What's Your Sign?

I do not believe in signs. I don’t often over think any situation or occurrence, I don’t sit around and wonder what “out of the norm” interaction means for me in the long run, I caulk them up to being just one of the million weird things that I come across daily. That is, of course, unless I’m flying. As many of you know I have a fear of flying (if you didn’t know this I would like to direct you to blog post titled, “I’m Baaaaack” from August 20, 2010.) I am happy to report that I’ve seen an improvement and am no longer afraid of landing… taking off and being in the air are different stories.

So when I fly, everything means something. And that something is usually that God is telling me the plane is going down. On Thursday, I flew back to Los Angeles from a trip to Denver and was hit with so many “signs” I’m surprised I didn’t have a panic attack. First of all, I was greeted with a last minute gate change, which most normal people would find to be a slight inconvenience but to me it’s a warning: Do not board this plane.

As I made my way to my window seat, I was asked by a man to switch seats with his brother at the front of the plane so they could all sit together. Being the people pleaser I am, I obliged. But now I was in an aisle seat. How was I supposed to monitor that the distance between the plane and the ground did not suspiciously decrease? I could only think of that scene in Final Destination when Devon Sawa realizes he had mis-planned the course of deaths because he forgot that he switched seats with a peer pre-flight (sorry for the spoilers). What if I was perfectly safe in a window seat at row 16, but an aisle seat at row 6 was doomed?

Finally after I forced myself to file pop culture references away as “NOT signs of my death by plane crash” I sat down to prepare for takeoff. I picked up my phone to shut off and saw I had a new email; I had a new follower on Twitter! “aaliyah.” Aaliyah, the name of a popular American R&B star and actress who died in a plane crash, was now following me on Twitter. It wasn’t even capitalized; she must have rushed back from the dead, in too much of a hurry to bother with proper punctuation to warn me about this plane.

I took a few seconds, mentally slapped some sense into myself and now here I am. I am now confident that thinking is what forces the fear of flying into me. If only lobotomies were temporary….