Every Song on This Playlist Unlocks a Different Frequent Flyer Status

Real photo of Margaret in 2008 during a layover visiting friends in Vancouver, BC. She's in a black high-cut dress, lounging across a gray couch. Wine and Doritos are nearby.

I've been curating a getting-hyped-up-for-a-workout playlist for the last few weeks by adding songs from a variety of inspirations. When I listened to the playlist in the car this morning, I realized that some of these songs evoke really specific memories. They are songs I listened to when I was still a flight attendant, and the nostalgia feels like being tucked into bed with my emotional support blanket.

The following list is neither exhaustive nor exclusive, but these were the ones that came to mind in the minutes before an OrangeTheory Fitness class. These are songs that got fused to moments of my life so intensely that the opening chord or beat functions like a psychological wormhole. I can practically taste and smell these memories.

First, let me explain the deeply sophisticated technological infrastructure I’ve built for myself, which is that I have a playlist called "5 Minute Dance Party," and a Siri shortcut programmed so that if I say, "Hey Siri, play the 5 Minute Dance Party," my phone randomly selects one song from the playlist. The drive to my workout facility is only about eleven minutes long, which means I basically get one shot to chemically manipulate my brain into becoming someone who voluntarily lifts weights and sweats profusely under intense orange lights.

Every single song on that playlist activates some deeply ingrained ass-shaking response in my nervous system. Not only are they booty-moving motivators, this morning I realized something else: almost all of those songs are tied to being a flight attendant.

Not on purpose. I didn't sit down with the intention to create "The Airbus A320 Emotional Support Megamix"** It just happened organically because music is weird and memory is weird and because my particular human brain apparently stores emotional experiences alongside Pitbull features.

I looked it up, Pitbull has literally been featured on over 1,000 songs. I don't even think I could list 1,000 songs. That's bonkers.

I would love to tell you I'm one of those cool people who constantly discovers obscure new artists and builds playlists around moods and seasons and moon phases. I am not. I have always jokingly called myself musically re——d, (which before somebody emails me, yes, I know, I need a new phrase because that's an ableist slur and I don't actually want to use language like that anymore). But what I mean is that I don't process music the way a lot of people seem to.

I think part of it is probably autism, honestly.

I like songs the same way I like certain blankets or routines or comfort foods. I want them exactly the same every time. Same rhythm. Same production. Same little inhale before the chorus. Same dopamine hit delivered directly to my frontal lobe in precisely the correct sequence.

This is why I low-key hate concerts. (I'm physically grimacing and bracing for impact waiting for you to read that)

I know. I know. Everyone else is like, "The live version was so raw and emotional." Meanwhile I'm standing there furious because they changed the tempo and added a twelve-minute guitar solo. Play the song like you did in the recording studio, please. I did not pay $180 to hear your artistic interpretation or crowd work. I came here to hear Track 7 exactly as the sound engineers intended and exactly like I've heard it 318 times before.

I get that this is probably an unpopular opinion. Don't hate me, please.

So these songs become little sensory time capsules for me. I don't just remember the song. I remember where I was. What the air smelled like. What shoes I had on. Whether I was lonely. Whether I was in love. Whether I was exhausted. Whether I was pretending not to be exhausted. What food I was eating. How the lighting looked. I can teleport back to that moment in time, temporarily.

And once I started thinking about that this morning, my entire workout became me mentally sprinting through old flight attendant memories while trying not to die during the final all out on the treadmill.

The first song that came rushing back was "Like a G6 (2010)."

Which, if you were alive and under the age of thirty in 2010, may have immediately activated a dormant section of your brain just now.

"Poppin' bottles in the ice, like a blizzard."

That song was flight attendant catnip. Not because we were all glamorous little club creatures. Honestly most of us were, at best, chronically sleep deprived raccoons in lipstick. But because there was something about that beat that could wake the dead for a particular type of above-the-wing worker.

I remember one specific morning so vividly.

Actually, wait. Morning is too generous a word.

It was 3 a.m. Pitch black outside. It's reasonably quiet for New York City.

My phone starts screaming at me from under my pillow, and when you're on call as a flight attendant, that sound immediately detonates your nervous system because you know your life just changed.

My phone says Crew Scheduling is calling me. I had officially become available for being On Call when yesterday clicked over to being today at midnight (just three short hours past).

I answer the phone trying to clear my throat and sound semi-conscious even though crew scheduling absolutely knows they just woke me up out of a dead sleep.

"Hello?"

"Margaret? Need you in Newark at six. You've been assigned a three-day rotation."

Cool cool cool cool cool.

Nothing makes you question your career choices like realizing you have less than three hours to become a functioning member of society prepared to safely transport hundreds of people through the sky.

Not only that, but you have to get yourself to the least convenient airport in the NYC base: EWR in Newark, New Jersey. Please note; I was currently in Kew Gardens, Queens.

Thankfully there was a crew shuttle leaving from a few blocks away at something like 3:45 a.m., which meant I had exactly enough time to brush my teeth, put on pantyhose and my navy wool-polyester-blend uniform, and spiritually dissociate.

Don't worry, my bags were already packed before I laid down to get a few hours of sleep. All I had to do was get my lunch box out of the fridge and go.

I remember laying in the backseat of that van, trying to close my eyes and get just a few more minutes of shut-eye while we bounced through Manhattan potholes like a lunar rover. If you've never tried sleeping in a crew van on New York streets, imagine being gently waterboarded by suspension failure.

Side note: I am genuinely excited to see what Mayor Mamdani does with the streets of New York. They are so bad, anything would be a positive.

Eventually I gave up on trying to get any additional rest, so I plugged in my headphones (gather round, children, and listen: back in our day, we had actual wired headphones with long cords and there was a headphone jack on all phones) and I turned on "Like a G6."

And something happened. My brain woke up. Not particularly gracefully. More like chemically. I started dancing in my seat and throwing it back (Millennial stank face and all) like I was headed to the club while we crossed Manhattan and headed into New Jersey. By the time we got to Newark, I was fully locked in. Awake. Alive. Alert. A vibe.

Ready to work first class like this was my plan all along.

What I loved most about that trip was that I'd worked that Newark-to-Atlanta flight a bunch of times already, so there were commuters I recognized. That's one of the weird and delightful things about airline life people don't really know about. Certain routes become tiny little temporary communities. You start recognizing the consultants and the commuters and the regulars.

"Oh hey. You again. Welcome back. This is going to be a good flight to Atlanta."

Tiny repetitive rituals in the sky. A wee bit of dopamine for an early day.

Then there's Lady Gaga's "Telephone (2009)."

This one takes me directly to Guyana, no stops.

There was a stretch somewhere around 2010 to 2012 where I spent about nine months in Guyana, though "lived there" feels medium-inaccurate because I didn't officially immigrate or anything. I just had a friend in the State Department whose housing was covered, and she was the kind of woman who always kept a safe extra room or two for other women traveling through the region. I ended up spending all my time off there for about nine months in 2010. I would work ten to twelve days in a row, then take off the rest of the month until my next block of work.

And because I wasn't hemorrhaging money on hotels, I actually got to know people there. Local folks. Peace Corps workers. Red Cross people from Italy and France. Aid workers. Government people from all sorts of Caribbean Treaty countries. Guyana was considered a "hardship post" that people were assigned to early in their career. Now, almost twenty years later, those people are Principal Consultants and Managing Directors at big government agencies, because they put in the time to build their careers, then worked their way up.

At one point I started dating a USAID guy who was absurdly handsome in that deeply unfair "international development professional with rolled-up sleeves" sort of way. Amazing cheekbones. Very debonair. Very competent. Looked great in vintage tees and linen shirts. Charming, with an incredible deep, raspy voice. We met on a flight and he loaned me a book that later led to another celebrity encounter, but that's a story for another day.

He rented a house that honestly felt like stepping thirty years backward in time. Guyana has such old infrastructure in some places because of the colonial history and political instability and corruption and all the complicated stuff that happens when countries get strip-mined by power for generations. The downstairs level of this house was kind of unfinished. Maybe a garage situation? Maybe a storage area? Hard to say. Upstairs was the actual living space.

I remember this house party there so clearly. Bottles of cheap local rum (El Dorado 5 Year) and the good Mexican Coke (the soda, not the other stuff). Local-ish beer like Carib and Red Stripe. Sticky heat. People from six countries dancing and laughing in this rental house in Georgetown while downloaded (not streamed) Lady Gaga and other UK Top 40 hits blasted through mediocre speakers. A real "what a time to be alive" moment.

I remember having this out-of-body moment where I thought: How is this my life? Like genuinely. How did I go from North/South Carolina to getting kicked out of Canada and then end up here?

That feeling happened to me a lot as a flight attendant. It was not luxury living, no exactly. There wasn't a sense of glamour in the way people imagine. But there were these moments where your life suddenly zooms out and you realize you’re standing in a place you never could have imagined before it unfolded just the way it did.

Then there’s "Magnetic Man." Or maybe "Hey Soul Sister." Or the entire Trouble album by Ray LaMontagne. My time in New Haven, Connecticut owns all of those songs.

Right before Guyana, I spent about six months crashing with an old friend named Joel in New Haven, Connecticut. He generously offered me his "second room," which sounds significantly more civilized than what it actually was.

What it actually was…was a basement room in an illegal sublet with a barely functioning bathroom and the general ambiance of "this place smells like you just cleared a grow op out of here before I moved in." There was no flooring in the bathroom, just subfloor (my knee is still messed up from when I slipped and fell in that bathroom).

But it was free, and when you're a relatively new flight attendant making approximately eleven dollars and a yogurt cup per hour, free is deeply sexy.

Joel worked in tech and made enough money that he had somehow bypassed learning basic survival skills. Cooking. Cleaning. Most noticeable was laundry. There were no laundry facilities in this building, so he had simply stopped doing laundry entirely.

I am not exaggerating even the slightest bit when I tell you this man had three industrial-sized garbage bags worth of dirty shirts in the corner of his room. Just...geological sediment layers of Abercrombie tee shirts and Old Navy button-down plaid shirts.

He would buy new shirts instead of washing existing shirts. But he kept rotating the same five pairs of jeans like a cartoon character. I don't know that he ever washed his sheets before I came along. I leaned into my ex-Nanny energy, got him cleaned up, organized a pick-up-and-deliver laundry service, and made him find a grocery store instead of only ordering takeout. He bought all the groceries, and I cooked for him. It was a really good deal on room and board for me.

Anyway.

I tried to become a runner while I lived there because every once in a while I go through a season of convincing myself I'm "a runner now," and Magnetic Man was on my running playlist because it made me feel impossibly cool despite the reality that I was wheezing and huffing through Connecticut at a pace normally associated with emergency evacuations of retirement villages.

And then there's Spain and Kylie Minogue's "Can’t Get You Out of My Head."

This one's a harder story to tell. Because memory is annoying like this sometimes. A song can hold both magic and ugliness simultaneously.

It was a hot night in July.

I remember dancing with a few people from my crew.

I remember the remix pulsing through some beachfront club in Barcelona.

I remember us all only having a couple drinks each.

I don’t remember several hours of that night.

I remember three different people from our crew having catastrophic reactions afterward.

One flight attendant and a pilot ended up passed out in a city park and were literally kicked awake by police officers who didn't speak English. They didn't have ID on them, because their wallets had been stolen.

I woke up in a hotel room beside a stranger realizing very quickly that something had gone very wrong. I don’t need to paint the whole picture for you. You can fill in the blanks.

The next day was horrific. One of those violent body-purge experiences where you're dehydrated and shaking and trying to survive a long-haul flight while your nervous system feels like exposed wiring.

One of the things I regret most is that I had absolutely no idea how to report any of it. No clue how to navigate filing a police report internationally. No framework for what to even do. We talked about personal safety in training, situational awareness and being savvy. We didn't talk about what happens when a few of you get targeted at a tourist spot and taken advantage of.

I suspect there are women in aviation reading this right now nodding grimly because unfortunately this stuff happens more than people want to admit.

Instead of allowing it to shut me down, though, I compartmentalized it and kept flying because what else are you going to do?

You put your face on.

You serve beverages.

You continue doing the best you can at 35,000 feet.

Anyway, let me change gears before I emotionally clothesline both of us.

I also remember singing my absolute favorite song at karaoke near the Tu Casa restaurant in Kew Gardens and absolutely annihilating it.

Cher’s "If I Could Turn Back Time."

Listen. I don’t have a huge vocal range. But that song? That song is in my pocket. I will destroy a karaoke performance of Cher. That night, I remember singing it in front of new friends and a pilot I’d recently started dating and getting that deeply satisfying moment where everyone goes: "Wait. Why is she actually good?"

Nothing fuels my "that bitch" energy quite like surprising people at karaoke.

I also do a pretty good rendition of Eartha Kitt's "C'est Ci Bon" when it's available from the Karaoke Jockey. It's not always there, but when it is, oh, I rock it.

Finally, the song that started this entire spiral today: "Miami 2 Ibiza" by Swedish House Mafia, featuring Tinie Tempah.

First of all, the lyrics of this song are objectively hilarious now because it's filled with references that instantly date the era. Name-dropping QVC, the defunct magazine FHM, retrotech like JVC and APC, the Audi TT, alongside lasting cultural touch points like BMW and Louis Vuitton. Acronyms and cultural references from a very specific slice of humanity before smartphones flattened all culture into one giant beige smoothie.

"She bought my MP3 and so I put her number in my Bold BB" is an entire anthropological study on its own.

But for me? That song takes me directly to Tel Aviv during Hurricane Sandy. It was a bad one, and we knew it before it touched the east coast of Florida. Delta started evacuating planes out of New York before the hurricane hit because flooding at JFK and LaGuardia could've destroyed millions and millions of dollars worth of aircraft. I'm not an accountant, but I'm pretty sure that would be bad.

So my crew flew into Tel Aviv and then…stayed there...for five days. Five glorious, bizarre, unexpected days. Literally, a paid vacation. We don't pay for our hotels. That's something the airline negotiates and handles the details for. We just show up. At that time, we were always put up at the David Intercontinental right across from the beach. Gorgeous weather. Gorgeous people. Gorgeous food.

Meanwhile New York was underwater. Not all flight attendants got so lucky. Some people were still flying domestic flights, just not to NYC and other impacted cities.

I spent those days laying by the pool in a thong bikini listening to Swedish House Mafia while casually dating both a handsome doctor that I met on the flight over and a Dominican-born chef who lived in Tel Aviv who I'd been out with on a few previous layovers.

Sometimes my life sounds made up even to me. That's the coolest and weirdest thing about being a flight attendant during that era. Your life swung wildly between exhaustion and absurdity. One day you're crying in a Newark crew van at 4 a.m. because you're just. so. tired. The next day you're drinking wine on the Mediterranean while a hurricane reshapes America far away from you.

All of it gets stitched together by music.

That's what hit me this morning: these songs aren't just songs. They're tiny emotional portals to a moment in time. Literal timestamps in the playlist of my memories. Proof that I existed in all these different versions of myself.

The exhausted commuter.

The girl dirty dancing with her lover in Guyana.

The almost-runner in Connecticut.

The woman who survived things she didn't deserve.

The flight attendant tanning beside the Mediterranean pretending this absolutely insane life was somehow normal.

Maybe that's why I keep listening to the same music over and over again. Sometimes what I'm really listening to is the soundtrack of my life.