This is the last leg of the flight back to San Jose. It’s about 5 pm CA time, and we’re mercifully on time tonight. I know I always say this, but it’s hard for me to believe that I woke up in Lafayette, IN this morning and am now lurking in a jet somewhere over the Rockies. I suppose that if the future lies far east, in the borderland between France and Switzerland, I’d better get used to the sensation of waking up thousands of miles from where I slept.
I’ll say this: on-time or not, I still have the mild headache and generally ill feeling that seems ubiquitous with flying. No matter how well I take care of myself in the airports, or before traveling (staying relaxed, eating well, taking walks in the terminal), I always feel like crap by the time I arrive home. There was research that was done either earlier this year, or last year, that indicated that the levels of ozone in untreated airline cabin air (standard on domestic flights) are far in excess of healthy levels. In addition, thanks to ozone’s reactivity with other chemicals, humans bathed in their cologne, deodorant, soaps, shampoo, and hair gel are chemical reactors, producing all kinds of unhealthy substances in their proximity. This compounds the unpleasantness of the air, allegedly producing chemicals that are known to induce cold-like or flu-like symptoms in people.
Given how much travel I do these days, and how I NEVER feel well even at peak healthiness, I’m beginning to buy this argument. As a physicist, I’d love to sneak some equipment on board for sniffing air samples and detemining their chemical content. I know of a physicist who brought a geiger counter on an airplane, a small one that connected to their Mac via USB, and measures cosmic-ray radiation levels at cruising altitude. Chemical sniffing equipment probably only looks SLIGHTLY more suspicious than radiation detection equipment.
Oh well, travel sucks. I like home, and I like the destinations, but all that flitting about in between is maddening.
