Fear of Flying

Dear Geraldine,

I'm a high school senior graduating in just a few weeks, and I'm very excited to go off to college next fall. However, my college is over a thousand miles away from where I live. I think I'll be able to sort out all the homesickness issues and learning how to do my own laundry, but I'm terrified of flying. I'd take a train to school, but it costs almost double what the flight costs, and the train would take much longer, so I'm just going to bite the bullet and fly. I was wondering if you had any tips for how to get over my fear.

Sincerely,
Madison

Dear Madison,

First off, your fear is well founded. Planes crash all the time and you never survive plane crashes. The worst thing is, even if the conditions are picture perfect out, you're still probably going to fly into a flock of geese and die. In fact, a federal database was just opened to the public on Friday to show just how often birds and planes collide. The data shows that 98,328 bird-plane collisions have occurred since 1990. And that's just the incidents that are reported. Think of all those mystery crashes in the ocean that went unexplained! Birds.

So my advice to you is prepare for death. Kiss your loved ones goodbye, leave a will, and enjoy those tiny bottles of vodka you can buy on planes. They're absolut-ly adorable!

Bottoms up!
Geraldine