I find myself at work, not really feeling incredibly motivated to do much. I think the woman in the cube to the right is stoned, I just finished a very long string of projects, and I am going to the dentist tomorrow. All good reasons to blow off a ½ hour or so and blog, right?

I had wanted to blog about my annoyance at the airport last Friday, and I did write about a 500-word essay on the topic. When I got to the end, I realized that I was being absurd. What upset me, was that I couldn't meet Paul at the gate when he came to visit me on Friday. But through the magic of writing, I was able to work through all that and figure out just why airports have disallowed this.

After all, European airports don't let you do it, and you can't do it in Brazil. You wait and meet your friends after you leave your gate, pick up your bags and go through security. Since their airports have been traditionally more worried about their security than ours, there must be a damned good reason for it.

1. First off, there is enough traffic in the airport - especially huge ones like O'Hare in Chicago, without security having to deal with people who really don't belong there.

2. US airport security is shortly going to have to search through every checked bag and every carry on. The metal detectors are turned up so high that they are now faithfully going off at my underwire bra and the rivets of my Levi's ®. This means that they are having to pass the wand over more people than they used to. Passengers are not used to waiting in line, and to keep them happy, airports are doing what they can to speed the process up. Keeping the non-fliers out of the lines.

WOAH! This is turning into a "9/11" blog! I didn't even see that coming. I won't take another step, I promise. I just wanted to express that I'd made my peace with the airport thing.....