Hand exam

I spent the day flying across the country to Middletown, CT for a presentation I'm giving tomorrow. On my flight from DC to Hartford, I had the terrible misfortune of sitting next to a girl who clearly was a crackhead.

She couldn't have been more than 20 years old, and when she boarded the plane, she looked lost and didn't understand how she would get her suitcase into the overhead bin. After looking forlornly at her bag, then the bins, then the bag, and at the bins again, someone was kind enough to help her out.

In addition to her suitcase, she had a very large duffel bag that she kept at her feet. When the flight attendant asked her to stow the bag under the seat in front of her, she took several minutes to rummage through the bag and procured four pieces of hard candy. She turned to me, offering the candies, but I politely declined. So did the person in the aisle seat. She returned the candy to the bag pocket and kept the bag at her feet, clearly not under the seat in front of her.

Then, as we took off, she handed me her camera and asked me to take pictures out the window. I conceeded, took a photo for her, and returned the camera. She then proceeded to reach across me to continue taking photos.

But the strangest behaivor she exhibited was that she would get distracted by her hands. Once we were airborne, she took out a book, opened it up, then started to examine her hands. Intensely. She kept scratching at her hands and squeezing little folds of skin. She ended up very carefully examining her hands for the entire flight!