Notes: On Vacationing

Talk about benign. What a benign title for this post. Strap yourself in.

Vacationing is a strange concept, perhaps so glorious only because we spend the majority of our lives longing for it, going without it for far too long, not being able to afford good ones, or being denied it via Outlook Email Request. Personally, I spend months thinking about it, weeks getting around to planning it, and then long laborious days waiting and waiting, feeling like I'm chained to desk chairs and locked in routines of walking to the printer and attending the morning meeting every Monday and Thursday and "following up" and "checking in" and waiting and waiting and waiting. The last day before it's finally time, I have never been a more useless ball of flesh. But I can't even care because I have visions of margaritas and waking up without an alarm and taking two hours to eat a single meal. I forget how to transfer calls and how to trim the fat and how to send attachments and fucking FUCK Microsoft Outlook to high holy fucking hell! It's just time to rage.

A wise young man once said, "Even watching TV on vacation is infinitely more relaxing." An interesting concept within a concept. Why is that so? I actually find watching television at home somewhat stressful. Nothing is ever on. There's nothing to count on. Except the news, which is a depressing summary of the day's local tragedies in a hard candy shell. While vacationing, I could have that goddamn thing on for three hours and neither move a muscle nor have one independent thought the entire time because I can say to myself, "Well, this will be the Day I Do Nothing." And the days that follow are the Day I Went to the Beach or the Day I Bought a New Pipe With Which to Smoke My Tobacco or the Day I Had Clams For Dinner or the Day We Did Nothing But Eat and Play Boggle, just to name a few. Not knowing the whereabouts of my cellular phone could be one of the most liberating contemporary experiences out there. The sadness of this could seem overwhelming but the world has changed and in an age where you can be reached, poked, prodded, harrassed, contacted, hit on, broken up with, fired, nullified, and bothered from any location in the world at any moment, this is refreshment at its height.



When you're finally tan and relaxed and feeling full and not overstuffed, easy but not exhausted, when you've bought new things and worn things you only wear on vacation, when you've had guilt-free cocktails at every hour of the day and cake after every dinner, you start to... worry. Uuuugh, you worry "how will I return to civilization, how will I get up every morning at 7 am and shower and make myself presentable and show up somewhere at a specific time and do what they tell me to do?". Life seems impossible. The worst part is that when you begin to feel this you are still on vacation, and there goes the last two to three blissful days you thought you had left, gone into a downward spiral of turmoil and paranoia and finally depression, depression that you can't feel free and full and passionate about small things all the time. And maybe you think back and you remember a time when you might have, but it's so faded, so gray, so compressed under layers of eight hour increments and more waiting at the company printer. Vacation is just a number on your paycheck, people. They're paying you to go.

There it is, ruined forever. The beach seems like a pile of jagged rocks and those clams are making your stomach feel like a gastro-hurricane. Waking up without your alarm only jolts you with fear that you overslept and those linen pants you were in love with seem like they're too thin to protect you from all the evil that seems to be seeping through the cracked pavement as you hit the road back to the rest of your life.

Bathtub Gin Margarita, anyone? Technological Destruction session, anyone else?