "thank you" or a tight bitter grin, Blond Girl scoots into her seat and settles in. End of story.

The kicker (I almost laughed out loud, stood up and showed Blond Girl what I was writing about her because she struck me as so ridiculous at this point): before the plane even starts to taxi to the runway for take-off, Blond Girl closes the window blind, shutting out the light and the view. It stays closed for the entire flight, and is slid open only for the landing into JFK. So much for the window seat.

Character #2
The aforementioned guy in the aisle seat directly across from me is not nearly as offensive as the blond girl, but I have to shake my head at him anyway. He's apparently a lawyer -- he sits before take-off with a sheaf of printed-out Westlaw cases from the Fourth Circuit in one hand and an orange hi-liter in the other. Minutes before take-off (after the Hispanic-woman-with-a-cane fiasco), he rushes down the aisle towards the front service area and returns with a plastic cup full of some fizzy clear liquid and a bunch of napkins. I figure he is just really thirsty, until I see him dip a napkin into the liquid -- club soda, I determine at this point -- and start dabbing frantically at a spot on his shorts on the leg farthest from me.

It seems that Lawyer Guy got some orange hi-liter on his shorts and doesn't appreciate the potential stain. Now, the curious part is that the shorts don't appear to be some kind of designer concoction that merits gentle care. In fact, they're frayed cut-off cargo shorts. I can see a prior stain -- looks like food -- on the leg closest to me. And this silly little Lawyer Guy is dabbing club soda on them to get rid of a pen mark. Jeez.

Character #3
I get on line for the bathroom at the front of the plane. As I'm waiting, a hoity-toity looking bleached blond lady takes one of the flight attendants aside into the little service nook right by the bathroom. Hoity-Toity looks to be about 45 years old (though she would probably slap me if she knew I said that), is wearing a tight white pants-suit, and has really tanned, stretched-out skin. Not the kind of stretched-out leathery skin that results from years of smoking and sun exposure, but the over-treated, face-lifted, chemical peeled stretched-out skin usually belonging to media moguls' wives. She carries one of those "now" Louis Vuitton purses -- the white leather one with the multi-colored logos printed all over it.

Hoity-Toity is showing the flight attendant what looks like a magazine or newspaper spread, covered with photos of really shiny people with big hair -- people like Siegfried & Roy and other Las Vegas types. Lots of sequins and teeth-are-too-big-and-abnormally-white smiles. (This is when I do the lean-in to get a better view and better sound quality.) These are the words coming out of her mouth at that point, and in the minutes following, as verbatim as I can recall:

"My dad owns Caesar's Palace."
"I'm in all of these photos . . . see?"
"I normally fly first class, you know, but I chose JetBlue for the television because I'm a television FREAK."
"I know a lot of famous people and have a lot of influence with society types."

Yes, she actually said all of that, and probably more, but I was disgusted and had to lean away before I snorted in her face.

Basically, Hoity-Toity was complaining that the TV monitor at her seat did not work, and she wanted to move to a seat that had a working monitor. After her mini-tirade, she pointed to a young boy sitting in the first row and asked if he couldn't be moved since he was too young to watch TV anyway. Unfortunately for Hoity-Toity, the flight attendant explained, the boy was sitting with his mother. Ultimately, a man in the first row gave up his seat for Hoity-Toity. The entire plane watched as she grabbed her Louis Vuitton purse and her little racquetball racket and moved up. Sheesh.

Others
Then there were the two ladies who acted like rock stars, got drunk, screamed their conversations to each other during the entire 5-hour flight, flipped the bird and cursed at the people around them and the flight attendants who asked them to pipe down, and basically went nuts. But I can't stand to write more than that about them because they were so hateful.

Not that other people's character deficiencies should make me feel better about myself . . . but they do, sometimes. Sigh.