At the beginning of November, I'm getting on an airplane.

I have two weeks' vacation coming to me, and I've got to use them by the end of December or they disappear. So a couple of months ago, I set things up so I would go somewhere far. The only feasible way to do that is by airplane. So that's how I'm going to do it. Yessireebob. Get right on the plane. Here I go. Don't push me, I'm getting there. Getting on the plane. Getting right on there. Here I go. Heeeeere I go...

Now, I'm uneasy about flying even during peacetime. Remember peacetime? A couple of months ago? When I made the plane reservations? Even then, plane flights for me were kind of like a really bumpy ride in a 1968 Chevy Impala with a bad radiator hose except you're a mile up in the air and the bad radiator hose might or might not be the left wing, and the broken windshield wiper definitely means we're all going to die.

But now, of course, there's also that whole pesky hijacking thing to worry about, that whole irritating "Two-guys-from-Kabul-killed-the-entire-flight-crew-using-only-a-napkin-and-a-corn-muffin-and-now-we're-headed-straight-for-a-Charlie-Daniels-concert" thing. And even if we don't get hijacked, everyone on the plane is going to think we'll be hijacked, and the first time we hit turbulence, the touchy-feely guy across the aisle will choose me for his last fling.

But I'm going anyway. And if you want to know why, let me tell you about my life.

I live in a tiny studio apartment in Maple Shade, NJ. Though I have always relaxed by taking long walks at night, I have nowhere to walk to here except the gas station and back. Nor can I watch more than about an hour of TV before I feel kind of gross, like I'd had cotton candy for dinner. So when it came time to plan my vacation, I wanted to go. Anywhere. Anywhere but the gas station. The guys there have told me that, even though they still like me and everything, they want to start seeing other customers.

So I dug up my short list of people I actually could stand to be around for two weeks straight, I called my friend Mark in Manhattan, and we settled on a couple of travel destinations that are, I should mention in passing, none of your freakin' business, as are our flight times. Who's asking, anyway? And what have you got in that bag?

So if I don't go, I'll be, so to speak, stuck indoors – compiling the fears of an entire nation that is, so to speak, stuck indoors.

What would I even gain from being overly cautious? Sure, when I go on the trip, I could crash in a hijacked plane. But if I stayed home, I could be crashed into by a hijacked plane. I could be blown up on the bridge on the way over to the airport. I could skip taking a vacation altogether and stay at work – at a newspaper office, the number one type of location, up to this point, for contracting anthrax. Federal studies also prove that, if I blow my nose during an editorial board meeting one more time, somebody is probably going to clock me in the head.

Sure, a number of things could yet keep me from going. If all flights everywhere are canceled, I could end up spending my vacation in a bar – which is kind of what I plan on doing anyway, except that the bar I'm headed for is a couple of thousand miles away.

But setting aside unforeseen events, I'm going.

And knowing that I'm going, I feel like I'm facing a sort of deadline. Just the possibility that I might not be alive in a few weeks makes everything more clear and urgent. I think about whether my life has amounted to anything significant, whether I really mean what I say, whether I really meant what I just said about meaning what I say, and whether I should have married that girl I saw that one time on that bus five years ago when I was drunk.

I think about whether it'd be worth it if, just once more before I died, I went to work wearing lederhosen and a football helmet.

But mostly, I think about why it is worth my life just to sit in another bar in another continent and see a different world, instead of cowering in this tiny apartment in Maple Shade – an apartment that would shrink even further the moment I decided to be afraid of something new.