Aging, Autopilot, and False Confidence

Something that I discovered about myself as I’ve aged, and I don’t know how I feel about it, is that I am a bit more forgetful than I used to be. Like, I’m not leaving things in unusual places—nobody has found my cellphone in the freezer…yet—but it seems to me that my brain puts certain tasks on autopilot and forgets to grab the yoke when it’s time to go back to manual control. More often than not, that manifests in situations surrounding whether I remembered to take my once-daily pill, not whether I remembered to grab my wallet before I walked out the door.

So, to pick up where we left off, I was walking down the concourse heading toward the men’s room, feeling confident in my world and excited to be heading back to Japan. I walk into the stall, sit down on the throne (I’m skipping a few steps; some details are implied), and, as is common practice across the world, pull out my cellphone to doomscroll a bit while Mother Nature runs her course.

I hear on the overhead announcements that my flight has begun boarding. Fortunately, my business is just about concluded. So, as always, I put my cellphone in a safe place, perched on top of the toilet paper rolls, and proceeded to clean up—looking forward to having access to some of the world’s most advanced toilets—stand up (again, I’m skipping ahead; the missing steps are implied), make sure I have my backpack (lessons learned from my earlier experience), walk out the door, wash my hands, and start happily walking toward the airplane. I reached for my back pocket to grab my phone and realized… It’s missing!

Shit! I remember EXACTLY where I left it! Time to go! I run back to the bathroom, and just as I walk in, I see someone else walk into my stall and close the door. I have several minutes before this becomes a critical situation, so I can wait, but hopefully it won’t take him that long to do his thing. So I stand there, in the men’s room… waiting… watching all the line of men come and go; making note of who washed their hands and who didn’t… patiently waiting… men asked if I was in line… I waved them around and told them I was waiting for a particular stall. Everyone looked at me, but to their credit, said nothing… still waiting.

The Physics of Waiting Outside a Bathroom Stall

Time becomes a paradox in moments like these. The bubble you’re in slows waaaaay down. Meanwhile, time outside of the bubble keeps moving at the same cadence or speeds up, sometimes significantly. I heard the announcement over the speaker that they are now boarding the next group of passengers. I’m running out of time and wondering if the guy in the stall with my phone has bowel problems. Wait… is he grunting? Oh no. That can’t be good.

I’m at the point where I need to take drastic action, and soon. I walk over to the door and get ready to knock when I hear the toilet flush, and stand up. Whew! Okay, time to play it cool. I walk back over to the unofficial starting point of waiting for a stall when the door opens and start walking toward it. He’s holding my phone! I look at him and say, “Hey buddy! That’s my phone!”

He smiles. “Here you go, man. I was worried about where I was going to turn this in.” He handed me the phone. I smiled, clearly relieved. He pats my shoulder. “We’ve all done it at least once.” In moments like this, especially as a captive audience in an airport, we somehow band together and look out for each other. So, props where props are due.

With my phone in hand, I bolt back to the gate, just in time to board and take my seat. As with everything Japanese, the plane pushed back on time, and we were airborne 20 minutes later, heading northwest back across the Pacific. This time, this is a daytime flight. I won’t see the stars again until I’m asleep in my hotel room at New Chitose Airport.

Suspended Between Day and Night

It was a smooth flight, and Japan Airlines did not disappoint. Their Sky Wide seats on their Boeing 787 models are quite lovely, particularly for someone of my size. I also appreciated the 2–4–2 arrangement on the airplane, and the seat next to me was empty. The flight attendants were beyond reproach, and the service was stellar. Japan Airlines is one of the best in the business, and this flight demonstrates why.

I looked out the window. Everything was cloud‑covered, but it was also quite interesting to see. Because we were flying so far north and took off around noon, the sun never really went down. The sky dimmed, for lack of a better definition, but it never got close to anything approaching twilight; it felt like we were existing outside of regular time and space and were right on the cusp of sunset, in a place that didn’t cast a shadow but also wasn’t in the dark. The light felt crisp, like what you experience during a solar eclipse. Below the aircraft, superimposed upon the clouds, I saw a shadow that was large and round, and the only thing I could figure was that the only thing large enough to cast that size of a shadow had to have been the Earth. I’d often heard this was a common phenomenon on the northern polar routes, but whenever I’ve crossed the Pacific, it has always been night outside. It was really pretty cool to see. Take that, flat‑earthers!

Despite this moment of scientific observation, I still had the check‑in agent’s waiver rattling around in my head. I had about eight more hours left to sort this out. Fortunately, my good friend in Taiwan messaged me back, and luckily for me, she and her husband would be home around Christmas, so I figured this would be a great time to pop over to say hi and spend a few days in Taipei. Simplicity itself! So, I booked my flight while I was somewhere over the Pacific—or rather, I tried to book my flight somewhere over the Pacific. That was a pretty tall order. Who knew there weren’t a lot of internet options literally in the middle of nowhere? Eventually, I got it done. One more thing off the bucket list, and if for some reason my math didn’t math, well, I had an onward ticket. Small comfort, because that raises a whole litany of concerns coming back, but one step at a time. Sometimes you can only solve one problem at a time and then deal with the fallout later. Speaking of which, this one’s for all you Fallout fans out there! IYKYK.

Preparing for Battle

As is normal, I didn’t sleep, but I wasn’t bored either. I got through a good bit of an audiobook, enjoyed a noodle cup snack (once again, Japan Airlines is freaking amazing!), and started preparing my soul to get through customs and immigration at Narita International Airport. After all, if customs is chaos at New Chitose, it has to be exponentially busier and more chaotic at Narita. Right?

Around breakfast time, the flight attendants brought around immigration cards for all of us to fill out and have ready when we landed, and that’s when I remembered the customs website where I could fill everything out online and have the machine scan my QR code. That took about an hour to handle because, again, the internet is a chaotic frenemy over the Pacific, just like it was on the other side of the ocean.

We landed at Narita a little bit ahead of schedule, which should have tipped me off that things were about to go in a very different direction than I had prepared for. I had spent the last ten hours low‑key mentally rehearsing a long, slow march through baggage claim, paperwork, and the chaos of us bloody gaijin being cattle‑wrangled through pens to get to the one agent I was sure was not going to let me in because I checked the wrong box on question 3d.

It turns out that Narita is one of the most Zen airports I have ever traversed. Everything is smooth, low‑stress, borderline calming, and everyone knows how to queue up to wait for their luggage. Compared to the chaos that is SEA‑TAC International Airport, Narita feels like a temple sanctuary that is as smooth as a monk meditating through an earthquake and is somehow disappointed in you for being stressed at all.

After I picked up my luggage, the next step was customs and immigration, and here is where my moment of truth was about to unfold. I was armed with my onward ticket and prepared to answer every question I could imagine them asking, including what the color of Uranus was. As it turned out, immigration was almost aggressively calm. The line moved. The officers were polite but no‑nonsense. They put a sticker in my passport, scanned my fingerprints, took my picture, and just like that, I was on to the next stage, where I scanned my QR code and was waved through without even so much as a sideways glance. I kept waiting for something to go sideways, because this is usually the moment it does.

It never did.

Then, just like that, I was out in Japan, and the moment felt glorious. From here on out, it’s smooth sailing.