I was headed toward my gate for my San Diego-bound flight this afternoon at JFK airport when I noticed two girls who couldn’t have been older than 13 checking their boarding passes and loudly speaking to each other. “They just announced they are boarding executive platinum and platinum fliers,” one of the girls said. “We’re platinum, so we should board now, too.” There wasn’t even a semblance of a line, just a big crowd in front of the “priority” and “main” aisles to board the flight, so I rushed ahead of them into the priority line, scanned my electronic ticket, and got on the plane.

As I sat on the plane, I thought about how crazy it was that these two girls who were barely teenagers had platinum status on American Airlines; that’s at least 50,000 miles flown each year, assuming economy class tickets and that we’re going by mileage only. I just started getting this level of status in the two years, and that was when I was 28. When I was 13, I had only boarded one dinky flight, and that was from San Francisco to Las Vegas. I wondered if they argued about their upgrades and tracked their frequent flier status all the time, too. It’s certainly a life I never had when I was that young. I also wonder if they try to talk about platinum status and frequent flier privileges with their peers, who have no idea what the big deal is and what all these terms even mean. Maybe one day I will have children who are like that, all because of the privileges that their mommy and daddy gave them.

After becoming acquainted late in life (I believe it was in late high school) to Korean food, I’m finally going to Korea this summer. I’m sure some people will label it our honeymoon, but Chris and I are just labeling it a trip to Korea. When we’re traveling internationally, we usually rely on Google Maps to get us around by foot and were confused when we tried to map several places at once in Seoul and kept getting our requests rejected. In addition, only driving directions were given; we couldn’t change the transport method to walking, which was odd. After further investigation, we found out that South Korea doesn’t allow full use of Google Maps, and when mapping, it will only give two points on the map and show driving directions… so no walking directions. This really didn’t make sense. So we did some more searches and found that Koreans in Korea use Naver to map directions, and it supposedly has Korean and English. Well, I downloaded Naver onto my phone to fruitlessly find that English was nowhere on it.. I even Google translated how to say English in Korean, and I still couldn’t find those characters.

In the end, Chris discovered that Bing Maps works quite well for Korea, and it’s pretty fast, too. I don’t think I’d ever been more excited about Bing in my life. Who would have thought that Bing would have saved the day (or our Korea trip)?

When I worked at Reprise Media years ago, I always heard my colleagues who worked on the American Airlines account grumble every time they visited Dallas for a business meeting. They’d complaint that the client was based in a city as boring as Dallas, as there was nothing good to do, eat, or see there. I always felt confused, since being food-minded, all I could think was that there had to be good Texan barbecue in Dallas. It’s Dallas in Texas after all, and Dallas is a major metropolitan area. How could there possibly not be good food there?!

Yesterday for lunch, we visited Pecan Lodge, which is arguably the best barbecue in Dallas, and it did not disappoint. Despite having a line that went out the door, it moved quite quickly, and it had the second tastiest brisket we’d ever eaten, with the first being at Franklin in Austin. It was extremely moist, well-seasoned, and didn’t need a knife to be pulled apart. The pork ribs were some of my favorite, and while eating them, I thought about how much Ed would have enjoyed these. We named a wedding reception table “Pork Ribs” after some of his favorite food. The meat didn’t need any sauces, but the sauces at the table were a little salty and tangy at the same time with a hint of sweetness. They were good for dipping the pulled pork.

Whoever said there wasn’t good food in Dallas is deluded.

Visiting Dallas has been like a history lesson going all the way back to the 1960s when Kennedy was president, up to George W. Bush’s dismal presidency that ended just years ago. We visited the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum this morning and then the Sixth Floor Museum, the museum dedicated to the life, assassination, and legacy of John F. Kennedy. The museum is actually built on the same site and on the same floor where the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy multiple times as his motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas.

The whole exhibit was put together so well, with lots of details of the Kennedys’ lives and an almost minute by minute account of what happened on the day of the assassination. I’ve developed an increased sensitivity to hearing about deaths, especially premature and tragic ones, and my eyes overflowed with tears when I read the description of Jackie Kennedy’s reaction to leaving Dallas after her husband’s death was pronounced. The new President Johnson and the Secret Service advised her to go back to D.C. immediately, but she refused, saying she would not leave Dallas without her husband’s body. Johnson consented and had Jackie and the president’s body in a coffin aboard Air Force One. The entire flight, Jackie sat in the back of the plane with the coffin next to her.

Stories like this always get me, hearing people’s experiences of great tragedy and loss and how they coped in a life without the ones they loved. It would certainly be worse to experience loss with the public eye staring down at you every single day and evaluating your life and every facial expression.

It’s been exactly two weeks from the wedding day, and I’m still so exhausted. Every sleep I have has been such a deep sleep, and when my alarm goes off at 6:20am for the gym, I feel cranky and just want to keep hitting snooze. I resisted the urge to sleep in three times this week, so I think I’m doing fairly well.

We haven’t had a proper weekend to just rest and do nothing since Chris’s parents have been in town since our first weekend back, and this weekend, we are Dallas-bound since Chris wanted to avoid the cold of the east coast. Getting on a plane seems so exhausting now, but I will be happy when we are eating Texas barbeque soon enough. I really just want to rest, vegetate, and do nothing for just a couple of days.

We were surprisingly very productive and efficient on our first day in the LA area, so we decided to use Tuesday to enjoy the day for ourselves and do what probably no one does during their wedding week travel: visit two presidential libraries in a single day. We visited the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, and the Reagan Library, which was huge and sprawling and even included an Air Force One, in Simi Valley. Both were grand and beautiful in their own ways, but both also managed to gloss over all the negative aspects of both presidencies, such as Nixon’s Watergate scandal and ultimate resignation from the presidency, and Reagan’s previous wife and first daughter, and how he used to be a Democrat in his life pre-presidency. Revisionist history never really works, especially when smart Americans rarely forget what really happened in the past.