Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away

 I've been applying for some jobs lately.  We just moved into a new house, the first house my parents have owned since 1996 when we sold our house in Neenah, Wisconsin before moving to New Jersey before we moved to what we thought was France but ended up being Spain.  So I can finally put down a real address on my résumé, though I'm still lacking a cell phone number.  Home phone will have to do.

I'm honestly one of those people who has a really hard time trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life.  I don't know.  There are only a few conditions I have for a job I'll enjoy, and those are frequent travel and the ability to use my language skills.  Which admittedly aren't that impressive since three of the languages I speak are Romance languages, but hey.  At least I'm not monolingual, right?  *winkwinknudgenudge*

A couple weeks ago, my best friend in Hawaii told me that Continental Airlines, based out of Houston, TX with a major hub in Newark, was hiring flight attendants and that she had applied.  I found the application, filled it out myself, and just last Friday, after getting an earful about how I really need to just get out there and get a job from my lovely parents, I looked around for other airlines that were hiring, and filled out two more applications.

The truth is, at the moment, flight attending is my dream job.  I can partly blame the current TV series Pan Am for that, but most of the blame lies in the fact that I have been traveling since I was little.  My very first memory is of me, in the back seat of a car, craning my neck out the window and looking at tall buildings on both sides of the street.  My first memory is of Manhattan, on my way to fly out to Wisconsin with my mom right after turning two.  I've been told that a person's first memory can, apparently, explain a lot about a person: where he or she's going in life, who he or she is, what makes him or her tick.  So I guess traveling's in my blood, so to speak.  Since then, I've been on planes out to Denver (when I was six and we were going to visit my dad's brother who lived out in Colorado Springs), Spain, Paris, London, Oslo, Brussels, Switzerland, New York.  I've driven through Spain, France, Germany and Italy and across a few states as well.  Up until 2004, I was on approximately six planes a year, sometimes more.  Before I got a new passport in 2007, I'd gone through two, and the last one had all but two pages filled with stamps and three student visas.

 My life has been duller than imaginable since the summer of 2004 when I came back to the States after graduating high school.  It took me two years before I was in an airport again, two years since I was on a plane again (even if it was only domestic), and I didn't leave the country again for four years.  And now, the prospect of spending very near the rest of my life traveling, going from airport to airport, country to country, a couple days here, a couple days there...getting cheap, sometimes free, flights for a vacation to anywhere else I want to go, and being able to meet and talk to people from so many different countries; some diplomats, some tourists, some businessmen and women, is a thought that does nothing but thrill me.

To be fair, only one of the positions I applied for fulfills those requirements.  Another is for an airline that flies domestically but within major cities and to Mexico, and the other is for one route: Washington Dulles to Madrid-Barajas.  I'm hoping, and praying, for positive news regarding at least one of these positions.  I've had little to no customer service experience which most airlines require and I don't live in the proper city for one of them, but if all goes well, if my résumé is considered properly, I hope I will be able to get the chance to do something that I was practically born to do.

All images are screencaps from the 2011 BBC TV documentary Come Fly With Me: The Story of Pan Am.