You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Stay-cations!
The whole idea of vacation is to relax, to stay away from work. You’re suppose to be able to divorce your mind from the worries that inhabit your brain most of your year.
In a quixotic world, you should be able to disengage from the work place completely. After all, it is an atmosphere that causes many of us to die an early death.
But in this cross word puzzle of inter-connectivity, disengaging from work is as difficult as a college student refusing free food or green backs.
The problem? Work is always around us. It hovers like a thin fog of worry. It surrounds us like a veil of work place pollen.
Why can’t we just tune it out? Why must we think about the place we despise?
Technology. It is a link to the world. If you have a smart phone, you are connected. The only reason you are not communicating with your boss on vacation is because he either doesn’t want to talk to you or you are climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and the cell phone towers have been run over by crazed pachyderms.
I check my email a few times a day. It’s a bad habit that is now hard to stop. It’s like smoking candy cigarettes or eating chocolate covered sardines. Once you get a hunkering for it, it’s hard to go cold turkey.
Emails from co workers or managers show up in my in box. I think about not looking. But then, like a red cape reminds a bull that the Picadores are coming, so to do these emails remind us there are only so many days left before it’s back to the salt mines.
Work to many of us is a place where typhoid is real, where inhaling the stress, snorting the conflict, absorbing the anxiety it into your brain is like chugging bad medicine.
I am doing my best not to think about work, but it is hard, especially when you aren’t doing anything exciting.
I’m currently on the back side of a Stay-cation. This is a fancy term for going nowhere special and doing nothing out of the ordinary.
Instead of deep sea fishing, I’m cutting the grass. Rather than climbing a volcano I’m climbing stairs with laundry.
Stay-cation Vs Real Vacation: The differences are extreme.
When you are climbing a volcano, you are worried about being vaporized. What if the volcano spews lava into my face while I’m posing for pictures on the edge, is this covered under my health plan?
When you are underwater petting grouper, dodging sharks, it’s hard to remember to check email.
The same cannot be said when you are tooling around on your riding mower with a beer. Not only don’t you need a passport to do it, you don’t even need a driver’s license.
You know you are far from a vacation when the mail man doesn’t even know you are gone.
From now on, I’m all about active vacations, interesting locations, vibrant experiences. If it doesn’t have a Mexican dirt highway or a cruise ship on fire or a palm tree with a half naked child climbing for coconuts or a machine cranking out frosty drinks with tiny umbrellas, then I’m OUT!
“I didn’t want Montezuma’s revenge anyway,” you tell yourself.
Next time I’ll roll the microbiological dice.
note to self on this self imposed stay-cation:
1. stop checking work email
2. drink an adult beverage in mid afternoon and pretend there is a mariachi band or steel drum playing in the background.
3. eat something unusual that makes you want to guzzle Pepto-Bismol.
4. pet an exotic animal and let it in your home.
5. go to your local super market and pretend it is an open air market place over run by chickens and children in bare feet.
6. boil tap water at your house and quietly worry about dysentery.
7. brush your teeth with tequila
8. go topless at the pool and wear pukka shells around your neck like a native.
9. Put Telemundo on in your home so you never hear an English word.
10. and finally, start googling your next vacation. Plan ahead. Get a clue. Hang a picture of yourself pulling weeds in the yard to remind you how much stay-cations suck.
Life’s Crazy ™