The Earlies

My sister and I are plagued with the earlies. It stems back to life with our mom and dad and no matter how hard we try, we cannot defeat the earlies. My parents are never, ever late to anything and I spent a lot of my life in waiting rooms because we often arrived thirty minutes early to appointments. It didn't matter that none of the doctors were ever running on time, we would arrive at least ten minutes early. I hated it as a kid, yet now that I'm on my own, I can't stop the trend. When Tim makes a restaurant reservation, I fret and panic until he finally agrees to leave. I become convinced that we will arrive two minutes too late and they will give up our table. I arrive to the dentist and the doctor 30 minutes early and end up waiting an hour. I carry a book everywhere I go because chances are I will have plenty of time to read. If I don't leave the apartment early enough, I go into a sweat and frantically pace around the room staring at the clock. I can't get anything done because I spend the whole time worrying up a storm, so I eventually surrender and leave. The worst part of the earlies is related to getting to the airport early enough to safely check in, go through security, and arrive at your gate with plenty of time for last minute bathroom runs and dashes for food. Nene and I traveled quite a bit with our parents and we always spent an hour and a half waiting at our gate because of the earlies. I never really minded the case of the earlies until I started traveling with people other than my parents a few years ago. Every time I have to go to the airport with a group of people, I desperately try to explain that we absolutely must arrive at the check in line two hours before takeoff or the world will end. Nobody ever pays me any mind and I spend the hours before takeoff in a constant state of panic thinking that we will never get through the check in line in time, and then security will pull all of us aside for special random checks and then we'll miss our plane and everything will go wrong and no matter how hard I try to stay calm, I fail pretty miserably. It's also terrible when I'm traveling alone. I travel to Florida for work sometimes, and I can never decide when I need to leave my apartment to get to the airport with enough time to make it through all the steps. A lot of my trips leave around 6 am, and so naturally that means I should wake up at 2:30 am, leave the apartment at 3:00 am, catch the bart, and ride it to SFO and arrive an hour or so later. Then that leaves me two hours to get through all the lines and security and sit at my gate with enough time to start and finish reading three novels. I spend the entire night before fretting over exactly when I need to leave the apartment, how much time I should factor in for emergencies such as the BART exploding in half, and then I have to re-analyze it all again and again. I can't sleep, and when it comes to my scheduled wake up time, I'm already showered and ready waaaaaaaaay before I planned to be. So the only option is to leave early and get to the airport much earlier than I should have. Recently, though, the airports haven't been open by the time I get to the airport. I end up sitting in the check in line leaning against my overpacked suitcase, dreaming about the extra hour of sleep I could have had if I wasn't plagued with the earlies. It is so frustrating. The last two times I've arrived at SFO, it was around 4 am, and the check in lines didn't open til 5 am. The same thing happened when Tim's father drove me to the airport in PA. He told me several times that I didn't need to arrive so early, but I persisted and insisted that I needed to get to the airport by 4 am or something would go drastically wrong. Of course, we arrived, and we spent an hour waiting for the check in line to open. So this weekend, when my sister's flight was to depart from Oakland at 6 am, she went through the same problem with the earlies. She wanted to be there around 4 am with plenty of time to get through all the lines, and she spent all of Sunday night fretting over it. Since I was not going on the flight, it was easy for me to say, "We'll arrive at 5, and the check in lines will have just opened, and you can get through all the lines just fine." She talked me back to leaving at 4:00 am and then she decided we'd leave at 3:30 am and then she decided we'd leave at 4:30 am and I watched my sister suffer from the earlies. I decided I'd wake up at 4 am to wake her up so we could shower quickly and get going, but 4 am swings around and my sister is sitting on the couch, wide awake, already showered, and ready to go. We leave early, I get her to the airport on time, and she gets through all the lines without much problem. The only problem was that when she arrived, the check in lines were already open. It is maddening because I was so convinced that she would be on perfect time, and I was wrong. So now my 5 am open up rule is broken, and I'm going to be plagued with a worse case of the earlies the next time I have a 6 am flight. I slept on the floor at work this morning. I work three minutes away from the Oakland airport, and I was too lazy to drive to OAK, drive home, sleep 30 more minutes, then drive right back to work. It wasn't very cozy, and I'm sure a few people were confused, but it worked out in the end.