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Why I love airports
I used to use this great site Bookcrossing. I asked an author if she wanted to hear my Bookcrossing story and she said sure. So this is what I wrote back to her. Sorry, ladies, no photos with this one.:)
Bookcrossing is a great concept but it requires people
to appreciate the value of books. Where I live, in
Hagerstown, Md., I'm often the only one in a
coffeehouse reading a book. So when I would leave a
book somewhere it would be thrown away. What a waste
of a good book, not to mention the time spent
registering the book, adding the bookcrossing label,
etc.
Gradually I figured out what would be better would be
to leave the book at a place where people are looking
for something to read. I had previously written about
how one reason I love airports and airplanes is it is
one of those places where you see a larger share of
the population reading.
So for a trip to visit family in Austin I packed extra
books with the plan to drop off books at each airport
I visited. What better way to get the books to travel
then to leave them in different city's airports?
On the way back from Texas, I had dropped a book on
some seats by a newspaper when I realized my behavior
might be viewed by security as suspicious. This was
during the summer when a pair of as yet unidentified
snipers were going around Washington D.C. killing
random people. Airport security had been becoming
increasingly tight.
Mere minutes after leaving this book I heard sirens
and other sounds and then it was announced that the
entire airport had to be cleared out. Implied was that
the airport security had found something suspicious.
Oh, god, I realized, my abandoned Kurt Vonnegut book
might cause everyone, including me, to spend the next
three hours filing out of an airport until it was
cleared and everyone had to rebook flights.
So not only was I a klutz but now I was a threat to
homeland security.
It was around then that I decided that if I was going
to continue to use bookcrossing I needed to be more
careful about where I left the books.
It was not long after that that the wife of our city's
mayor, who I covered as part of the city beat,
mentioned her curiousity at learning that I like to
read while in the bathtub. I tried to figure out how
she knew such a personal detail about me while I tried
to get out of my mind the image of the mayor's wife
and her daughter discussing, as they had apparently
done, my habit of reading each night, often in a
bubblebath.
It was when she mentioned that they had found this
juicy detail about me when they happened to come
across my bookcrossing profile that I decided two
things: it was time to change my profile and it was
probably just time to stop doing the whole
bookcrossing thing before anything more embarrassing
taken place.
They say it's accepting you have a problem that is the
first step and at that point I realized I had a
problem and it was my relationship with Bookcrossing.
Why I love airports
I used to use this great site Bookcrossing. I asked an author if she wanted to hear my Bookcrossing story and she said sure. So this is what I wrote back to her. Sorry, ladies, no photos with this one.:)
Bookcrossing is a great concept but it requires people
to appreciate the value of books. Where I live, in
Hagerstown, Md., I'm often the only one in a
coffeehouse reading a book. So when I would leave a
book somewhere it would be thrown away. What a waste
of a good book, not to mention the time spent
registering the book, adding the bookcrossing label,
etc.
Gradually I figured out what would be better would be
to leave the book at a place where people are looking
for something to read. I had previously written about
how one reason I love airports and airplanes is it is
one of those places where you see a larger share of
the population reading.
So for a trip to visit family in Austin I packed extra
books with the plan to drop off books at each airport
I visited. What better way to get the books to travel
then to leave them in different city's airports?
On the way back from Texas, I had dropped a book on
some seats by a newspaper when I realized my behavior
might be viewed by security as suspicious. This was
during the summer when a pair of as yet unidentified
snipers were going around Washington D.C. killing
random people. Airport security had been becoming
increasingly tight.
Mere minutes after leaving this book I heard sirens
and other sounds and then it was announced that the
entire airport had to be cleared out. Implied was that
the airport security had found something suspicious.
Oh, god, I realized, my abandoned Kurt Vonnegut book
might cause everyone, including me, to spend the next
three hours filing out of an airport until it was
cleared and everyone had to rebook flights.
So not only was I a klutz but now I was a threat to
homeland security.
It was around then that I decided that if I was going
to continue to use bookcrossing I needed to be more
careful about where I left the books.
It was not long after that that the wife of our city's
mayor, who I covered as part of the city beat,
mentioned her curiousity at learning that I like to
read while in the bathtub. I tried to figure out how
she knew such a personal detail about me while I tried
to get out of my mind the image of the mayor's wife
and her daughter discussing, as they had apparently
done, my habit of reading each night, often in a
bubblebath.
It was when she mentioned that they had found this
juicy detail about me when they happened to come
across my bookcrossing profile that I decided two
things: it was time to change my profile and it was
probably just time to stop doing the whole
bookcrossing thing before anything more embarrassing
taken place.
They say it's accepting you have a problem that is the
first step and at that point I realized I had a
problem and it was my relationship with Bookcrossing.
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