Current Favorite Drink

Me and Southwest. We've become very familiar. I eat their 100 calorie packs of skinny little Oreo wafers. I get my aisle seat, usually row 5, and 80% of my trips are made more comfortable by the Southwest Sniffle. This is carried out by my very convincing portrayal of a woman who has a terribly snotty cold (as evidenced by the wadded-up, partially shredded kleenex over her nose, and her apologetic eye-rolling in mucus-induced misery). Boarding passengers usually do not even pause near my den of germ warfare. They keep moving. I am a pathetic, sniveling petri dish. A victim of an illness so vile that it has filled me with enough snot to sink a canoe.

A dozen or so flights ago, I felt sorry for the elderly woman sitting in the window seat near me, so I told her what was up. "Hey," I said, "I'm going to look like I'm really sick for a few minutes, snotty and coughing. But I'm really not sick. I just don't want anyone to sit in this middle seat."

Her eyes lit up, as eyes sometimes do when they are included in a conspiracy. "Oh!" she said. "I'll help you!" And she got out a kleenex of her own and suddenly became Sick Elderly Woman By The Window. She sniffled and blew and wiped until her nose actually was red. I loved her immediately. And we succeeded. We had the only empty seat on the plane, right between us.

Last month, when Scott and I flew together, we triumphed on the flight out, but not the flight home. There is no way for even the most expertly performed Southwest Sniffle to work if there are zero empty seats on the flight. So we were foiled when a guy came from the back of the plane and found our one empty spot. I had been on a winning streak (6 in a row) and was desperate to make it 7. "Oh man," I said to the guy. "Not sure you want to sit with us." (Scott was totally overdoing it, coughing into the crook of his elbow in a way that said "This is swine flu. Eject me from the flight.") But unless we killed the guy and stuffed him in the overhead compartment, there was nowhere else for him to go. We lost.

Anyway, I like their hot chocolate.