Friday, June 25, 2004

Cruise Control

Hey folks, I am back from an 8-day cruise I took to the Caribbean and trying now to fit back into reality. Cruises are a whole other world by themselves. You're cut off from civilization, floating on the ocean with nothing but miles of water around you, all-you-can-eat buffets in front of you, and little kids all over kicking you in the swimming pool. It's a swirl of bingo, eating, art auctions, eating, trivia quizzes, drinking, eating, more drinking, more bingo, gambling, and animals made out of bath towels sitting on your bed. You eat just to do something else besides bingo. Bingo every freaking day. All these years I thought you could only play bingo by getting 5 numbers in a row, but boy was I wrong. My bingo world easily crumbled upon hearing that 5 in a row did not matter here. They had bingo where you had to get a "six-pack" of numbers, "like a six-pack of beer" said Owen, the social host/son of a famous rock star and model whose names would not be revealed for possible fear of embarrassment that their kid worked on a cruise ship. Sometimes you were not even allowed to use the free space in the middle of the card, which was called getting bingo "the hard way." Strangely, getting a bingo when allowed to use the free space was "the easy way," which completely blew my mind into the outer dominions of space. It occurred to me that this game had become so boring that they invented new ways to keep it boring. By around 10 at night I was conked out. I was racking my brain on trivia questions impossible to answer if you were born after 1960. Who do they think I am, that guy on Jeopardy! who's won for like 17 days in a row? Raising the fork to my mouth over and over again took it's toll as well, and I was spent. I could barely make it to the midnight buffet. But if you've never gone on a cruise, go. You'll never feel like more of a gluttonous pig in your life.

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