I'm sitting at Sydney International Airport awaiting my flight to Japan.

That sounds awfully exotic ( I flew up here today from Melbourne with the lovely Qantas people) and while it is, it's just the beginning. After I spend a little bit of time soaking in the sake and taking bad photos of tiled roofs, I'll be boarding another plane. This time to fly across the Pacific from Narita to the USA.

Yes, I'm coming to America. (if I were Willo I'd say "Brace yourself bitches!")

I'm visiting San Francisco to get my brows waxed.

I'm driving to Las Vegas to shoot guns.

I'm going to SXSW - Rosie? How could I think of this place and not think of you - I'm going to Austin! Texas for the rest of yous. don't worry, if you thought I was a dork at Webstock with Russell Brown, wait til I'm in the same room as Ze Frank. At least I have an outside chance Ze will think my accent is charming, Russell just knew I was drunk.

Then, then THEN.. hold on to your hat, Rosie (and Todd who doesn't read this blog but if he did and if he was wearing a hat it would blow OFF within the next second) I'm going to see Kiki in NYC.

No, really. Kiki. Me. NYC. It's gonna be like Devonport all over again but with more wine and better shoes! and more expensive!!

Is that even possible... it's been so long coming and 2010 has been a personal mountain of crap so far. So.. so.. so can't even tell you how crap.

I am not happy with this post - I may well delete it in the morning. Wesley? where's my neck pillow and my book light?!

I was unsuccessfully looking around for the sign for the Women's bathroom. Fox said it was upstairs; one staff member asked me if he could help; the other staff member was talking to the first staff member about a bucket - all at the same time. This was confusing, "I just want to WASH MY HANDS!" The first staff member said I was welcome to use the downstairs toilet for disabled patrons. I thanked him and went through to wash my hands.

Fox, Willo and I had spent the afternoon with The Scots and friends celebrating Charlie's first birthday and had decided to drop into the Belgian Beer Cafe to buy Charlie her first beer. Being the efficient worker-bees we are, we also decided to take the recycling out as we were to pass the bins along the way. I like washing my hands in general, and more so in the time between touching trash bins and putting my hands anywhere near my mouth. I needed to lather-up with increasing urgency and rid my skin of recycling germs before I ordered my drink.

I wasn't entirely sure which door I needed to go through, but I took my best guess and felt comfortable with my choice as entered the spacious white-tiled bathroom - noticing there was tons of room for a wheelchair I must have picked the correct door.

Half way between the door and the basins though I realised that 'extra wide door' to the right was not necessarily for wheelchairs, but for able-bodied people wanting access to the next thing I saw: the urinals. I was, in fact, in the Men's toilet and then I realised the second urinal from the left being utilised.

The man standing at the urinal glanced over his shoulder and clocked me - that slight action made me feel the option to leave was no longer available. It was as if I had been seen, so I could no longer be unseen. I had to carry on. Yes, that's exactly how it works. Those are the rules!

I apologised and started seriously concentrating on washing my hands as quickly as possible. He said it was okay. He said he didn't mind. Failing to rinse my now-soapy hands fumbling with stupid flip-taps that wouldn't just run the water without being held in the 'on' position - I had to hold the handle up with one hand and try to wash the germs off with my the other hand - stupid taps!

Shaking off the water and keeping my eyes to the floor _TO_THE_FLOOR_ I turned and cursed to see there was only a hand dryer and no paper towels. Drying machines take too long, _too_long_. I pushed my hands underneath the nozzle and it began slowly drying my wringing hands in the jet of warmish air.

The man had finished in the urinal section now. He had washed his hands and was now wanting to use the hand dryer too. I thought he's wait his turn - there must be some sort of air-dryer etiquette - and if there is I'm sure that sharing a hand-dryer is considered poor form. He pushed his hands into the air stream between mine and the source and looked at me and said "So, how're you doing?"

"Obviously not well," I said "I'm a woman in the Men's toilet."

"That's okay, I don't mind in fact, I quite like it."

And this, people: this is my life. My life is not a movie.

If this was a movie I'd be some quirky square peg in a round hole who is stupid-smart, good at math and creative up to the eyeballs. I'd buys clothes from second-hand shops, pairing items together in an unique way but I can manage to pull off and look wonderful. He would have been some intelligent, good looking guy who is bored with the string of main-stream vapid blondes he'd been touting around town and is instantly fascinated by the quirky girl who had stumbled into this bathroom, and spends the rest of the evening (not hanging around in the toilet - out in the bar, walking along the waterfront, riding the ferris-wheel) kinda fighting a bit, laughing a lot and falling in love.

No. No, my life is not a movie.

Mine is a real life. It's full of recycled germs and wrong turns. It stars a middle aged, over-weight, under made-up woman with her badly cut hair dragged into a pony tail. She is a woman who, while knowing that 'Homme' means 'male' in French, will still barrel into the a toilet marked as such and not even have the where-with-all to slam it into reverse and get the hell out of there when the truth is revealed. She is the type of person who will commit to a course of action which ends up standing next to a creepy, unattractive stranger who is touching her semi-dry hands with his wet post-peeing-penis hands under the same warm-ish air from a bathroom hand dryer.

I was talking to a colleague today about James Cameron's AVATAR topping the US$1bn mark and noting that it only had to earn another US$600,000,000 to become the second largest money making movie ever - the first being Titanic - and that was one of his too.

She scoffed and said that Titanic was the worst movie she had ever seen. EVER. And the main reason for that was because of Leonardo diCaprio who, at that stage of his career, she said, still hadn't learned to act. Which I thought was a bit harsh - especially in a world were they still let Nicolas Cage make movies.

Her broad, sweeping statement about a movie that is clearly (millions of unmarked dollar bills: clearly) beloved by millions of fans, got my hackles up - which is weird because I'm not a Titanic fan (the movie, not a reference to my size) nor do I have actual hackles anymore - but I've seen such films as Deep Blue Sea and The Phantom of the Opera (7.2 IMDB? really??) so I know a thing or two about bad movies.

And there's a lesson in this story for everyone - don't interact with colleagues. Just don't. It never ends well and you won't get the mileage out of your hackles you were hoping for when you had them fitted.

[Blogger's Aside: I started remembering Phantom and comparing it to Titanic and now I'm losing feeling in my legs, there's a strange white light and I think.. is that, Uncle Jack??

SNAP OUT OF IT MICHELLE - you can't die from thinking about bad movies...

or.. can you?

(okay that doesn't work so well without the spooky music to accentuate the tension)]

ALSO: I apologise for not having a point to this blog post. My hackles didn't really rise that much either - I did find myself becoming defensive of Titanic, feeling I needed to rescue it from my colleagues opinion. Then I realised the highest earning movie of all time really doesn't need the help of someone who didn't really like it much to begin with. That behemoth was big enough to take on all-comers.

You might wonder how anyone could love a beach made of black sand. This sand so fine it gets into everything, including the fabric of swimming costumes making light colours seem moldy and dirty. It absorbs heat from the sun to degrees that don't just cause discomfort, but some days actual burns. But nothing says 'home' to me (on days cloud is covering Mt Taranaki) as much as stopping at Mokau Beach and seeing this dark beachline curve along the coast.

I stop at Mokau on each of hundreds of trips from Auckland to Waitara - for a few years I took photos of the family and we have a very short record of the kids growing taller and older on the same or similar driftwood logs. It's a place to let the dog off and she ricochets between the grass and the waves, digging and rolling, chasing sticks and barking at wrestling children.

As soon as we stopped in the carpark, Tandia stripped down to skivvies and dived right down the bank and into the warm, fine black ironsand - she was instantly covered - black sand sticking to her white knickers, up her arms, over her face and up into her blonde hair. She didn't care, and neither did the dog. The sand sticking to Bailey's eyelids and making her look like she was wearing thick eye liner.

Plus I got 'wanded' again and padded down and searched. Obviously they don't recognise my saintliness.

Sent from my iPhone

*later - on the plane parked on the tarmac at Christchurch airport*

So today has been a litany of small discomforts and annoyances. Which is a worry, as Malcolm Gladwell says in one of his books (they all blur into one in my head) that air disasters aren't often due to one catastrophic event, but a series of little events - and that's what's happening to me today - so if I don't make it - this is why.

After I got to the airport at noon today, being as early as I often am to the airport, I was about tenth in line for check-in - but it still took _45 minutes_ to get to the counter. The three counters that were operating (not counting the Business Class counter which only checks in those dudes) were all coping with family groups with passport problems. After a little while, the sheep-run had almost the entire plane's worth of passengers waiting to check-in.

When I finally got to the counter, the woman said "So I assume you know your flight has been cancelled?" and I wondered to her how I was supposed to know that information? She apologised and said, "Due to a mechanical problem with your aircraft, we are now flying you to Auckland on an alternate plane, via Christchurch. You are due to land in Auckland at 9.45pm."

"Okay," I say, "okay. I mean, what am I going to do, it's not like it's the MOST IMPORTANT DAY OF THE YEAR FOR MY FAMILY or anything, not as if they'll MISS ME AT CHRISTMAS EVE DINNER and it doesn't matter that I took a WHOLE DAY OFF WORK to FLY EARLY to GET THERE ON TIME or anything!" She looked at me, obviously, this wasn't the first time she'd heard this kind of bleating from a passenger and what could she do? I knew she was just doing her job so I smiled and wished her a Merry Christmas and made my way to my gate.

I found my seat on the plane - not, of course, my 'usual' seat - but an aisle seat in the middle block - almost my least favourite seat in the aircraft. But I settled in, pushed my bag under the seat in front of me, loaded up Bill Bryson's Shakespeare audio book on my iPhone and began listening to his soothing voice when, a very less soothing voice broke my peace and quiet.

"You're in my seat!" she said. I looked up (she's lucky I heard her, my Bose in-ear headphones are bloody good) and she said "You've got the wrong seat." I was pretty sure I wasn't in the wrong seat but I pulled out my boarding pass and held it up to her. The seat numbers matched, we had both been assigned 44D. "This is MY seat," she insisted "I booked it for my whole family!" her husband was standing there, sheepishly holding their young baby. I looked for a crew member to help - they're hard to find when you need one, and the one I found I had to ask if she was part of Air New Zealand's crew - although she appeared to have clothes that might be part of a uniform, she didn't have any badging or logos on her jacket. I let her know the problem and she asked the other woman to accompany her to find a new seat. I suggested, as I was a 'single' maybe it was easier to move me than half the child's support team. The crew member shrugged like she didn't really care who moved, and I followed her to the back of the section of seats.

She took my boarding pass, told me to "Stay here." and went up to the front of the aircraft to sort things out. She came back after a few minutes and said they were sorting it out. She asked me if I'd been waiting long at the airport. I said I hadn't been, the usual time, but added that I was disappointed to be flying via Christchurch, meaning I would miss Christmas Eve with my family, and how I'd missed it entirely the year before due to a flight mix-up (while these things are true, they were said in a way which didn't let her know that a) there was no dinner or anything special planned and b) I was the reason for the flight mix-up last year that ruined Christmas) in an attempt to be upgraded to Business Class.

The crew member, instead of suggesting Business Class seats might help comfort my broken heart, then proceeded to tell me about HER day. How AirNZ had called her at 6am for the 10am flight from Auckland to Melbourne when they could just have easily have called at 8am and then she could have had two extra hours of sleep and wouldn't be bad right now because SHE WAS TIRED! And how she was so annoyed and upset that she was going to phone them and give them a piece of her mind. How it wasn't fair, and how everyone on board felt the same way she did and none of the crew were happy. NONE OF THEM. All the time she's talking I'm wondering why I paid AU$780 for no seat, a longer flight and the experience of hearing AirNZ Crew Member's sob story about how bad her day was. I was wondering why she wasn't just saying "I'm very sorry Madam, I hope upgrading you to Business Class will go some way to making your day better."

All devices must be turned off now, we're about to leave Christchurch for Auckland.

So, where was I - oh yes: standing by the toilets waiting to be allocated a seat.

Eventually, about 15 minutes later, and five minutes after our flight was supposed to leave Melbourne, Ms Crew Member comes down the aisle with a torn boarding pass with my name on it and a new seat number 55A. God dammit, no Business Class. She walks me to my seat to find, surprise! someone sitting in it. She asks the woman in the window seat for her boarding pass and yes, again, it matches my one - and they've booked me into a double booked seat *again*.

Ms Crew Member drops me off by the toilets again, and goes back to sort out a seat. Unfortunately, after another five minutes or so, they sit me in the aisle, middle section, economy. God dammit. How badly do I have to be mucked around to get upgraded? People I know show up late for flights, mucking up the flight schedule and still get upgraded.

I'm grumpy. I'm sitting behind a screaming baby - the woman who is sitting next to the screaming baby is asking to be moved. I don't even have the energy to ask to be moved. I stare at the emergency exit remembering Gladwell's idea that plane crashes are the result of lots of little mistakes. Then the Captain's voice intercoms information about how all the computers are down and their "passenger head count" and computer print-out for people on the flight doesn't tally so they're gonna have to phone Auckland and get that sorted out.

I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever see another Christmas, let alone this one.

Another couple of confusing intercommunications and we're finally underway, about 30 minutes late and many apologies later.

This is where my luck changes - slightly - and a lesson in how it's the little things that can make all the difference.

[it's at this time that I could tangent into another, equally as long post about how I bought my Bose in-ear headphones at JB HiFi by accident and how, up to this point I'd been dead annoyed at doing so but I won't because I'm sure we've all got better things to do than write/read that stuff - so onwards, we're nearly done]

When I bought my Bose headphones at JB HiFi by accident, they came with adapters, one of which appeared to be one that plugs into the airphone jack on an aeroplane.

I really hate airplane headphones - they don't fit properly, I have to have the volume up really loud to hear anything, and then I also hear everything else - the plane engine, the trolleys, the people next to me etc etc. So when I plugged the Bose adapter into the socket and pushed the buds into my ears, I couldn't believe how AWESOME Anthony Bourdain sounded and how crap the sound on the inFight entertainment system really is. Like, it's really crap. Like an old stretched cassette tape. But awesome earbuds, I couldn't hear the baby, the people, the plane or the crew member was trying to offer me water.

I was happy again, because the Bose and because the feature movie was District 9 and it had great sound. In fact it was so great, it made all my annoyances go away - well, almost. The intercom interrupts the movie everytime the they have a message - important messages such as making sure that tray table is stowed, making sure we know that there is a light snack (and that's all you're getting too missy, don't thing $780 gets you an actual MEAL we are landing in Auckland, and you need to fend for your starving self and no, the bar is closed and we're not opening it again FOR ANYTHING - dry run to Auckland!)

Wait, where was I? oh yeh.. the intecom interrupting the movie to talk about trivia, to wonder which word has 5 'e's and no other vowels or, for those how prefer maths trivia, how many years of combined experience does the crew have, and where Santa is and please make sure that tray table is stowed cos, you know, they're fecking dangerous.

It got so bad, the woman next to me started throwing her hands at the screen everytime her drama stalled due to constant inane messages from the pilot and crew.

Me? I just rolled with the punches by that stage - happy with a great movie and awesome headphones and knowing that I would, in the end, make it all the way home for Christmas Day and that safe in the knowledge that flying 4 hours earlier than I usually do, I saved myself one whole hour in the end - but really - what price is an hour with family?

Priceless.

2:57am bedtime.