TELL ME ABOUT THE CRUISE

Jenny, I read about your phone calamity in Korea and laughed. Not because of your misfortune, obviously, but because both of us got boned by Mercury retrograde while traveling this week. (Is it because we’re Geminis? Or is that a cope?) In my case, I might as well blame my own stupidity because— get this, I left my phone and wallet in the car service when we arrived at the terminal to depart for our cruise. Yes, that’s right. I realized I had done this exactly ten minutes after the car vanished around the corner, and I had no way to contact the driver because— yeah. After a brief, flailing panic on the curb that basically registered as a cardiac event on my Oura ring, I calmly assured Marcello that I would get my phone and ID back in time for the boat’s departure at 3:00 PM. Marcello pointed out the vicious irony of the situation— I had micromanaged and pre-organized every single aspect of our cruise, even printing up personal itineraries with headers in the Sand font, and yet, I had somehow forgotten the two most fundamental items I would need to embark, at the actual last minute. As a lifelong “miss the forest for the trees” person, this was on-brand for me. But I’m still shocked by my own stupidity.

I won’t bore you all with the ugly and stressful details, but I did (through an insane stroke of luck) manage to get my phone and wallet back in time to embark. I’ll just say that I had to wear socks with sandals for the entire three days of the cruise because I mutilated my feet in the literal dash for my phone that took me all over the terminal and surrounding gigantic parking lot. But it was worth it. I was soon relaxing on Deck 11 of the Navigator of the Seas, surveying my queendom:

Jenny, the cruise was EVERYTHING I dreamed it would be as a kid. There were buffets, and drinks served in hollowed-out pineapples, and kitschy (amazing) shows, just like the commercials promised. And there were also weird liminal spaces, which I love. (My favorites were the weird hallway leading to the waterslide, and the Star Lounge between activities, when it was empty.) The best part was that I got to spend a lot of time one-on-one with my kid. I still have to function as a roadie and butler for him on trips, but that’s a small price to pay for moments like the one where we watched the sun melt on the ocean while we ate spider rolls and gyoza. (“I don’t really care about sunsets,” M said, but he does, he just doesn’t know it yet.) I went to bed early, but Marcello stayed out past midnight every night of the cruise; he and the other kids on the ship played fireball on the top deck and roamed the lounges and formed those temporary attachments that randomly pop into your head one day 30 years later.

The problem is, three days is too short for a vacation, especially when it’s your dream vacation. When I got home, I felt like I’d been wrenched from a womb. A womb with unlimited poolside tacos. As I unpacked and did laundry and combed through my kids’ backpacks in preparation for the week ahead, I thought to myself: No wonder I wanted to go on a cruise so badly. You wake up to a blank, and the blank is an ocean, and even if you wanted to do the things on your to-do list, you can’t. You are many miles away, at the mercy of the captain. You are not the captain now. It was the tackiest surrender, deliverance with extra cheese. An environmental nightmare, yes, but I had to do it just this once.

(Who am I kidding; I was Googling “10 day cruises” by Tuesday.)