I had an interesting situation occur while I was traveling back home.  I was on the plane on Saturday night, just after my layover at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas.  I had just boarded as I am always top 25 on Southwest Airlines (A-List BABY!) so I get priority seating and I was doing my usual ritual.  I typically choose the aisle seat in one of the first few rows of the plane so I can get off quickly when we land.  Being that I am probably the most impatient and most claustrophobic person on the plane, it’s best if I am off ASAP.  If not, I’m liable to hurt someone, or say something totally inappropriate.  The other part of my ritual is that I try not to make any eye contact with the people walking past me.  Now, don’t think I’m not scoping out the people whilst they’re walking by.  Oh yes, I’m profiling baby.  I’m hand picking the person that is going to be lucky enough to sit next to me the whole flight and typically once I choose that person, I’ll make eye contact.  Then, usually, they’ll look at me like I’m oozing gross and walk right past me.

On this particular flight, I happen to see a pretty good looking woman walk through the door.  Now, she was definitely striking, but I could tell she was about 2 inches from her cougar years.  Still, for a pre-coog, she was way hot.  So as she walks through the door, I thought to myself, the hot chicks never sit next to me.  I always end up with some guido in a track suit (Credit goes to Jersey Jen, From Michigan), yelling at his wife, spilling over into my seat, forcing me to lean into the aisle.  I’m always having back pain after flights – maybe because it’s the fact that guido is forcing me to sit sideways on the plane.  Maybe…or maybe it’s because I’m so far in the aisle that I end up getting smashed in the back by everyone and their mother as they walk up and down the aisle to the restroom.  They should remove those.  I’m rambling.

So, this pre-coog.  She walks right up to my aisle and says, “Is that seat taken?”  I was out of my seat before she could finish her sentence and grabbed her suitcase and started stuffing it into the overhead.  She said, “What a nice guy!  Thanks”.  Then I sat down, said my ‘Cool Guy’ (as The Wife calls it) “You Bet”, and proceeded to start reading my book.  Yeah boys, I turned ignore on full blast!  As I was reading I looked down because I noticed she was opening her book, being the totally nosy person that I am.  As I was looking at her book, I noticed out of the lower left corner of my eye that her left hand was loosely holding the book – and then I heard the sound of gears turning and her thumb mechanically clamped down on the book.

You guessed it, she had a prosthetic hand.  So, as your typical guy would do, I started panicking that my chivalrous act of grabbing her luggage may have been misconstrued as a leap to help the poor girl with the prosthetic arm.  Because it’s all about me, I stressed about it for about 2 minutes (which is pretty long for me to stress about offending someone) and then delved into my book.  About halfway through the flight, I overheard the woman in the window seat asking her about her arm.  I just had to force my way into the conversation.  There was no way I wasn’t going to stay out of this one.  I have always wondered how those prosthetic work.  As she was explaining the mechanics behind it, I saw an opportunity to explain that my chivalrous act was in reality a chivalrous act and not some sort of pity thing for the girl with the prosthetic arm.  She said she thought I was just being a gentleman.

At one point, the conversation turned to me.  We started talking about the book I was reading and I explained that it was actually the Bible and that I was reading it because I hadn’t ever read it cover to cover before.  I explained that The Wife and I are doing this scheduled Bible In A Year reading where there are a certain number of pages you read every day.  I also explained that I was reading it on the flight because I was about 3 weeks behind on my reading and that I wanted to capitalize on the long flight to catch up.  I’m only 2 weeks behind now, by the way.

One thing led to another and we found ourselves in a discussion about theology and I began to explain that religion is a good foundation in life, but it is important to be active in life and make things happen to yourself.  I explained that I didn’t think that it was good to sit around and wait for things to happen to you.  Then I went on to explain that bad things happen to everyone and that it was a fact of life.  I tend to like to use a lot of words to drive my points home (surprise), so I went forth with what I thought was a pretty groundbreaking statement, since we were coming from Vegas:

“Sometimes, you just have to deal with the hand you’re dealt.”

I’m an absolute Geniou…idiot.  There was a long pause. I thought she was going to open the emergency exit and toss me out.  Then she said, “Or in my case, the hand you WEREN’T dealt!”  Then she laughed really hard.  Now we’re friends on FaceBook.