Lately, things haven't been going my way. I was on the first leg of my three-leg journey home when the last leg got cancelled. This caused me to be thrown off the middle leg and rerouted to a different airport on another day. I learned all this on the runway from my cell phone. Inside, the customer service agent seemed disinterested in customers and in service, but I managed to scrounge the last (middle) seat on the last flight out.

The man on my left is reading The Watchtower (“Is Satan Real?”), when he suddenly starts sneezing wildly. My god, I think, he has Ebola! If his temperature hits 103, I’m as good as dead. It's one thing for ISIS to sneak infected people onto cross-country flights, but Jehovah’s Witnesses? I have always listened politely when they come to the door, and my reward is a plague that even Job never got?

I turn toward the man on my right, whose head is buried in Mickey Mouse-sized earphones. He is furiously texting, furtively covering up his iPhone whenever the stewardess approaches. My god, I think, this jihadi is trying to bring down the plane!

This morning I woke up with a sore throat. I thought of quarantining myself for 21 days, but I decided instead not to sit in middle seats any more. That way I won’t have to worry about ISIS and Ebola at the same time. Then I turned to this morning's post-election news. Now I have something to worry about.