I'm so excited about this week's review. I want to get up and shout my excitement from the mountaintops. I want to dance through the streets proclaiming how incredible this thing is. I want to tell everyone and get riled up!
But I can't do any of these things, because this week I'm reviewing Valium.
Let me explain: I used to love flying. It was great. I wanted to be a pilot and I wanted to fly all around the world, like most eight−year−old boys do at some point or another. But then, somewhere between fifteen and twenty, I started to hate flying. This past summer, I found myself panicking when I had to fly. There was nothing I could do to remain calm.
People close to me tried to calm me down on both of my flying trips, but it was to no avail. White−knuckled, I gripped the armrests and braced myself against the floor as the 747s gently lifted off the runway and banked slowly over the endless landscape.
When I realized that I would be flying alone to the U.K. for my study abroad semester, I figured that, rather than get intimately close (by force) with the people in my row, I would get something to minimize my anxiety.
One conversation with my doctor later and I was in possession of six ten−milligram diazepam tablets (a generic version of Valium).
Before I go any further let me clarify: I'm not scared of flying. As Stephen Fry, an amateur pilot (in addition to being an outstanding British actor, comedian, author and generally great person), once said, "I'm not afraid of flying, I'm afraid of crashing." I enjoy flying and landing, but the whole take−off thing has been sort of annoying lately.
Cue Valium.
Sitting in Terminal Four, the international departures terminal at New York's JFK airport, I popped a Valium at 6:10 p.m. By 6:30 p.m. everything was a−okay. Believe it or not, much of this column was typed while I was experiencing the effects of the Valium.
It's called a tranquilizer, and whoever named it such was nothing short of a genius. I still was not thrilled about getting on the airplane solo, but I understood that it would be fine. Things were sort of fuzzy and slow, and I was — surprise, surprise — tranquil.
I wanted to take a nap, and I wanted to talk to everyone.
Walking was a lot of fun; it was sort of like being on roller−skates. Someone was moving, but it was more like being gently pushed in a shopping cart on clouds than hustling with a heavy backpack to get onto an airplane.
As it turned out, I was tranquil enough to take a nap on the airplane and then not freak out when I woke up to find that, nearly two hours later, we were still sitting on the runway. By this point, I thought that the effects of the Valium had run out. But I discovered that this was not the case some time later when, after we finally took off, I was rudely awakened from yet another nap when the plane dropped about 15 feet and, rather than shriek like the gentleman next to me, I simply smiled, blinked and went back to sleep.
All in all, Valium is fantastic. On a serious note, this anti−anxiety medication is not a fun drug to take willy−nilly. It was prescribed to me by a medical professional, only to be taken under extreme cases. This somewhat minor detail prohibits me from awarding Valium the highest distinction of five stars.
These pills helped me out a lot, but altered states aren't super great all the time.
Valium: Four out of five stars.
--
