My wings were clipped, but they grew back

What? Airport madness
Where? ROA
When? Monday afternoon, November 19

I had planned to use my Thanksgiving break to work on an scholarly outreach program with Hispanic underrepresented students. My intention was to travel to Texas A&M University Kingsville (which I will refer to as TAMUK, hereafter) and spend a couple of days unveiling the secrets of something called computational chemistry. Computational chemistry, aside from putting food in my plate, is a modern discipline that can be used to greatly enhance the chemistry curriculum of higher-education institutions. However, a variety of undergraduate institutions are not incorporating computational chemistry into their curriculum because they lack the expertise, the resources, or both. My plan is to help alleviate this problem by offering training to the faculty and on-line resources physically available at Virginia Tech. My focus is on Hispanic-serving institutions.

But my plans got grounded by Delta Airlines. My plane to Corpus Christi via Atlanta got delayed four hours, with the implication that I was not going to make it to Kingsville until 24 hours later. Forced to think fast, I realized that I did not have any contact information of the person who was supposed to pick me up at Kingsville in a few hours, or a cell phone to call anybody, for that matter. The radical in me is resourceful, though, so I took an alternative path to exit the labyrinth that modern air transportation senselessness had put me in. I remembered that ROA has wireless internet, so I fired my computer, hunt down the phone of my contact at TAMUK and called him from a public phone using a calling card. I know most of you are surprised to hear that, yes, public phones still exist, and they actually work. I gave myself a brownie point for demonstrating once more that cell phones are more convenient than necessary.

In the end, I had to postpone my trip a week. Here is where the two darkest points of the day stroke. I realized that I had to drive back to BBurg, which overall amounts to two gallons of wasted gas on Frankie. I also realized that the fare of my new ticket was $1,000 over the one I had previously booked. Delta representatives at the other side of the line were not happy about it, but the local clerk convinced them that this was really Delta's fault. I couldn't stop thinking that I had cost Delta $1,000. Of course, I love to cost big corporations money. However, it dawned on me than in the end, Delta will not stop making profit, so they will recover those $1,000 and many others by increasing the fares for everyone, denying raises to honest workers in the lowest rung of the ladder, or perhaps filing for bankruptcy and screwing everybody all the same.

Of course, whoever controls life paid me back big time. The sunset over Dragon's Tooth on my way back was unbloggably beautiful (whoa! I just invented my first word in English! Hell yes!). The colors of deciduous SW Virginia this particularly dry year are uncanny. I urge all of y'all to consider looking out the window if you happen to be in SW Virginia soon. Moreover, once in BBurg, I hit the public library, and one of the books I had been chasing for months was available! Oh yeah. Can't wait to finish this shit to start turning pages. Furthermore, I can now enjoy all the food that I had stashed in my suitcase to survive Texas on a vegan diet: carrot muffins, scrambled tofu with red peppers and 'shrooms, bananas, and cliff bars galore.

Yep, air controlers clipped my wings but SW Virginia grew them back. You've got to love it.