Eat Fresh

When you travel for work for nearly a decade you learn about yourself. Most of these insights aren't really helpful, they're just observational. Some of them are strange (you don't really enjoy driving cars made by Kia, it turns out) and some of them are borderline obsessive (the hospital corners style of bed-making in hotels is untenable and must be undone immediately). You develop habits both good and bad.

You make use of the hotel gym.

You eat too much fast food.

You will go out of your way to catch a ballgame, or try out a cool-looking bar.

You don't manage your sleep well enough.

There are busy seasons and slow seasons, and during your busy seasons you find yourself feeling worse and worse as the time passes. Your body breaks down much easier in your mid-30's than it did in your mid-20s. Your diet has a more immediate effect on the way you physically operate. You developed a seizure disorder at age 29 which to mitigate involves always taking your meds, trying to stay hydrated and fed and altogether unstressed. You aren't supposed to get too hot. Or too cold. You think. You're definitely not supposed to do cocaine. Airports don't make doing any of this easy (except the cocaine part). You've been spending a lot of time in the airport chapels because they are quiet and nobody is scrolling Tik Tok with the sound on. There are no screens there and your brain can quiet down.

You spend so much time in airports. You hit the button that stops the light show on the moving walkway in the Detroit airport, you run into some coworkers at Reagan in D.C. and kill a layover with them, you try to stay hydrated. Work gives you a per diem to spend for food, you do your best. Some weeks your best is terrible. It's hard when you're in the middle of nowhere and you've just worked 13 hours lugging cameras up stairs in a football stadium and there's a Bob Evans across the street.

Sometimes you just need a vegetable. These are generally hard to come by in airports so you end up finding yourself at Subway more often than you'd have ever imagined. The sweet onion chicken, spinach, banana peppers, tomato and onions works. You're not sure if it actually makes you feel better, but it isn't a burger and fries so this feels like a minor win.

You think about your friend from high school, Grace, who loved Subway. She was the first vegan you knew personally, way before it had taken off in America the way it has now, and you think of two conversations you had with her. One, at a late-night diner in your hometown when you were eating a burger with an over-easy egg piled atop it and the yolk was dripping down your beard and you remarked, "if I got to the pearly gates and St. Peter showed me this footage and didn't let me in, I'd understand."  Another, years later, when you were working at a pizza parlor and ate mostly vegetarian salads for dinner when pizza each day became literally too much to stomach. "I think I could be vegetarian if it weren't for the money."

You thought about that more over the years and it was coupled with the thought that you were a coward. Not because you weren't vegan, but because you've let others do your animal killing for you. The choice was clear. Either kill, drain, feather and butcher your own chicken or commit to vegetarianism. But this binary seemed absolutely ridiculous, so you did neither.

You're back in the airport at Subway and they fucked it up. It was looking as perfect as possible for one of these sandwiches and then they asked what dressing you wanted. "A little sweet onion and a little chipotle mayo." The woman applying the condiments is just so, so stoned. She's just staring at you with her dead-eyed, half-toothed smile and the dressing is absolutely everywhere. You've never seen this much sauce on anything outside of a wet burrito. You're alone. You pay for the sandwich and a sports drink and find a table. You open the sandwich up and it's barely edible. You just wanted some vegetables.

Airports are some of the only places where absolutely no one at all cares about you. Every single person in an airport has the most immediate and pressing needs imaginable and never realizes that every other person in the airport does as well. High school is sort of like that. No one can see more than three inches in front of their face but they have to get to the gate, or the bathroom, or their crush, or gym class. Desperation leaking out of you with every outfit choice or boarding time. Will anyone care today? Eventually you become numb to it. You think about your high school lunch menu and how you ate a chicken patty and fries almost every day. Did Grace just eat fries? Did she bring her own lunch? You don't remember. You sit and pick apart your sandwich before your flight boards, trying to extract some nutrition from this abomination. You drink half your sports drink and fill the other half with water for your flight. You'll try and eat more vegetables next week.

-Michael Campana