Hobbies and Teens

Upon leaving the 24-hour restaurant, we passed a table of 4 teenagers. One kid looked like a terrified drawing of a teenager, blond, shaved hair and worried eyebrows and a button down black clubbing shirt that was kinda too big for him. He had his hands folded and was leaning into the table. The kid across from him leaned back in his chair—ratty t-shirt and long curly hair—giving a speech like he ran the universe. His speech was this:

Really blasé: “Okay, so you’re what? 13 and a half? Yeah. Okay, so one year for you is like…that’s like a long time. I mean that’s like a third of your life. Or wait—like 6.5% or—well, it is a really long time. Now see, me,” incredibly pompous “I’m 15. So one year for me is like…one fifteenth. So it’s like, less.”

 

I have discovered that many southerners from some kind of a specific region say “[sentence subject] was just sittin’ there sayin’” As in “I walk into the elevator and this New Yorker’s just sittin’ there sayin’ ‘where you goin’?’ and I’m sittin’ there sayin’ ‘why’re you askin’ me?’” Which is delightful to think of people walking somewhere to sit and ask a question. We have a Texan from Corpus Christie that says it.

Last night, we had a crew party. This means the ship can get rid of its beer that is almost expired and people walk around going “I think this Red Stripe is expired.” It also means everyone that we know (the entertainers) gets hammered (typical). The crew party featured the dancers and singers doing what they consider fun and a hobby. My current hobby is a diorama kit purchased from Michael’s for $16. I am making a miniature field. I just put in the road and some ground cover. I am excited to put things in this field for jokes. Haha, what would it be like with a Rubic’s cube that I am excited to learn the tricks about from YouTube. People are different!

The dancers and singers, for fun, say…have a party with a theme that will support them choreographing, rehearsing and singing the “Cell Block [something]” from Chicago. This entails wearing underwear and standing up and throwing your leg behind your head and basically doing sex moves while the male crew spazzes out and films it. Our castmate said “if there was ever a good time to know Tagalog, it was in the bathroom after the show” because everyone was losing their mind. Also, these people are professional singers and dancers, so it was terrific.

If you are a gymnast, and you have freetime, you do things like this:

Another odd story: apparently people very frequently ask the crew if they go home at night. As in…back to the Philippines or Canada or Indonesia. For a while, there was a standard answer: “Yes, a helicopter comes to get us at night and then brings us all back in the morning.” And usually there is “hahaha” and it’s over because that is clearly a crazy lie. The crew is now forbidden to use this comeback. This is because a passenger wrote a comment card and said “I loved the cruise, except the helicopter kept waking us up in the mornings.” Delight!

Random fact I learned:

When you have been on a submarine, you are not allowed to drive a car for 2 weeks, because your depth perception is such a mess. ON A SUBMARINE. IN A TUBE WITH PEOPLE. I cannot imagine this. 

Oh...did you say you wanted more Diorama? By the Porthole? Okay.

New Jersey, Jocks and Pink Eye

New Jersey!

There was a selection of very jockish buzz haircut football playing Asian kids on board last cruise. They talked with a lot of “duh what’re you doin’” around the buffet and then showed off their muscles. One of them decided to make out with a girl he had just met or something (shy, semi-nerd-funky with glasses and long black hair) in the middle of the hallway, at the bottom of a stairwell, right below the buffet. I walked out and caught them kissing, which they immediately stopped, and she put her head in his neck and hid and he pretended he had to look straight ahead at the elevators. Then I got a cookie, by which I mean 3, and had such delightful thoughts about cookies that I forgot not to go down that stairwell. So I did and caught them again. They did the exact same stop tactic although this time he impatiently started to shake his leg, waiting for me to go. O TEENAGERS!

All of them, by the way, have a) extremely short buzz cut haircuts, b) fashion baseball hats worn artfully cockeyed, c) well fitting plaid shorts that do not hang low, but go below the knees, and d) white low top shoes with barely visible socks. This says “I am from Jersey.” Possibly “New York” and possibly “East Coast.” I have no idea. There is also male eyebrow shaping and large diamond/cubic zirconia earrings on the gentlemen, the flashier ones employing both ears.

Today’s passengers include:
A family with blue tshirts with white writing that says “Cruise 2008.” A family reunion/trip/something with neon green tshirts that say a list of Irish-ish last names on the back. A family with big white tshirts and a picture of a cruise ship that says “THIS IS MY [insert number] CRUISE” as is appropriate to them. One fluffy-ish 14-ish year old with day glow orange clearly fake nails had a t-shirt that said it was her 11th cruise.

Also, a Russian/Eastern European/Ukranian/something family with a probably 30-ish year old daughter. All of them dressed like they were about 23 and about to go clubbing, including the dad who had very trendy sunglasses, very trendy white long pointy shoes, and a trendy, tight light blue t-shirt with arty graphics stretched very far over his giant, round tummy. He has full white hair. I will attempt a photo.

There is also a little 10 or 11 ish year old girl who wore a head scarf. As we got closer to the statue of liberty, the wind blew her hair around, making it pretty obvious that she is going through chemo. The nice part is that her brother/cousin seemed to ignore her, so the world still made sense.

Also, note, vis a vis the hilarious South African doctors in the medical center: a small tale:
a) so I had a pretty bad idea and kept my contacts in water for about 2 weeks, probably 3, because I ran out of solution. Then I got some solution and just put them in there for a few days.
b) I then decided to put them in my eye anyway. My eye reacted by burning and turning red and tearing up, which I decided was dramatic and false and made my eye wear said contact all day.
c) I got pink eye.

So I went to the medical center and was prescribed eye drops. My exact prescription is like this: “well, usually you put 2 drops in your eye every four hours. I’d say just put 1 or 2 drops in your eye every hour for today—maybe 2--then tomorrow just do 2 every two hours or four hours or so then you know, so do like that and then instead of a slow attack, it’ll kill the germs fast. And when it stops bothering you, you know, stop uh, using it.”

A Happy Chinese July 4th

What it is to be irritable:
To be unable to escape from one’s own human companions:
To go like this: can I just have some time by myself and to have someone say “there you are!!!!” and insist upon telling one a story.
To be completely unable to find a tiny corner to just tuck away.
The complete unavailability of private corners.
Private corners!

Last night was spent discussing with castmate the exact nature of going crazy on a ship. It goes like this: as he reported: some of the doors in his mind got opened that didn’t need to be opened, like: “when did time begin” or “what is language” or “what was I before I was myself” and “when was my first thought” and things like this and “is it all meaningless” and items that you don’t actually need to think about because you will go crazy because there is no answer. This was good to hear about because this happens. This is what happens if you have no work and legions of servants. Then you start thinking “WHY AM I HERE” and feel like you are a trash pit that people throw food and amusement into. This must be part of what happens to incredibly rich entertainers or similar.

I am drinking 3 cups of coffee per morning. This is probably what is helping make me so irritable, along with the 50,000 people here. I should note that our room stewards, who work all day, are not irritable. They are pleasant and helpful. I should note that one of the guys who works in the buffet line had a fun time making up different sounds for a horn when he was trying to get through the masses of mooing humans, then went “hahaha.” Also, I should note that one of the women sings a song regularly and there is a general mood of laughing amongst that staff. This is nice x 1000.

The difficult thing about being a teenager is that you need a phone. I have seen the same girl twice in two days. She is a girl, so I have no idea if she is 23 or 16. I think she is probably 16. She asked me “is anybody sitting here?” about a chair that was about 15 feet away from me, in the middle of a completely empty mass of chairs. I said “no.” The day before I saw her and she desperately asked me if I got phone service. I said no and that maybe it was because we were in the Dominican Republic. She said she got phone service the other days. Both of these times I had my headphones in and was clearly on a computer. Well, today she got phone service and proceeded to loudly bawl on the phone. This is in the middle of a high traffic area. She didn’t want to sit in my line of sight, so she sat in traffic’s line of sight. I could hear her painfully sobbing and gulping air and saying “but noooooo” in a really high 4 year old’s type voice. And I think “I said I would call yoooou” and some other stuff. This is what happens when you have no privacy. Very upsetting. Also, she is going to be broke from that phone bill, if she is 23, or she is going to be grounded for life if she is 16.

There are a number of older Chinese folks on this cruise. They are frequently in the gym. I ran/walked on the treadmill next to an older lady who ran much faster than me and kept either staring at me or looking out the window right behind me.







Yesterday was the 4th of July. I should note that there are about 7 Americans on the crew, out of 1000. This results in a celebration of the 4th that is, in a word: crap. There were a bunch of red white and blue streamers that felt Chinese somehow and a fringie silver banner with cardboard letters that said PROUD (to be an) AMERICAN. The “to be an” was very small and on a silver cutout of the United States in the middle. Then there were identical cardboard American flags kind of haphazardly just around the ship at incorrect locations to the eye height. There was a $25 jazz brunch that they have every week that they called “Independence Day Brunch.” Like I said: Chinese. No fireworks, no sparklers, no face painting. I know blah blah blah Iraq blah blah blah SUVs blah blah blah, I don’t care. I am traditional. Very traditional apparently because I was VERY interested in getting in a fight all day. The best I could do was rant and rave about how terrible “Two Days in Paris” is as a movie. (It is terrible, just like how there is supposed to be a CLOTH AMERICAN FLAG SOMEWHERE AND ONE PICTURE OF UNCLE SAM AND OH I DON’T KNOW SOMETHING).

Our cruise director is Canadian, the captain is Swedish, everybody is Filipino or Peruvian, the Hotel Director is German and youth counselors are mainly Canadian and there are many of them. There are a ton of South Africans. For Canada Day (July 2nd) we had a big party and the Canadians wore red and white and put flags on their faces and got hammered. The passengers are all American, mainly from New Jersey physically or spiritually. Well, my cast had a lot of fun feeling very persecuted and ignored because there were no fireworks or BBQs and all of us tried to be alone and/or watch movies and/or read and/or write angry diatribes. Also, hello, we are people who make fun of things, so we wait for someone else to do something, then point out how stupid it is. This is hard when they are not doing the stupid thing you desire so you can rant about how pointless and jingoistic (maybe the word?) July 4th celebrations are. We finally went down to the crew bar for some conversation and Coronas, after our show, we could freely vent our hostility and wish each other a good 4th. I took the opportunity to plan a Labor Day Picnic and invite everyone. That is never to happen again! The end.

Spiritum

This new ship is very cocky about it’s GI problem. There are hand sanitizers kinda…arouuund. Apparently someone in one of the previous casts got GI, but as someone said, scoldingly, “he was playing beer pong in the crew bar.” On the last ship, we were aggressively sanitized at every possibility. There were hand sanitizers at the door of ever restaurant, in front of the elevators, in the elevators, as you enter the buffet—and those are the stand alone, laser eye versions. There were humans with spray bottles who aggressively sanitized you. Here, there are more than a few double-paned windows with mold growing between them. Hand sanitizers are around, but only the stand alone versions and only here and there, as if to say “meh, if YOU think you need it.”

I forgot that people have dots behind their ears, which is a transdermal anti-barf system. I have felt sluggish and tired, which is how it is when you get on ships.

The clientle here is famously New Jersey apparently. I wouldn’t know exactly, but there are a lot of tattoos on dads (I just saw Yosemite Sam) and kids with large chains (silver/gold) and large crosses on them. Generally there are a lot of eyebrows. I have only seen a little bit of ice cream so far.

As per usual, the chocolate chip cookies disappear immediately. We met the two magicians, a husband & wife team, who are obviously fascinating.

We saw teenagers being RADICAL! To one another via “your freckles turn green in the sun” spake by a dark, freckle free Italian-ish pre-pubescent boy (physically) with a post pubescent attitude (emotionally). He did not make eye contact with the girl (taller) that he was trying to impress. She said “what? Hahaha that’s not true hahaha.” He and his shy buddy both were wearing large silver crosses.

A very large woman in a bathing suit decided to use the handicapped bathroom. She was not handicapped, but I guess didn’t want to open the door, so she pressed the button. This revealed a gentleman already using the bathroom. They had a long exchange of mutual annoyed muttering. She then walked to use the non-handicapped bathroom. He eventually left, revealing himself not to be handicapped.

We walk through the casino a lot. I have very strong negative feelings about casinos, so this will be a challenge for self. There are Sopranos themed one armed bandits…jackpots…see this is how your brain dies. I cannot think of SLOTS!!! Slots. This is an appropriate theme because so many people are from Jersey.

A note about flip flops: many people purchase flip flops with about ¾ of an inch extra hanging off the back.

The buffet closed. Almost entirely. The ice cream station: remained open.