Historically I have some wicked bad anxiety over flying. It’s so bad that I’ve convinced myself many times that if I get over my anxiety that the plane will fall out of the sky. (It’s a phobia, it’s supposed to be irrational.)

I was sitting in the airport with my Dad several years ago and commented on my anxiety. He was shocked to hear it because he LOVED to fly, wanted to get on the plane first, sit by a window and enjoy the whole thing.

Which I found a little strange considering he’d been on recovery teams for the airline crash in Guam and EgyptAir.

I took comfort knowing that if I was on a plane that crashed that my dad would be on the recovery team – and God wouldn’t be so horrid as to make my Dad sift for me – so clearly I wasn’t going to die in a crash, and my anxiety was keeping the plane aloft anyway, so I had two things going for me!

And then he went and died. Fucker. Now what I was supposed to do?

Anyway. Back to that airport chat.

AFTER I tell him I’m SCARED of flying, he relays the following experience (told in his words. Add your own drawl as needed.)

“I was on a flight to go to conference to speak about [one of the airline crashes]. I opened my briefcase and started going through notes and pictures. I noticed the guy next to me perk up and looking over my shoulder. He finally said, “Okay, WHAT are you doing looking at plane crash photos on an airplane?”

“We talked for a while, I explained what I did. He asked me what would make my job easier and I told him I wished that when a plane was going down that everyone shove their thumb up their ass.”

(um, zomgwtf Dad?)

“Well, you see, there tends to be fires with air crashes. Fingerprints are great identifiers but easily lost in a fire. A torso is very thick and would protect that thumb/fingerprint and make identification much easier and be able to get the victims back to their loved ones.”

“After the flight, I got my luggage and went to the bathroom where I ran into this guy again, and he told me he’d thought a lot about what I said and if he was ever on a plane that went down, I’d know who he was because of the thumb up his ass.”

So when Scout and Alex and I flew to Chicago a couple weeks back, I asked, “So do we round robin the thumbs up the ass? If so, I totally get Alex’s thumb.”

(I bet AllTop is real proud of this entry!)