Over the weekend I was bestowed one of the most important distinctions in my life: more important than becoming a licensed member of the State Bar of California, more important than officially being wed to my wife MJ, this was much more important than those, I became.....a Silver Medallion member on Delta Airlines. It turns out that if you spend a lot of money buying flights from an airline and rack up a ton of miles, they you back as a customer to encourage continued spending of money on those flights, and to do that they make you have "status" so you can feel superior over others and get more privileges over others and get a comfort seat or even better, maybe one day, one day make it all the way to the front of the cabin. Subtly capitalizing on class welfare, it reminds me a lot of the movie Parasite which is still reverberating around in my brain. There are clear distinctions between the way the poor and the rich live in Parasite, but also our society uses the class discrepancies to play off of each other, parading the rich's luxuries to the poor and making the poor work and spend money to become the rich and be better than the other poor. "You can become one of us! You're a Silver Medallion now." Delta literally points these privileged folk out on some flights by thanking flight members with status while the masses (me up to this weekend) watch and envy.
But I'm a Silver Medallion now! Talk about instant gratification, I immediately went from getting all middle seats in the past to getting a window seat on this week's flight and then, lo and behold, the middle person, who would have been me normally, didn't show up to the flight, and the middle seat was MINE.....to share with the aisle passenger, but still, leg room! And I enjoyed every bit of it, sleeping 4 hours out of a possible 5 to get ready for the day. Luxury does have its advantages, especially on flights when you can literally cut out the middle man (passenger). Not the way the phrase is typically used, but most businesses and jobs in America are driven by being the middle man, so I can't really imagine how the economy would function by cutting them out. Heck, I'm a middle man, I work for law firms to provide legal services to companies and take a share of the cut of the wealth. The retailer I buy clothes for is a middle man, the stock trading website I use is a middle man for accepting trades, the apartment complex I pay my rent to is a middle man for the owner of the complex.
On a personal note, I need to cut out the angry man inside me that hibernates most days but when I'm really pressured, comes out at the most inopportune times during the height of an argument. The movie "Anger Management" actually describes very accurately and in memorable fashion how my anger works: I have a lot of repressed anger, which means I don't express my anger/ how upset I am most of the time and just hold it back, letting it build up under the surface and slowly boil into a range that gets uncoiled when it reaches a tipping point that triggers everything to blow up. Hence why Adam Sandler's character in the movie is nice to everyone even when being treated rudely on flights and other areas, but when he is forced to confront a childhood nemesis, all of the emotion comes exploding out as he tackles someone and uses physical violence. I feel a lot like that and it makes everyday situations a little easier where I hold back what I want to say to people who cut me in line (don't cut people in line nowadays, btw, especially at Popeyes) or make an inaccurate statement or TSA treats me unfairly and just get over it, but I suffer a harsh penalty (and MJ does too) when I become uncontrollably angry during an argument with m wife, who gets very surprised and shocked when I act out in rage and start yelling......part of how I've been (wrongly) taught by myself to cope with highly stressful situations. My arguments as a child with my parents would often end with yelling and screaming after a week's worth of being made fun of by classmates or suffering stress from being in high school and my parents would get the brunt of the anger, and it became a negative ritual of sorts of me finally releasing all my repressed anger out on my loved ones, and it's continued into now. I need to learn a bit from MJ who usually speaks out about everything that makes her upset then and there, so she can get it off her chest and at least know that someone has acknowledged the issue she's having (that someone is usually me). I just need to find someone to bounce my complaints and comments off of........MJ is a bit, shall we say, unresponsive to complaints that I have about her, so maybe I can have some sort of euphemism machine translate what I want to say into a nicer, better consumable package of an issue and send it
Anger isn't the only emotion that coils up like a spring inside me: apparently I cry during romantic movies or highly sentimental situations, such as watching "Modern Love" on Amazon Prime the past weekend and seeing stories of love depicted in them. I guess in my old age I get emotional when people have sad stories or stories about loving conquering all or a single mother making it on her own while raising a little girl.
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