Quiz: Are You Experiencing Violent, Bone-Shaking Airplane Turbulence, Or Is Your Toddler Just Having Another Turbulent Tuesday?

A child is screaming at the top of their lungs.
Any and all loose items are dislodged.
Someone is forcefully ejected from their seat.
There’s juice on your lap.
The floor is covered in tiny bags of snacks.
It occurs urgently and violently, even on a clear sunny day.
Nearby strangers make intense worried eye contact.
Your partner is somehow sleeping.
A loose toy hits you in the face.
Your only viable tool for distraction is a tiny screen full of children’s cartoons.
If it lasts longer than 40 minutes, you enter a dissociative-fear-trance from which it takes days to recover.
Most online blogs say that it’s totally normal and that you should stoically ignore the situation, despite the overwhelming feeling that all the violent shifting and stirring could lead to death.
Someone pees their pants.
Another loose toy hits you in the face.
“Is it too early to drink?”
Despite your abandonment of religion at age 16, you pray.
Somehow, miraculously, everything returns to calm.
You decide that if it weren’t for your appeal to God through prayer, everything would have continued to spiral toward annihilation. You briefly consider returning to Catholicism.
It happens again twenty minutes later.
God is dead.

1–20: Turbulence

1–20: Toddler

Luke is a writer, editor, comedian, economist, and poet. Learn more here: https://www.lukestrathmann.com/about.