Fantasies. We all have them. Admit it. You do. They’re therapeutic. They’re entertaining. They’re cheap.

There are all kinds of fantasies: salvation, rescue, escape, sex, power, revenge.

What makes them fantasies is that they’ll most likely never happen. You don’t act on them. Ok, sometimes dreams do come true, but we’re talking about the kind of fantasies that are (or should be) fairy tale or criminal: Toad to prince. XXX rated. Bank robbing.

We’re thinking about this for two reasons: the Jet Blue flight attendant who in a “Network” moment, fed up by surly passengers and general airline flight misery, pulled the escape chute sliding to safety. Or, more likely, a jail sentence. And, our experience on the beach yesterday where the rudest, nastiest, most unpleasant person we’ve ever met swamped what should have been the best beach day of the summer.

The story goes like this:  We were sitting on the beach and needed to make a call only to find no signal where we were sitting. (Trust us, we’re not the loud-obnoxious-cigar-smoking-cell-phone-talking-boom-box-listening-beach kind of person; in fact, we have rules of beach etiquette that we strictly follow.)  We walked ten yards further down the beach to a completely empty stretch of sand. Then, in the middle of our call, a very chic young’ish couple – he was over six feet in Vilebrequin boxers and she quite pregnant with Elle, Vogue and House Beautiful in hand – sat down directly in front of us. (Hello! a double-direct violation of beach etiquette, positioning yourself between a person already in place and the water and setting up within three feet of a personal boundary.) They opened their umbrella, spread out their towels and sat down. As soon as she was seated, the woman swiveled in her chair and yelled “get off that phone”.

We ignored her.

“Get off that phone and march back and sit with your little friend over there,” she screamed.

What ensued was a discussion that made no sense. She said it was a public beach.  She said she was entitled to sit anywhere she wanted. She said it was annoying to her to have us talking behind her and we needed to move.  It was irrelevant to her that we were there first and the beach was empty for yards and yards around us. This was the spot she wanted to sit in.

To make a long story short, it was impossible in the moment to come up with a good retort, so we went back to our seat on the beach and spent the afternoon fuming, coming up with cutting remarks and, dare we say, thinking up revenge fantasies. Not physical, violent, come to blow kinds.  Something more elegant like a photograph of her on the cover of the Huffington Post with headlines emblazoned: This is What a Bully Looks Like.  Rudest, Most Entitled Woman in the World.  It’s Not Safe on The Beach: The New Incarnation of Jaws.

Of course, unlike the Jet Blue dude, we’re not acting out.  Yes, we did want to go over and suggest counseling before she brought another life into the world, but we didn’t. Instead we decided to talk about it –after all, it’s cheaper than therapy to bitch to your friends. And, it will keep you out of jail.

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