Another Vacation Bites The Dust

This was my Cancun.

And here we are again, another spring break ended, another term of school up ahead. If you feel kind of cheated, kind of like it slipped away, kind of like how the hell does the University of Oregon rationalize giving us a month off after fall term and then only a week after winter, you’re not alone. I feel this way all the time – after every four day weekend, three day weekend, weekend, Christmas break, spring break, summer break, and bathroom break. If you spent your spring break volunteering with sick, poor, on fire orphans in the darkest slums of San Lorenzo, good for you – your spring break was probably not only exhausting, but also highly memorable and fulfilling, save for the fact that until you kill Bono you’re not going to get worldwide publicity. If you’re like most of us and you spent your spring break sleeping in until 1:30, playing PS2, and watching Extras, you no doubt had a great and very relaxing time, but looking back on it now, at the end of your break, you feel like an entire week just disappeared right out from under you.* It’s tough to really squeeze every drop out of your break when all you want to do is nothing; although if sleeping was an Olympic event I could take you all to the cleaners.

*If you spent your spring break in Cancun with your beautiful friends getting drunk and having wild nonstop sex, why the hell are you reading my blog? This is not a blog for people whose lives could potentially be the basis for a reality show. Go sit in the corner, I don’t want to talk to you right now.

Seeing as I don’t believe in an afterlife, I try to make a point of living life to the fullest. Over spring break, I beat Resident Evil 4 again. Sure, it’s a video game I’ve played before, but it’s a video game I love! “Oh, what,” you say, cradling the sick flaming orphan’s head in your lap, “Are you going to tell your kids about that when you’re 50?” Hell yes I will! Any child of mine had damn well better love Resident Evil 4 as much as I do, and if not, well, why am I wasting my time telling him stories in the first place? At the end of the break, I feel good about myself for doing the things I wanted to do, but of course it looks bad in retrospect because the majority of those things involved a television screen, hummus, or in some wonderful cases, both.

A good friend of mine loves skiing – he goes skiing all the time, and he’s got wonderful stories to tell afterwards, and he’s a brilliant photographer, and he’s got an awesome girlfriend, and he has wicked manly facial hair, and I’m pretty sure that his spring break was nonstop exhilarating action and adventure, except on Wednesday, because that was the day he visited me. How lucky is he, that his favorite pastime just happens to be something that sounds exciting and sexy when you mention it? When someone says, “I’m a skier”, it conjures the image of handsome guys in designer gear zipping down mountains. James Bond went skiing. People can die skiing. A Kennedy died skiing, and while the Kennedy family does have sufficient numbers for one of its members to die in just about every possible situation (“Hieronymous Rasputin Kennedy died doing what he loved – juggling kittens”), it still lends some street cred to skiing, don’t you think? Now look at me – my pastime, writing, doesn’t have any of that appeal. When someone says, “I’m a writer”, it conjures the image of that person staring at a blank page in a typewriter and drinking. Alone. Writing does have a remarkable death toll, however, in most cases the deaths are either a result of alcohol consumption or suicide. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Hunter S. Thompson, Edgar Allen Poe… Writers drop like flies (or Kennedys). Even my own idol, Kurt Vonnegut, embraced the experimental nature of the 1980s and gave suicide a shot, but much to his chagrin it didn’t pan out. So it goes.

Some people get lucky and wind up loving something that’s really cool and interesting and makes for a great conversation starter, and some people love painting futuristic army miniatures, or collecting barbed wire, or creating an online pictorial database of flat top crewcuts. God bless all of them, from the guy who isn’t happy unless he’s testing experimental fighter jets to Barry, who’s really good at Jenga. In the long run it’s a lot more fulfilling to do what you want to do than to force a square peg into a round hole and try to do something that just looks that way, even if it means your spring break isn’t too memorable as a result. That being said, if your favorite pastime is forcing square pegs into round holes, well, you keep doing that. Seriously. Just… Go nuts.

Truman Capps wants you to remember, before you call him out for being insensitive because of his comments about the Kennedys, that he was also insensitive about financially destitute flaming orphans, and they probably need your support more than one of the most powerful families in America.