Let's fly away

Do I have write in English? Is somebody actually reading this? Maybe I can just continue my story in Dutch. Just to avoid all my spelling- and grammarmistakes, just to play with words I feel with all the associations I linked to them during the past 20 years. English, I just know you since I was fourteen. And anyway, I was never good in you...

Some days have wings, some airplanes are just dots on a LCD-screen. Eurocontrol revealed the world to me behind the screens of the airlines. I was always wondering how airplanes found their way through the giant skyworld. I imaged a pilot overlooking the sky with his eyes and cameras placed on the wings and tail of his vehicle. Yes, I was really convinced the pilot was free as a bird, making his own choices how high to fly, responsible for his own successful flights and crashes. My illusion died today. The pilot is just a puppet of the 'airtrafficguides' in Eurocontrol (Maastricht). A pilot is blind and have to trust on the guidelines of a man or woman ni the strictly protected control centre. The control centre looks like you can expect from the movies: giant screens with a lot of dots (which function as symbols for airplanes), coordinates, information about the ascend and descend of all these planes, etc.

I tried to image myself sitting in one of the (quite confortable) chairs, staring to the dotted screen for hours. Ok, they offer you more than 100 000 euro to do that for a year, you just have work for 20 hours a week, you can take breaks of half an hour to two hours and you have to life of thousands of helpless people in your hands (or computermousse), but is that the difference I want to make?

Today I discovered psychologic experiments are an easy way to get money. I reacted on an advertisment about cognitive effects of tutorial groups in my university. Three sessions of reading texts and answering questions about it, will provide me 25 euro to spend in the Maastricht filmhouse, restaurants, theatre, etc.

I'm not really inspired today. It depends of the weather I guess. Or is it just my creativity which is flowing away... ? Who spoke a magic spell?