Leg Room Makes It All OK
In other news… a company called Biojewelry is making wedding rings using lab-grown human bone tissue created from the bone tissue of the couple. Hmm. I’m like 50% “that’s interesting,” 25% “that’s mark-of-the-beast-ish,” 20% “what the?” and 5% “harvesting bone tissue must hurt real bad.”
During my travels I finished Malcom Gladwell‘s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make Big Things Happen, the always reading-my-mail Tom Peter‘s The Brand You 50: Fifty Ways to Transform Yourself from an ‘Employee’ into a Brand That Shouts Distinction, Commitment, and Passion!, and the well-designed, but essentially boring Unstuck: A Tool for Yourself, Your Team , and Your World. (Business books always seem to have that trendy Main Title: Ridiculously Long Subtitle format.)
The Tipping Point was great… not so much in the huge conclusion way, but more so in the make you think way. (I’ll take either if it’s well-written and presented.) I enjoy the way Gladwell writes. The Brand You 50 is typical Tom Peters, which is wonderful because I think he has lots of wise things to say and he always manages to shake things up while saying them. The jury’s still out on Unstuck. It’s very pretty, which is why it virtually pulled itself off the shelf into my greedy book-buying hands in the midst of the stale conformity of the business section… but i’m not sure the content is all that earth-shattering and to me, a book about getting “unstuck” should not be BORING. It might require a second read before I pass final judgement to the tens of you who actually read these strange things called books.
The main reason I had lots of time to read during the SC to MN portions of my trip was flight delays. Especially the return trip, when my flight from Minneapolis to Chicago O’Hare left 3 hours late due to a missing part (yes… a missing part… on an airplane… very reassuring, eh?), which made me miss my connection to Greenville… which meant I was in O’Hare for another 5 hours waiting for the next flight. Grand total, I kicked it airport style from about 9:30am to 11:30pm on Sunday. I wouldn’t really recommend this to anyone who isn’t Tom Hanks with a bad accent wooing a disproportionately attractive flight attendant. Seriously… 14 hours? It’s not like I was flying to a foreign country or anything… I went to Minnesota… dontchaknow?
Somehow all of this was made ok by the fact that I snagged a last minute empty exit row on the flight back. Bonus leg room and no one beside me apparently makes up for 14 hour airport day. I’m pretty easily pleased.