Welcome to the Friendlier Skies

When I arrived on my virgin flight on Virgin America at 7 AM, my first thought was, “This airline is AWESOME.”

As a frequent flyer of JetBlue Airways, I was used to seeing a personal TV monitor embedded in the seat in front of me, but Virgin America had touchscreens with a wide selection of movies and premium TV, an airplane chat room, computer games (the easy kind that required pressing only four buttons at a time, not 25), and to top it all off, Magnetic Fields on their music channel.

But by hour 3 of my flight to California, my excitement over the flight offerings had waned. I had already constructed an elaborate playlist of music and then not bothered to listen to it. The “email/text” option on the touchscreen was not yet enabled for inflight use, thus preventing me from emailing everyone I knew with such crucial information as, “I AM EMAILING FROM A PLANE!!!!” And though the airline had lots of movies I wanted to see, I didn’t think that paying $8 to watch one on a tiny screen less than a foot from my face was a good financial decision, given that I had elected not to pay $8 to watch the same movie in a first-run theater.

Finally, after I had finished reading the book I’d brought with me, I brought out my Nintendo DS. Apparently inspired by this sight, the kindergartner sitting next to me, who until now had been quietly mesmerized by his TV screen, decided to tell me about his own Nintendo DS. He had one just like mine, he said, and a white one which his father had owned but then given to him.

Not satisfied with this verbal explanation, he asked his mother to take out his DS so he could show me. He then explained how his SpongeBob SquarePants game worked, in the direct way of young children, by describing exactly what he was doing. This narration was accompanied by tilting the DS screen away from me and rapidly moving his stylus so that it covered the entire screen and I was unable to see anything.

Social intercourse has never been my strong point, so I was initially stymied as to how to indicate my interest — and later, my desperately growing disinterest. It turns out, though, that a conversation with a 6-year-old boy requires only that you glance occasionally at him, say “Uh-huh,” and “Oh, neat,” and “How many lives do you get?” and you have won his attention forever.

Let me repeat myself — you have won his attention FOREVER. If you are anxious to appear polite, as I was, you will feign interest to the point of suddenly finding yourself trapped in an endless monologue about the pros and cons of something called Bakugan.

From what I could determine, Bakugan are basically Transformers with game cards, but instead of transforming from vehicles to robots, Bakugan transform from random shapes into other random shapes. Apparently this is entertaining.

The little boy next to me proceeded to explain and demonstrate every attribute of all eleven Bakugan he owned, even though by the third Bakugan I had stopped pretending to listen and was openly jotting notes about our conversation in my notebook.

This did not deter the young boy, who continued to explain which of his Bakugan was his favorite, and then the next favorite, and then the next one, and then he related the following insightful story about a Bakugan whose name sounded like Boba Fett:

Boy: “He took off his eyes and put them on his tail!”

Me: “Ew!”

Boy: “I know!”

He then acted out various Bakugan battles in which he had participated in the past. These demonstrations appeared to primarily involve smashing two toys together. Also, and this is just a guess, I believe he was farting during my entire conversation with him.

Finally noticing my distress, the boy’s mother slipped a pair of headphones on him so that he could watch TV and presumably stop attempting to talk to me. Unfortunately, his TV screen was tuned to an episode of Pokeman, which meant that the boy was obligated to recite the names and descriptions of every Pokeman he could remember to me.

“How many Pokeman are there?” I ventured to ask finally, interrupting him mid-stream.

“A lot,” came back the grim answer.

He had, he explained, a book describing all the Pokeman and it ended on page “Thirty Hundred.” This was indeed a lot of Pokeman.

Once we approached California, the TV screens blanked out so the boy shifted his conversation accordingly, to the subject of his cat(s).

“You know why I named my cat Squeaky? Because it makes a noise like SQUEAK!”

and

“One time she took off her collar and slept NAKED! I said to her, ‘why are you sleeping in my bed? This is not YOUR bed!’”

and

“One time my cat got sick and almost DIED!”

Thinking this last statement referred to his current cat, I asked, “Is she better now?”

“Oh no,” he said, matter-of-factly. “She’s in a box now. She’s dead.”

How does one end a conversation with a child? The answer is, you don’t. All you can do is wait for the flight to end when you both venture forth on separate journeys — he to visit his siblings, and you to demonstrate your newfound knowledge to unsuspecting people with, “Say, have you heard about this thing called Bakugan? Let me tell you about it…”

Posted by: Supersonic Jane | June 20, 2009 | 4:17 pm
Posted in: This Life