The stress of flying

I keep scheduling flights knowing how stressful flying is for me. It takes every bit of my concentration to keep myself from imagining the plane spiraling into a corn field from 32,000 feet, or into the side of a mountain because the control panel has a glitch and the fog hid the landscape.

I pray a lot. Or rather, I chant, which only means I repeat a prayer over and over and over, often for hours at a time. I did this when I went skydiving. It kept me from erratically jumping from the plane prior to having my parachute secured. A nice, evenly paced chant seems to calm me down, allows my concentration to focus on words, not images, and keeps my breathing natural.

Speaking of natural, it has been over five years since I've stopped dying/coloring/destroying my hair. I realized this in a peculiar way:

I went to New Orleans this weekend with some old friends. I had gone to New Orleans with this same group of friends eight years ago. Back then, my hair was various shades of white, pink, blue, green, and so on. I took pride in not knowing what my natural color was, actually. Between shaving it all off and stripping it of all color, I somehow lost some of my hair's natural thickness and healthiness. I haven't done anything artificial to my hair in years, but these old friends didn't know that. A few commented on my natural color and it took some math to realize it's been a while since I've played around with the hair dye. It's been a while for a lot of things, I suppose.

But back to the flying. The flights I mentioned previously also include visits with old friends and new cities. So if anyone has some Minneapolis or Charlotte entertainment suggestions, I'm ready for you.