October 6, 1999

The day before yesterday we finally got our tickets to Ohio for Christmas. My whole entire family lives in Ohio (you'd know that if you read the intro page). We're going to be visiting them from the Wednesday before Christmas until the day after Christmas. I'm a little nervous, to tell you the truth.

Not about visiting my family. Please. No, it's the other issue. It's -- bringing my boyfriend home to meet the family.

I have this huge extended family in Ohio. They're Catholic, so I have six uncles and an aunt, and most of them have at least two kids, so I have approximately 4988420 cousins. At least, that's what it feels like when we're all crammed into my Grandma's house at Christmastime, and my uncles are yelling at the football game on TV, and somebody is screwing around on the piano, and Mike has out his brand new guitar and amp, and toddlers are zooming around playing Tag You're It, and babies are crying and people are in the kitchen laughing at some story somebody told.

Keith met a few of my relatives at my graduation. He said, "Wow, I had no idea your family was so colorful".

Poor Keith. He has no idea. It's not that I don't think my family will like Keith. Keith is a great guy. Everybody likes him. I just hope he survives my family Christmas party.

Anyway, we did NOT get our tickets via Priceline. I was concerned, though, because for awhile there it looked like we were going to have to pay a total of over $900 for our round trip tickets to Columbus and back. I went to expedia.com, I went to flifo.com, I went to Yahoo travel, and all of them were quoting me about the same price, within fifty bucks or so.

Then Carolyn suggested going to specific airlines' web pages and checking fares there. So I did. I checked United, American, Frontier, America West, and Southwest, and you know what? They all quoted me the EXACT SAME FARE. $465 per person. What the hell is up with that? The same goddamn fare? Can't they even PRETEND that they're not all part of one big conglomerate? Couldn't they vary the price by like five dollars or so just so people didn't get wise to their little game? I mean, seriously, after you go to the fifth website and it's the same freaking fare, to the dollar, you start to get a little suspicious.

Continental turned out to be our savior. I went to their site and got quoted a price of $210 per person. Whoo-ee! That's more like it! Of course, the times sort of sucked in that we'd have to leave at 10PM and arrive in Columbus at 8AM, but whatever, for $400 bucks I'll do just about anything.

I called Keith from work and gave him the flight numbers and times and told him the website to go to, and he said that sounded like a good deal and he'd go online and get the tickets right away. I hung up, secure in the knowledge that my sweetie was, even as I typed, going to get us cheap and relatively convenient tickets for our Christmas trip.

He called me back three hours later. The first thing he said was, "Well, I didn't trust the privacy agreement on Continental's site, so I didn't get them through the web page, I called an actual agent."

OK, that's cool, I can deal with that. "Also, I was so pissed off by the time I got ahold of an actual person that I just took the first tickets she had for us on that date and that price, because the original ones we wanted were sold out."

He paused.

"Hm, I probably should have called you to see if these times were OK first."

I very tentatively said, "Well, babe, what ARE the times?" I crossed my fingers.

"Well, we're leaving at 10 AM on Wednesday and arriving in Columbus at 6 PM, and we're departing again at 6AM the day after Christmas."

OK, at this point I would like to say that I am a much better person than I was even a year ago. A year ago I would have freaked out and got mad and yelled, because I had NOT requested Wednesday off work, that's why the original flight left in the evening on Wednesday, and I really wanted to spend at least part of the day after Christmas with my family. With the tickets Keith got, we'll be leaving practically before anyone is awake. A very strong feeling of anger at Keith that he would get tickets without even asking my opinion first swept through me, but I managed to contain it. Like I said, I'm a much better person these days.

"Um, hon. The whole point for leaving Wednesday NIGHT was so that I didn't have to take another day off work."

Keith had already sounded apologetic when he said he should have called me. NOW he sounded REALLY apologetic. "Oh, fuck, I'm so sorry, I am REALLY sorry, oh man, I'm sorry".

Well, how are you supposed to stay angry at someone who's that upset that they upset you? I thought about it for a second, and I told him, "Look, it's actually not that bad. It's just one more day off work, it won't be during our production cycle, and it's the week before Christmas. Who wants to work the week before Christmas anyway? And the day after Christmas is usually when I start wanting to go home anyway, so that's OK too. And come on, it's worth it for $400 bucks, even if you HAD called me to ask, we would have talked about it and I would have told you to get the tickets anyway."

All of which is true. I just needed a minute to calm down and realize it. At any rate, we have our amazingly cheap tickets, and I get to see my family for a day longer than I originally thought I would, so everything worked out.

In other news. I know hearing about other people's dreams is boring, but I really have to relate this one that I had last night. It was a commercial for some breakfast cereal, and it was targeted to women. It showed a guy eating his breakfast cereal, and the voice-over said "Ladies, this breakfast cereal really brings out the KID in your husband!" Then there was a little disclaimer at the end, and the voice-over said "just be careful that it also doesn't bring out the space alien in him", and it showed the husband morphing into this big purple thing with a bulbous head and pointing a ray gun at his wife.

Is that not completely bizarre?

Back       Next       Journal Home