I recently came back from a 5 week trip in which I took nearly a dozen flights to, from, and around Europe. Almost all of my travel was in the blissfully comfy Business Class section of the planes for the first time in my life, and amidst all the friendly service and generally tasty food, one thing stood out:

Plastic knives.

Okay, so I don't mean to sound insensitive to the victims of 9/11 or National Security yadda yadda and Mr. Ashcroft if you're reading this please don't arrest me, but this is one of the most friggin' stupid things I've ever seen.

Confiscating eyebrow tweezers from my younger sister at the airport security checkpoint ranks up there, too. But I digress.

Anyway, I guess no one stopped to think that, gee, if someone is hell bent on hijacking a plane, a metal fork is likely to do just as much if not more damage. Or how about broken shards from the wine glasses? And as they (sort of said) in A Christmas Carol, watch out for those metal spoons, 'cause they'll gouge your eyes out!

Why do we have such a history in this country of taking not only the easy way out, but the absolutely moronic dumb-as-rocks way out when faced with real problems? In fairness, even Air France dumbly offered the same surprisingly sharp plastic knives, but I'm guessing that none of this silliness would have happened without American gov't/airline decrees.

Am I the only person to be so annoyed by this symptom of knee-jerk stupidity?

If you don't have pictures to remember your travels, did they really happen?

While we all would initially no doubt insist that we travel for the "experience," we should also ask ourselves to what extent we travel to "collect" things... trinkets, pictures, etc. Without those things, what do we really have left? When the memories fade, what then?

I came to this hard realization after getting my backpack stolen while on a 5-week Europe trip...

I just got back from a 5 week vacation, and 4 days later, I'm still feeling jet-lagged, at least emotionally jet-lagged. And I'm asking myself many questions:

• Am I capable of taking a vacation that's not an 'adventure'... a week or more when I'm just sitting by the seaside sipping a drink, sans schedule, without worries about monetary conversions, train schedules, walking tours, and so on? And if so, when?
  
• Is this the last 5 week vacation I'll have before I'm retired? If not, what kind of job am I gonna be able to find that'll let me take such an extended time off?
  
• Why do I feel so unmotivated and unrefreshed now?
  
• Am I ever going to feel at "home" in America, or I will continue to have nagging suspicions that I may be happier in some other country?

Of a more urgent nature, though, I suppose I ought to clean my room, find a job, and basically get around to handling the 1,318 tasks on my burgeoning to-do list, 98% of which are holdovers from before I began planning my big vacation.

Blah.