I want to do nothing more than sleep. But of course my brain had to think about writing. Which I hadn't done. So now I'm here writing instead of in bed sleeping like I want to be.
I'm home now. After an hour of being trapped on a plane surrounded by screaming, crying, laughing, kicking, hitting kids (I didn't hit them, they hit me) I'm home. I have never in my life been on a plane with so many children. They surrounded me on all fronts. There was one directly behind me. A little boy. The lovely creature was on the plane for all of two minutes before he hit me in the head. I don't really know how it happened. He was so little, I don't know how he reached up over the seat to bop me on the head, but he did. From that moment, I knew I wasn't going to enjoy the flight very much. And that was after I found out I was in the middle seat.
It was an early flight so I was tired anyway, I just wanted to sleep. But sleep was never really an option. Not with all the child noises coming from every direction. Happy noises, sad noises, noise for the sake of noise noises. Any time of sound for any purpose a kid could have was made. Normally kids don't bother me much. But when there's one kicking the back of your seat on a semi-regular basis, and three others making random noises, it starts to grate on you. The kids parents never even told him to keep his feet down. My source of sanity came in the form of several batman comics preloaded onto my iPod. That and music. Loud music. Lots of it. I soon got into my happy place where screaming children barely existed.
I was honestly sad I was surrounded by families. Not because of the screaming kids, but because I am rarely inspired by families. It is easier for me to look at one person and come up with where their life has taken them, and what they might have done than it is for me too look at a family and imagine the same thing. I don't write about children. Children are hard. They're complex and simple. Smart and idiotic. They're confusing. And I don't think about them much. I don't write them because I don't know them. But a single person? A teen, a young adult, an adult? It's something I can relate too more. Something I can understand more. Children throw off my groove. Add a kid into any picture and my mind rarely knows what to do with it. They make writing difficult.
Children demand my attention through laughter and squeals of joy or pain. They rip me from my comfortable little world and throw me into one where my thought process slows and the stories freeze in my mind. It's awful.
I don't like feeling creatively drained. So I avoid writing about children. Or around them. Because they make everything so much more difficult. Even simple things like enjoying a short flight from Atlanta to Indianapolis.
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