I am far too highly strung. I know this. I seem unable, though, to stop this. I'm writing this on a 777 airplane that is on its way from London to New York. Next to me, is a hirsute and turbaned Indian man whose hirsuteness and turnbandness have not yet impacted me in any meaningful way. The brown corduroy jacket that he is wearing, however, is keeping me in such a state of tension that I'm nearly unable to breathe. It started out just covering the arm rest that we share, and is now actually partially draped on my leg. It's bumping against my pillow which brings up questions of sanitation, and the fact that this fellow keeps asking me advice on how to fill out his Department of Homeland Security forms isn't calming me down.

I tried to be wily--I opened the tray table that is stored in the arm rest and feigned an inspection of it. This forced him to move the fabric he's so intent on draping over me for a moment. Once it was safely tucked on his side, I ended the inspection and closed the arm rest up again. He looked at me quizzically and asked if I needed the tray table out. "No, just you know, checking it out," I said weakly. Within minutes he had managed to again assault my boundaries and cover me with brown corduroy. All joking aside, I'm actually about to freak out. I have a very low tolerance for these sorts of thing. I've been violently scrunching my toes and making tearful faces as a way to try to calm myself down, and it's not working. I took out my laptop entirely for an excuse to open the arm rest up again as a way to push him back into his designated area.

He started talking to me before the plane even took off, which is a really bad sign. Worse still, he appears to have brought no forms of entertainment. Nary a magazine, ipod or sudoku was to be seen, and thus far he's spent the entire journey infringing on my personal space, shodding and unshodding himself and releasing well timed blasts of foot odor, twiddling his thumbs at amazing speeds and strained his eyes trying to read this as I write. I can't begin to understand how someone could get on a trans-Atlantic flight without a book. Or something. This may be why he's spent the first hour of this journey quizzing me on whether Ireland was part of the UK and if they spoke English there. He should be watching Bridget Jones inflight. I don't like the possibility that I may be the only form of entertainment he has. After his first attempt at conversation, I imagined what would happen if the flight started to go down.

He would try and embrace me, so we could clutch each other in terror and confess out secrets and comfort each other in our dying minutes. Perhaps even talk each other into believing that we would be okay, that we weren't going to plunge into the Atlantic. But, no, I decided, I wouldn't allow it, I decided. "I'm sorry," I'd say. "I have boundary issues. Please don't touch me." This is actually a line I have used more than once at parties. I'd then plug in my ipod, in order to block out his terrified chatter and blankly look at the window until he turned to someone else for solace. Which is what he's appeared to do now. A moment ago, he jumped up and went to the woman in the aisle who has a middle seat next to her open. Words were exchanged, and now mysteriously, he's seated and chatting away with her.

The travel today has not been nice. I arrived at the airport at 8:30 am for a 10:30 am flight. I had stayed up all night as a means to combat jetlag; it would allow me to sleep for the entire flight When I finally checked in after ducking a 90 minute line due to my elite "gold" status, I was told that the flight would be delayed by 4 hours, I would miss my connecting flight and although I could make it into New York only 7 or 8 hours late, if I wanted to get to the airport I needed to go to, it would take at least until tomorrow. I stood there, dumbfounded. "I'm meeting my parents at JFK seven, though. They are flying in from California." She looked at me stonily.

We stared at each other for a while, and finally she said, "So do you want to arrive at Newark at 11pm or LaGuardia at midnight?"

And so, I wept.

I was hustled to customer service where I continued to weep. "I've been getting complaints from everyone who was on this fight. This flight is not my fault. I didn't do it," the agent explained.

I wept.

I was supposed to go to New York last week, but my friend Mark was stabbed to death a few days before my departure. I changed my flight to attend his funeral.

I continued to weep, and when it became clear that there was no abatement in sight, nor would my body mass be condusive to physically removing me, they decided to change my flight something a bit more reasonable. To an amateur, this seems like negative reinforcement. I've just, once again, proven that wailing is more likely to help me get my way than not. After taking psych 101, though, I know that this is actually positive reinforcement, and I'm feeling rather chipper about it, brown corduroy and all.