Thursday morning, I woke up at 3:40 a.m. to catch a flight home for Christmas. My original plan for this article was supposed to be a video diary of my travel experience and I really wanted to be witty. But then I realized that I was waking up at 3:40 a.m. to catch a flight home for Christmas. I try not to be witty until at least 9 a.m. Flash forward 4 hours and there I was, sitting on a plane that would take me from Georgia to California. There was a baby squawking three rows to the right of me and a woman next to me cackling at the movie she was watching.

Flying is a pretty cool way to travel. It's literally the height of luxury! However, there's a lot I hadn't considered about flying until that morning, when I was deliriously thinking about the deep mechanics of flight.

My first flight got in 20 minutes early and I couldn't help but wonder if it had ever occurred to anyone that pilots speed just as much as people in cars do? Essentially, a plane is a giant car in the sky, so the rules of the road apply: just in the air. This means that pilots can probably speed about 5-10 mph above the speed limit. Is there even a speed limit in the sky? How fast are pilots supposed to go on average? Is the minimum, like, 200 mph? Is there an air police plane that notes which planes are speeding? Does Google have these answers?

The most beautiful thing about traveling by plane -- or really traveling anywhere that entails changing time zones -- is how it's the closest form of time travel we'll get. By the time I got from the east coast to the west coast, I had experienced 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. twice. The math was too complex for me at the time, and even now if I'm being honest, so I can't compute how many hours that day was for me, but it was definitely more than 24.

One thing that would always freak me out about flying when I was younger was flushing the toilet. This is gross but I used to believe that our human waste would be dispersed into the atmosphere. Literally, I thought that when I flushed it would would directly open a hole in the plane to the outside and I would get sucked out of the plane. Which is why I would never use the bathroom while in flight. I grew out of that (thankfully). I know the truth, but it doesn't stop me from thinking that every time I flush. My heart still pitter-patters with a small amount of fright at the thought.

Planes are weird things if you think about them too hard.