Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

Especially in light of how increasingly hostile the airport environment has become since 9/11, this is excellent news:

President Barack Obama outlined his plan for “long overdue” high-speed rail on Thursday that would rival air travel, create jobs and help curb the U.S. transportation system’s appetite for oil . . . Obama envisions a network of short and longer-haul corridors of up to 600 miles plied by trains traveling up to 150 miles per hour.

One of the reasons I loved living in Japan was the ease with which I could travel. All I had to do was wake up in the morning and buy a ticket at the station. I didn’t have to worry about arriving early or finding transportation out to the airport. The worst thing that happened was when I accidentally sat in a smoking car on the shinkansen on my way from Tokyo to Hiroshima.

Besides all that, train travel is simply more pleasant than air travel (unless you get stuck on an overnight hard seat during one of China’s national holidays, but that’s another pint of beer entirely). Your body doesn’t have to contend with changing pressures, and you get a much closer view of the scenery. While I admit that there is something to be said for the bird’s eye perspective planes offer, one can get much the same effect from a mountain or skyscraper.

In reading Joe Sharkey’s April 13th column, Looking You Over, With a Shameless Gaze, I couldn’t help but think that the reaction of the woman who had been directed to go through a whole-body imaging machine was remarkably similar to the way many women respond after experiencing sexual assault (emphasis mine):

“I was stressed out and in a hurry,” she said, when a female screener directed her to one of the boothlike machines. Ms. Jost said she assumed it was another kind of machine, one of those so-called puffer devices that check for explosives traces.

“When I figured it out, I really felt violated and mad at myself,” she said. “I’d been trying to avoid these machines, and I literally walked into one without knowing it. I really did not connect the dots until later when I was sitting on the plane, and I said, oh my God, that was one of those strip search machines.”

Indeed, the first paragraph of that quote is reminiscent of institutional rape in which an individual with power, possibly a trusted figure, directs someone to engage in or tolerate acts that they may not understand until later (if at all). Now, obviously, I am not saying that the security guards in question were acting out of a desire to violate this woman (though especially if whole-body imaging should expand, it seems unlikely that the TSA would be able to screen out people who would find such things titillating, even if they tried). What I am saying is that such security systems feel like an assault. Being forced to display your nudity when you do not wish to, even if only one other person sees it, is an assault.

That said, the column in which this woman’s experience appears is highly problematic. Sharkey feels the need to note that “[l]ike Ms. Jost, many people who object to the invasive nature of the machines insist they are not puritanical”. Why is it that people, especially women, who do not want to be forced to reveal their bodies need to defend themselves against charges of being puritanical?

Even worse is that when it comes to the possibility of someone figuring out how to save images from these machines, especially images of celebrities, Sharkey turns the violation into a weak attempt at a joke. Ending his column on that note, undercuts the seriousness of violating a woman’s right to control her body and who sees it.

Seven people die on the roads of China’s Henan Province every day. When I was teaching there, this led to a lot of jokes about checking the local news to see if the quota had been met before heading into the city. (It took forty minutes to get into rail-hub Zhengzhou from dirty little Dragon Lake.) I wrote Henan Highway Stretch, now up at foam:e 6, after returning from a trip to a hot spring resort about an hour away.

Two images stuck with me from the ride there: one was of mannequins with skin of a plush maroon material in the dusty window of a village store. The other was of a narrow bridge that had arches placed on either end to keep the larger and heavier trucks off. Rather than find alternative routes, however, any truck that could conceivably make it would inch through, even if it meant scraping off the inevitably blue paint or, as in one case, temporarily removing half the load of watermelons.

Henan Highway Stretch is part of my unpublished manuscript, Who Escapes the Yellow River, a partial exploration of present-day China which takes the central provinces, once the seat of power but now largely impoverished, as its starting point.

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I was a little worried about my tight connection at O’Hare yesterday. I need not have been—not because my flight left at its scheduled 6:15 am departure time (which it did)—but because when I reached Chicago and searched the screen for my flight to Louisville, I found that it was canceled. Now, I had chosen the first flight I could in part so that, in case of such an eventuality, I would stand a chance of getting on a later flight. Unfortunately, when I got on the automated system, the only option it gave me for rebooking was for 8 am on Friday. Not only would that cause me to miss most of the conference, but I’d either have to stay in the airport for two nights or pay for two nights in a hotel (while also being charged for my reserved room in Louisville). I realize that the fact that I can travel at all means that I’m in a much better situation than a lot of other people right now, but something like that simply isn’t in my budget.

So I asked traveler’s aid if they knew where I could find an actual person from United to talk to. They directed me to a customer service desk in another concourse and advised me to “grab the agent by the hair” until I got what I wanted.

By the time I reached the desk, there were already about 50 people in line (a flight to Lexington had been canceled too) and only 3 agents helping. People were calling the offsite customer service center on their cell phones and not getting any answers. When I finally reached the front, their advice was that I get a flight to Cincinnati and then drive. Of course, this wasn’t an option for me since I can’t drive; those who took this option had to pay for the rental car themselves anyway.

Finally, they booked me to fly to Charlotte where I would be able to catch another flight to Louisville, scheduled to arrive around midnight. While waiting at Chicago, I played around with photography in the corridors, drank an enormous margarita, and watched the snow start.

My flight boarded on time. After we were de-iced, however, the captain announced we were being delayed because the plane was too heavy and they had to remove some luggage. I started to get nervous because I only had an hour in Charlotte to make my connection. Still, after another round of de-icing, we got into the air, and they announced an arrival time that would allow me to make it.

Near the end of the flight, however, things changed. We were put on a circling pattern due to weather: we watched lightning strikes out the window, and those of us needing to catch another flight prayed the departures were delayed too. Mine was, but barely. I sprinted to my gate and just made it.

Oddly enough, my bag beat me to Louisville. I didn’t reach my hotel room until 1 am.

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