Carscafmoo

I recently spent two and a half weeks in the Mediterranean, starting off with five days in Barcelona and then cruising around in absurd luxury on a 12-day cruise that took me from Spain to France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Croatia.  While the day-to-day activities have been recorded in too much detail, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a step back and summarize my feelings and findings from the trip.

We went on the cruise because a couple of my friends are cruise aficionados; they swear by Celebrity cruises, because they cater to an older and more sophisticated crowd.  Last year, they went on a cruise to the Antarctic and had an incredible time; they brought back tales of on-board ad-hoc whiskey tastings, fine dining, intriguing activities, and great shows.  This, plus the stories of Celebrity pampering told by David Foster Wallace in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” got me really excited for the cruise.  I know this is basically the exact opposite lesson to take from that essay, but I was prepared to be blown away by the incredible service I received.

Our cruise was … a little different.  The cruise population was definitely older than any I’d been on, and that was nice (although there were still some 25-40-year-olds, and a total of like 5 bona fide children).  But the service wasn’t noticeably better than the Royal Caribbean cruises I’d been on; as an example, the bartenders were best described as “rookie,” and we never really got close enough to any of them that we could have an ad-hoc whiskey tasting.  The on-board activities were, for the most part, kind of sad and boring: bocce tournaments and the obligatory “men v. women pool olympics” (not that I didn’t enjoy bocce).  I’ve previously mentioned that the food was not the 5-star dining I had been led to expect and the quality of the Equinox show cast.  The non-cast shows are expected to be bad, but all of the comedians (even the Freddie Mercury impersonator, who at least shouldn’t be considered a comedian, even if he considers himself one) heckled people walking in late to their shows for the first 15 minutes, and they were 30-45 minute shows, so up to half their acts were just bullying the people who had come in to see them.

That said, I had an incredible time; we weren’t on the ship a whole lot, because we were in a new port almost every day, so the on-board activities didn’t really matter.  We cozied up to a few of the specialty bartenders, and the fact that some of the drinks were downright awful was negated by the fact that they were free (for us). The show was easily avoidable, and wasn’t exactly a selling point anyway, and the food was, if not incredible, pretty good and incredibly plentiful.  My biggest gripe is probably that our sommelier was terrible, and that only mattered for about 5 minutes at dinner, not to mention it’s the king of first-world problems.  Combine that with floating around on an enormous palace going from interesting place to interesting place with a full staff of servants whose job it is to make sure you have a great time and that you get to your destinations in an organized and hassle-free fashion, and you can’t go wrong.  Probably the weirdest thing that I most enjoyed was that when you wanted something cleaned up, you just had to put it on a surface.  Any surface. Done with a drink?  Put it on a table, or a railing, or on that pool chair, and it’ll be gone when you come back.  I know it’s weird, but that’s probably my favorite part about cruises, and one of the reasons I’ll do it again.

On this particular cruise, we were in port enough that it wasn’t really relaxing, so much as sort of … educational? For instance, I learned that the entire Mediterranean is basically mountains on the sea, and that I find that aesthetic nontrivially pleasing.  I’m seriously considering moving to the Mediterranean (or at least somewhere where there are sea-mountains), if I can find some way to be employed there.  I also learned or remembered a boat-load (hah!) about ancient civilizations; I had no idea where Ephesus was, much less how large and important it was.  I would probably prefer to spend a bit more time in each of those places; it’s impossible to really get the flavor of somewhere in 4-8 hours, and I intend to familiarize myself with many of them in the future.  Most importantly, though, I learned that there are stray cats and dogs everywhere in Europe.  Seriously, it was kinda weird, actually.  The fattest ones are in Italy, where the dogs hang out near restaurants and get fed by patrons.  The more you know!

I do, however, have a real gripe about cruises generally.  It is 2014; I’m posting this from a bus in the middle of Maryland right now, and even my transatlantic flight had internet (it wasn’t fast, but it existed).  It cost me about $25 to get 24h of internet above the middle of the ocean.  On the cruise, we were never more than about 50 miles from land, yet $25 bought 40 minutes of internet.  It’s inconceivable that cruise lines, who make such a huge deal out of the incredible service they provide, are being beaten into the ground by airlines, whose mantra is, “Take, take, take! Charge, charge, charge.”  I get that you’re supposed to be on vacation, and that vacation is supposed to involve the relaxation of being able to let go of the outside world, but it almost stopped us from going on the cruise (because my entire team from work was on the trip, and we needed to have some connectivity), and as much as it kind of sucks, my generation finds it relaxing to be connected, to tell people about the stuff we’re doing, to have the time to read the news or download a book and read it, etc.  I’m surprised that cruise lines haven’t tried to address this yet.

The other thing that’s strange about cruises is that they bring you to these beautiful, often quaint, sometimes remote places, but they do it in these huge floating tacky luxury palaces.  Driving up a mountain and looking into a pristine harbor nestled below is kind of ruined when you see a quarter-mile-long skyscraper-high 21st Century monster ship sitting in it.  On top of that, the places they go clearly have a love-hate relationship with tourism; a lot of the tour guides mentioned that tourism was basically driving the economy, but that it was completely changing the way of life for the people there, usually for the worse.  The tourism industry is making people work on Sundays and otherwise disrupting the Mediterranean lifestyle of going to work around 11, eating lunch from 2-4, sleeping from 4-7, then eating dinner from 8-midnight, etc.; at the very least, it was clear that the cruise industry was disrupting a lot of people’s lives, some for better, some for worse, like a macro-manifestation of the observer effect.

That said, the cruise industry has come a long way even since the first cruise I went on about 12 years ago.  My recollection of that cruise is that we were leaving a wake of garbage.  The major cruise lines now make an effort to be more eco-friendly (although I’m sure they’re still burning fossil fuels at rates that violate the Kyoto Protocol), and I got the feeling that, aside from air pollution, view pollution, and human pollution, we weren’t making the waters we were sailing in any dirtier.  I’m looking forward to finding out what other strides they’ve made by my next cruise.  Maybe they’ll even have reasonable Internet access.

This continues my series on Euro Vacation 2014 (part 1 can be found here).  Once again I’m several days late.  I won’t tell you when (or if) I catch up so that you can’t judge me.  Only I can judge me.  And man oh man do I.

Day 1: Barcelona / Equinox

Day 1 began in Barcelona with a pretty medium-grade hangover.  If there’s one theme to this trip, it’s that I thought I drank more in Vegas than I ever would for the rest of my life, and I was wrong.  Once we get on the ship you’ll understand why, but we’re not there yet – we’ve woken up late (checkout is at noon), and we’ve had standard minor snafu-ery getting a quick lunch with eight people, so we don’t make it to the boat until about 2:00 or so.

The first day on the boat is simultaneously the most exciting (“We’re on a HUGE BOAT!”) and the most boring (“We’ve explored the boat everybody! Now what do we do?” “Meh.”).  It’s also the first experience you get with the food and amenities, so I’ll likely focus on those today more than I will on other days.

They hand you champagne as soon as you step on board, which is great, except at this point I haven’t worked out, which I’d like to do before they do the lifeboat drill at 4:00. Of course, my workout clothes are in my bag, which still needs to be brought to my stateroom, because it’d be a travesty if I had to do any of my own heavy lifting (also, they take this time to do security stuff, like searching your bag for contraband).  The tradeoff being that it can get to my stateroom literally whenever they darn well please, so at 3:30, when it’s still not there and it’s clear I’m not going to be able to squeeze that workout in, I grab another drink.  And that’s the story of how, at about 5:00, I worked out drunk!

And here’s the crux of the matter: We have paid a fixed price ($180…ish), and we get free drinks everywhere on board.  Everywhere.  Any drinks.  Well, almost any drinks; most drinks are between $10 and $13, and our plan covers everything up to $13.  There are a few things that are like $9999 or whatever; we can’t get those.  But it means unlimited gin and tonics, for instance.  For the entire trip.  I cannot stress how much I have abused this at this point.  (One note: it actually makes some stuff objectively better, like when a drink isn’t that great and you can just ditch it, rather than drink something nasty because you don’t want to spend to replace it; on the other hand, the thought, “I don’t really want to drink anymore because I can have this when I get home,” has become totally invalid, because you can’t have it for free back home.)

Anyway, the ship is pretty similar to other ships I’ve been on.  It’s enormous. It has 16 decks (14 of which are accessible, since 13 doesn’t exist and 1 is crew only), and it’s over a thousand feet long.  Our stateroom has a window, which is new for me, and I can actually go the casino, which is weird. It’s also got a hot glass studio on the 15^th deck, where it also has a lawn with real grass for some reason (which is apparently only used for bocce and corn hole — sorry, the crew isn’t allowed to call it that, it’s Baggo™).  It doesn’t seem materially nicer in any way than the Royal Caribbean ships I’ve been on, but it certainly doesn’t seem any less nice either.

After an hour or two in the hot tub, we manage to clean up and make it to dinner, which is nominally a 4-course affair, but rapidly turns into a 6- or 7-course feast as we order multiple items for each course.  The food is more plentiful than it is objectively good; at some point, cooking for the 2850 guests on board necessarily involves some freezing and thawing, not to mention some blatant disregard in terms of meat temperature.  I have yet to taste a dish that is objectively bad, but really I can’t say that the food seems that much better than the food on any other cruise I’ve been on.  That includes the buffet, where the sushi is tasty and totally edible, but just looks like it’s been sitting out for an hour or two (even though it actually hasn’t).  The wine list also leaves something to be desired; their selection is largely American (including the world-famous Kendall Jackson winery, which you may know from the $9 shelf at your local supermarket, which they are selling for $11 a glass).  But what do I care, it’s free, right?  So I have a 6-course meal with free wine and a glass of Tockaji, which we recognize from a previous Vegas trip, and a Bailey’s coffee, and everything seems A-OK.  (Also of note, my tastes have changed considerably since I last went on a cruise, so it’s possible it’s way better but only seems the same to me.)

After dinner, we check out The Show, which details the entertainment available on board for the rest of the cruise. The show itself features the Equinox performers, a group of dancer / singers who appear individually to be adequately talented, but in ensemble are obviously all hearing slightly different music; it looks like they are all just a tiny bit off-beat, not enough that you notice compared to the music individually, but definitely enough that you notice compared to each other.  Combine that with wildly different levels of enthusiasm, from apathetical facial expressions to flamboyant dance participation, and you really get a unique Equinox experience that will convince you never to go back to any of their Shows.

On the other hand, Trombone Jerome and his house band are pretty good and play a mean “Don’t Stop Believin’,” and there’s a gorgeous songstress whose voice isn’t too bad either.  There’s also Cruise Director Paul (different dude than Tour Guide Paul from Barcelona), whose voice sounds like it speaks only in proper nouns, in part because of the way he says things, and in part because it sounds like most of what he says is trademarked: “Welcome to The Celebrity Equinox Experience™.  Tonight We Have Just a Sampling of the Fabulous Performers™ That Will Enhance Your Experience™ Onboard the World-Class Celebrity Equinox™.  Sit Back™, Relax™, and Enjoy The Show™!”  Paul also mentions all the acts that will be performing for various The Shows; I’m most looking forward to the Freddie Mercury impersonator and least looking forward to the ventriloquist who came in 11^th on Britain’s Got Talent (“but it’s OK because it was the year Susan Boyle was on, so really it doesn’t count as a true 11^th.”)

The night ends with everyone in Quasar Club, which has two elderly couples dancing to Michael Jackson, being spun by Equinox’s own DJ Gio.  (“This is my nightmare,” say I, as I go off to write my last blog post.)  I explore the ship a bit more, finding, among other things, a group of Aussies in neon orange suede jumpsuits spread amongst various levels of the ship, and I ultimately rejoin my compatriots in the nightclub and convince them to go to the martini bar, where a talented bar tending staff is doing awesome martini-related tricks, and one of the aforementioned Aussies is leaving with two girls (!!!!).  I know the night has come to a close when he returns (“Well that didn’t’ last too long…”), and I go up to the bar to order a water and the jump-suited Australian calls me a pussy.  This actually happened.

It’s been a long day; I promise tomorrow’s entry will be shorter.

Day 2: Villefrance-sur-Mer / Nice

Four of our group of ten have decided to head into Villefrance (a city on the Côte d’Azur where I think my mother recently lived for a summer, because she is a French nerd) at 10:30.  I get a workout in first, then meet everyone downstairs to discover we are not actually able to pull into port, because the port is too tiny.  Instead, we’ll have to wait about an hour to get a boat into port, so we head up to the buffet to get breakfast and decide to eat outside upon discovering that the Côte d’Azur is gorgeous.

My mother had sent me pictures of Villefranche, but they were all like, “Look at this cute flower!” or “look at this cute alleyway!”  It turns out that Villefranche is nestled in between mountains jutting out into the Mediterranean, which basically separate all the cities of the Côte.  Of note, Marseille appears to be a major draw along the west end, while Monaco is a major draw along the east.  Nice (and Villefranche, two stops away), seems to sit somewhere in between.

We head into the town and rapidly discover that the best thing we can do is head to the train station and get a ticket toward Nice, which we do.  We wander into the city and get lunch at a café a couple blocks away from the station on what appears to be a major route through the city, where I correctly explain in French that they have charged us for two Hawaiian sandwiches, when we have only ordered one.  This is the highlight of my trip to date, and I will not shut up about it.  It is exasperating for everyone else.

We eventually meet the rest of our group by happenstance and climb a hill at the east end of town, leading to an incredible view of two of the valleys wherein nestle the cities and hamlets forming the major attractions along the Côte.

Not much else happened today; we headed back to the boat (“We could buy wine and cheese at a café in Villefranche, or we could head back to the boat and drink free wine and eat free cheese,” led to the obvious conclusion), and we hung out in a hot tub and discovered a new bar called Slush, which serves boat drinks, until dinner.  After dinner we headed to a Molecular Bar, which serves “molecular gastronomy cocktails,” which means they put dry ice in your drink and charge you more ($12, or as us Premium Beverage (PB, for short), say, “free”).  My night ended as the night before had; with a glass of scotch and a blogging.

Day 3: Pisa / Florence

We had booked an Offshore Excursion for the third day; a semi-guided tour through Pisa and Florence.  Those of you who have ever been there will know that neither is actually on the coast; the ship was parked at a port, and we had to take a bus into the cities (a half hour into Pisa and an hour and a half from there to Florence, then an hour and a half back).  The bus had a guide, but our time in the cities was up to us, hence the semi-guidedness.

The Miracle Square in Pisa was actually really cool; the Leaning Tower is basically the newest thing there, dating from the 15^th Century, while the Basilica is one of the first Renaissance buildings (designed in 1296 or some such), and the Baptistry is where Galileo was baptized; all three of these incredible early Renaissance buildings sit surrounded by a grass lawn kept pristine in spite of millions of visitors per year.  Pisa was actually one of the most powerful cities in Italy in the 13^th and 14^th Centuries, and man does it show.  The architecture in this square is breathtaking, although I spent all of my time waiting for the basilica to open instead of waiting in line to climb the Tower, which turns out to be a poor choice when the basilica opens a minute after we are due to be back to our tour guide so that he can lead us back to the bus.

Up the Arno River, Florence is of course also incredible; we visit the Ponte Vecchio and walk along the Arno before cutting inland to visit the Duomo.  The Duomo is everything La Sagrada Familia last week wishes it could be; incredible in stature, yet mature in its opalescence; the main structure took 140 years to complete (less than La Sagrada to date), its main dome and two smaller domes are all magnificent in scope, and a façade finished in the 1870s (roughly the same time as La Sagrada was being started) is adorned with classical marble statues and detailed marble trim that put Gaudi’s concrete modernism to shame.  The fact that the Duomo sits on a square surrounded by buildings hundreds of years newer speaks to Florence’s power during the Renaissance and thereafter (compared to Pisa, where one gets the impression that property value wasn’t exactly going up in the city after the Tower was built).  We end our time in the city by visiting the cathedral, wherein are buried (either symbolically or actually) Florence’s greatest people, including Dante, Enrico Fermi, Michelangelo, and countless others.

When we get back to the ship, we enjoy more Slush time, a huge dinner (as always), and an ice martini slide.  The martini slide is hosted by our friends at the Martini Bar, but is elsewhere, in a “club” on the ship that features an EDM DJ and a bassist (the bassist plays along with the DJ and actually seems somewhat talented, I guess, but the DJ is clearly not the right call for this cruise, where the median age is somewhere north of 60).  Once our martinis have been served, it becomes clear that no one is dancing (and in fact almost no one is there).  When in Vegas, I had thought that Deadmau5 had a boring concert, but now I understand that he must have been really talented.  People actually paid to be bored by him; this guy was playing for free, with free drinks, and no one was showing up.  We request that he play the Fresh Prince theme, “or any other such Will Smith song.”  He tells us he’ll “see if he has it;” evidently he does not, because we never hear it.  We all have a good laugh about his lack of talent and the terrible music he’s playing.

Day 4: Rome

Astute observers will note that Rome is also not located next to the sea; this morning, four of us take an early train into Rome from Civitavecchia, Rome’s port, and do something similar to what we did yesterday; our guide tells us on board the train what’s worth seeing or trying to get to, but once we get there, we’re on our own.

We start out near St. Peter’s Basilica, although we don’t go in (we can wait an hour and see the Pope, since it’s Sunday, but we decide not to).  We walk along the Tiber until we cut in in search of the Forum, which we finally manage to locate but can’t figure out where to get tickets to go into, so we just admire it from above.  We’re also near the Coliseum, which we also admire from outside, because the line to get in is approximately seven years long.

I don’t know whether it’s because it’s a weekend, or because my memory is fuzzy, or because everything in Rome is way more famous now or something, but everything is more crowded.  After lunch, we wander up to the Pantheon, which is packed to the gills with people; the last time I was there I hardly remember there being anyone else.  We also see the Trevi Fountain, which is impossible to get close enough to throw a coin into; the last time I was here I think we sat down at a café in the square and had a leisurely snack with Paul Giamatti. Today they don’t even appear to have tables set up outside, since there’d be nowhere to put them because the square is so packed.

The other cool thing we saw was an enormous monument to the first king of unified Italy, Victor Emmanuel; this monument also houses a military history museum (super weird; they basically glorify their valiant effort in WWI, which the rest of the world saw as a humiliating sideshow by the bumbling Italians on the Isonzo, and then glorify their Axis effort in WWII) and their tomb of the unknown soldier.  It was a pretty impressive monument.

The things that struck me most about Rome as we trained back were the crowdedness, the history, and the fact that I was allergic to it.  I have never felt such a distinct difference in the way I felt as when I showered after the Rome trip.  I’ve already discussed the crowdedness, but in terms of history, I think the Pantheon is the best example; here’s a place that was (I think?) created by Romans some two thousand years ago, then gutted by the Catholic Church for their own purposes in the late Renaissance, and now houses the tombs of the modern, unified Italian kings.  Rome is an incredible place in that right next to a 20^th century monument lies the excavated ruins of a 1^st Century Roman emperor, and people have inhabited the place continually between the two.  Otherwise, my impression is that it’s kind of a dirty, gross place; if I were to move to Italy, I’d move to the Amalfi coast or to Tuscany.  I’d visit Rome once a year and pick out a tiny neighborhood of it to explore in detail.

Back on the ship, we seem to have settled into a routine of Slush bar / hot tub and then dinner.  Dinner tonight involves at least three of our group getting three entrees apiece; this (to date) marks the height of our gluttony.  I expect to have gained about 15 pounds from the start of the trip to the end.  That will put me at a new record for sure.

Our day tomorrow starts late, so we make a late night of it out by the Martini Bar.  Guess who’s playing?  It’s EDM DJ Jerk and his amazing sidekick, Bass Boy!  I make a euro off the group by requesting “any Will Smith, like maybe something off of Big Willy Style, but even Willennium will do.”  Unsurprisingly, EDMDJJ does not oblige.  He stops playing before we go to bed. I have at least three liter bottles of Evian (the premium beverage package gives me access to Evian water, while the plebes with the regular package have to drink some generic garbage).

Day 5: Pompeii

We have a late day today, and our excursion doesn’t start until the afternoon, so there’s plenty of time for a workout and breakfast beforehand.  We meet in the early afternoon on the pier to head out to Pompeii, which I’ve been to before, when I played “the lava game” there. (You know, where you pretend the floor is lava?  It was in poor taste, to say the least.)

We are docked in Salerno, and we have to pass through a tiny portion of the Apennines in order to get to our destination; they are gorgeous and larger than I imagined they would be.  Our tour guide (who incidentally is a Brazilian man named Juan) tells us that they form the conclusion of the African Atlas range, which I have heard is actually the continuation of the Appalachian range, whence I hail (…ish).  I find this somewhat hard to believe, since these mountains seem significantly more impressive and less worn than those of my homeland.

In any event, Pompeii is roughly as I remember, except we get to visit the red light district, where they have “explicit erotic frescoes” that act like a menu (as in, “Oooooh, I’ll have that one!” and then you point to the picture of a naked lady on top of a naked dude; presumably they are engaging in some sort of primitive mating ritual). We also see a number of bodies (these are actually plaster casts of the space inside the ash surrounding the skeletons; the bodies themselves have decomposed and left the space), including the one I most remember, whose mouth is open and appears to be screaming in agony as he suffocates and burns to death as the volcanic ash buries him.  It is haunting; I did not take a picture.

Otherwise, our tour guide is remarkable in his mixed love and hatred for Italy; he seems incredulous to the point of embarrassment about his countrymen’s driving habits, from their lack of respect for other drivers to their lack of respect for their own lives vis-à-vis seat belts and helmets; he laments their inability to change their attitude about the role of women in society (“Until 50 years ago it was the case in Italy that women …” is a phrase uttered more than once); while at the same time he clearly romanticizes the laziness of Southern Italy (“We would be happy to have tourism and gastronomy as the driving force of the economy, while the north forces this industry upon us!”, and he also uses the phrase “slowly, slowly” to describe our movement through the city).  I am assured by the more Italian members of our group that I simply do not understand Italians when I mention that he seems to both hate and love Italy.

On the way back, I realize I have misplaced my SeaPass card, which I need to get on the ship.  Fortunately, this is not a huge problem; I have my driver’s license, and the crew lets me on with the proviso that I immediately visit the guest relations desk to get my card back.  Disaster averted!  Otherwise, the ship brings more of the same; Slush bar and hot tub (our friends DJ A-Hole and The Bassist Extraordinaire pass by while we’re in the tub and I loudly lament that no one on the ship will play any Will Smith; they definitely hear); too much dinner (although admittedly I only have one entrée), too much wine, and another night near the Martini Bar.  We go to bed surprisingly early, considering tomorrow is a sea day, and we have nothing to wake up for.

Day 6: Sea Day

We are at sea today; we have no excursions to wake up for. The biggest issue we face is when will it be acceptable to start drinking without effectively being alcoholics.  I manage to hold off until after my workout and breakfast; I finally meet up with everyone on the lawn deck around 2:00, so naturally, I start drinking around 2:00.

We play bocce all afternoon while a hot glass show occurs from 3:00 to 5:00.  At the end, they raffle off some of their pieces.  We win nothing.

There is a bocce tournament soon thereafter, and we have been practicing; my roommate and I come in second, while another pair of us comes in third.  We win medals!  This is literally the first medal I think I’ve ever won.  I’m awkwardly proud of it.

We make our way to dinner very gradually through a bar off the tail end of the ship; there we meet a British couple that has gone on a whopping 9,734 cruises (or a similar number; don’t quote me on that).  They claim their favorite line is Celebrity, but they are upset that Celebrity is attempting to lose its rep as “the old people’s cruise line,” (when we met them they asked if we worked for the ship because we were “so young”) in favor of attracting the 25-40 crowd with their new musical selection, which they have noticed will literally clear out any venue where that “damn bass-wielding DJ duo” shows up.  They are obviously talking about our good non-Will-Smith-playing friends DJ Jerkwad and The Boy Bass Wonder, and we applaud them in their observation.  Also, they invite us to try the sangria, which we didn’t even know they had!  Things are looking up!

Nothing much else happens today; eventually I manage to make it back to my room in spite of my keycard not working, and we settle in for another late morning tomorrow.

Day 7: Mykonos / Ancient Delos

We pull into the port of Mykonos in the Cyclades around 8 in the morning, but our excursion doesn’t start until 1:45, so we wake up sometime after 11 to make the most of our time in Mykonos by totally avoiding being in Mykonos.  This proves not to be the worst decision we’ve made on the trip.

Around 2:00, we board a tender boat from the ship and make our way to Mykonos, where we immediately board another boat and head out to the island of Delos, where sat the ancient and aptly-named Greek city of Delos. The tour is guided, which is good, because otherwise it would be almost impossible to figure out what anything is.  Our guide is very knowledgeable, but not great at guiding; at the end of the tour this is explained when she finally A) tells us her name and B) informs us she’s actually an archaeologist studying an even ancient-er civilization, the Minnoans.

Anyway, the island is actually pretty cool; the ruins that we’re exploring actually date to the Roman settlement of the island; it turns out it was an important hub for the Minnoans and Ionians as far back as the 11^th Century BC before the classical Greeks took over sometime in the 5^th-2^nd Centuries; eventually (2^nd Century BC) it was conquered by the Romans before “the enemies of Rome” burned the city in what is described to us by our guide as “The Catastrophe.”  Also, I slowly come to realize I’ve heard of Delos before as part of the Delian League, which is a thing I don’t really remember anything about and definitely need to look up when I get Internet access again.  As part of this trip it becomes clear that no one in our group really has any clue about any of the ancient civilizations being discussed or how they worked, so apologies to all of the history that I have butchered and will continue to butcher.

Some of the cooler aspects of the city include surviving burn marks from The Catastrophe; tile mosaics set into the floors that held about 6 inches of water, which served as ancient air conditioning; wells that still draw water; and a number of surviving statues, including several lions, which guard the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, which is pretty cool.  Do(es) your god(s) have a birthplace?  I didn’t think so.

When we make it back to Mykonos, we discover that the only worthwhile part of town (Little Venice) is basically a lot of narrow alleyways with shops that all sell the same things.  It’s actually pretty cool, but it takes about 15 minutes to see everything, and unless you’re going to stop for an authentic Greek meal, it’s not really worth a lot of time, so we head back to the ship.

Nothing else really happens for the rest of the night, and anyone still reading this breathes an enormous sigh of relief.

Day 8: Kusadasi / Ephesus

Today is an early day, which is rough for all of us, I think.  Still, we manage to board the struggle bus and make it out to port at 8:30 or so for a guided tour of the ancient Greco-Roman city of Ephesus, just outside of Kusadasi, in modern-day Turkey.  I’ll spare a description of our tour guide other than to say that she thought we knew way more about current events in Turkey than we actually did, and she was definitely on the side of “the youth” in the country, which I think means opposing any move toward Islamization of the state.

Ephesus is impressive; it seems like the logical conclusion to our tours of ruins so far.  Where Pompeii was a city of thousands where refuse flowed freely in the streets, and Delos was a city of 30,000 with a working sewer system and steady supply of water, Ephesus was a city of 300,000 with working sewers, the first recorded church, and the traditional deathbed of Mary, whom some of you may remember as Mama Jesus from Sunday school.  It’s also the city whose inhabitants were addressed in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians; I am slow on the uptake of this fact.

Only 15% of the city has been excavated, but it seems the major stuff has been restored, including the main road, the port road up which walked Mark Antony and Cleopatra “on their honeymoon,” the library façade (easily the most impressive ruin we’ve seen so far), and much more.  It is a shame we don’t get to spend more time here.

After we head back to Kusadasi, we skip out on a carpet-making demonstration (although we are assured that the Turks really know how to hand-craft a good carpet, we counter-assure that it’s boring) and head out to explore the town.  In the town’s enormous bazaar we discover that Turkish salesmen are incredibly pushy; we literally can’t stop to look at anything in any of the shops, because as soon as we point out anything the proprietor of the shop will approach us and demand that we be interested in purchasing the good in question.  This is true of everything from the glasswork blue eye pervasive to the region (and said to ward off “the evil eye,”), ugly ceramic cats, and tattoos.  Not henna tattoos; we are literally asked if we would like to be the lucky recipients of the “cheapest, highest-quality tattoos in Turkey” in no fewer than three tattoo parlors (we took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up on Sex Shop and Tattoo / Piercing Lane).

The bazaar is enormous, and everyone seems to be selling exactly the same stuff in each shop (or at least there are four or five types of shop, which repeat ad nauseum).  This includes shops selling “Genuine Fake Watches,” whose selling point appears to be that their fake Rolexes are genuine watches.  Or possibly that they are genuinely fake and don’t tell time at all (possibly not even twice a day).  It’s unclear, because we are never able to get close enough to one of them without accidentally legally buying one or marrying a shop owner’s daughter.

Back on the boat, we enter today’s bocce tournament to discover the same people who came in first last time have entered again; their names are Tim and Allen and they are 40-something bros.  They’re the kind of people I hope to manage to become (to their credit they are universally positive in their boisterousness), but at the moment I hate them, in part because of how unnaturally good at bocce they are.  The joke’s on them, though; they lose tonight, and a pair of little old ladies take home gold.  Two of our crew pick up second place, but not me; I don’t even make the medal round.

Dinner is a sad affair; my roommate has fallen ill, and we have an empty seat at the table.  This also marks the point at which our server remembers that someone always orders an espresso and a glass of Sambuca after dinner; unfortunately, that someone is sleeping in our room at that moment.  We literally pour one out for our fallen homeboy.

Day 9: Piraeus / Athens

We have an early day today; roomie is still sick, so he won’t be joining us.  A large portion of our day will therefore be spent finding something suitable to bring back to him.

We have docked in the port of ancient Athens, Piraeus, which is some 7 miles outside of the city (connected by the Poseidon road, running along the sea) and is visible from the Acropolis.  During the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta, a walled road ran between the port and the city in order to protect Athens’s commercial interests and allow them access to the port without worry about attack.

We get a guided tour of the Acropolis, which includes among other things the Parthenon, which is enormous.  The columns alone are the largest columns we’ve seen, and we find out that it took a mere 15 years to build it (take that, La Sagrada Familia!).  It was also built entirely by free people; Athens took it’s commitment to democracy seriously and may or may not have abolished slavery, but no slaves were used in constructing the Parthenon, which is in honor of Athena (Parthenos meaning virgin, apparently it was the temple to virgin Athena).

Before we go up, though, we receive a brief history lesson, which I quite enjoyed, and so I will bore you with it now.  The history of Athens begins some 5,000 years ago; about the 6^th Century BC they establish a democracy (an actual date is given, although I forget it; it is unbelievable to me that we can attach dates to this event and the events that follow).  Sometime thereafter, in the early 5^th Century BC, the Persians invade.  They send a smallish force initially, and they are defeated at Marathon in 490 BC.  The tour guide glosses over this part, but after the battle the Greeks send (according to who you ask; I have friends who can clear this up) either a soldier, a slave, or Pheidippides (who famously ran the 100+ miles from Athens to Sparta in only 36 hours in order to request help from the Spartans for the battle) to run the 26.2 miles back to Athens and announce the victory (according to legend, he proclaims “Nike!” and then falls dead from the exhaustion).

The Athenians, understanding the might of the Persian Empire, consult the oracle at Delphi, who tells them that they will be protected by wooden walls; their city walls are already built of stone, so they interpret this to mean that they need to build warships to protect themselves; thus the port city of Piraeus is constructed in order to build and repair Athenian triremes.  The Athenians meanwhile rally other city-states to their cause, including the Spartans, to help protect against further incursions.  This ultimately leads to the formation of the Delian League (I knew I had heard of this!!), which serves as an alliance whereby the Greek city-states will help to fund and staff their mutual defense from further incursions; to ensure neutrality, the funds are housed in the Mediterranean island of Delos (we were just there!).  This marks the first time the Greeks really thought of themselves as a single people, rather than as Athenians, Spartans, etc.

Anyway, in 480 BC (possibly before the formation of the Delian League, that part was a bit fuzzy), the Persians return.  She glosses over this part, but the Greeks find out with just enough time for the Spartans to send a token force to hold the mountain pass at Thermopylae; millennia later this will be memorialized in the movie 300 (of note, legend has it that the Spartan force actually did say the “We will fight in the shade!” line, among other things, and the 300 were ultimately defeated when a local goat herd (whose name means “traitor” in ancient Greek) or some such showed the Persians a goat trail around the pass).

In the year of war that followed, the Persians burned Athens, but ultimately the Greeks prevailed, with important victories like the naval battle of Salamis led by Athenian triremes (wooden walls!).  As part of the burning of Athens, the acropolis was destroyed; the Athenians then used this as an excuse to secretly expropriate a huge chunk of the funds set aside for the Delian League in order to rebuild the Acropolis (which is how we know when the Parthenon was built and who built it), which ultimately led to the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.  When the war ended in the late 5^th Century, Athens ceased to be a world power, but from the establishment of democracy through the end of the war, Athens was a cultural and economic powerhouse in the region, and ultimately established itself as an important place for learning through Roman times.

The thing that strikes me most about the Acropolis is its age; it is a full 700 years older than, for instance, the ruins we saw on Delos, which basically means that when the ruins we toured on Delos were being built, the Parthenon was roughly as old as the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Duomo are now.  Nobody else seems impressed by this, so I will move on.

We spend the rest of the afternoon wandering through old Athens (the Plaka) looking in shops, and ultimately get roomie a bottle of Ouzo and a small bronze hoplite helmet.  That night, he rejoins us for dinner; I literally order steak for dessert, and it is the best decision I have made on this trip. We end the night in the casino, where I lose all of my money playing craps right before the table goes on a roll; one of our group ends up with about $250 on a $100 investment.  Not a bad night… for him.

Day 10: Sea Day, Part II / Massage

No history lessons today, just us being at sea.  We admittedly did a lot less sitting outside today, because it was kind of cold out, especially if you weren’t in the sun, and all of the sun seats were taken.  Instead, a lot of cards were played.  My opinion on cards is generally positive; my opinion on playing 6 hours of cards during vacation is generally negative; cards are something you play when you have nothing else to do, they are not something you do when you are having a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  So I only played about 4 hours of cards.  The rest of the time I spent writing for this blog that no one reads.

I also spent about an hour and a half getting a massage.  This is not a thing I’ve ever done before, and actually it was pretty weird (but obviously great).  It’s also noteworthy that I love being touched.  That’s a weird thing to love, but seriously, it’s one of my favorite things.  In elementary school, we wore t-shirts, and it was always a thing that if you sat in front of the delinquent kids, they’d eventually lose interest in whatever was being taught (“Seriously, when will I ever need to know how to read?  Boring!”), and they would start tracing the back of whatever was on your shirt.  Most kids would immediately tell on them (or hit them), but I’d pretend I didn’t notice so they’d keep doing it.  That’s how much I love to be touched.

Anyway, the instructions for getting massaged were vague, and the people giving them didn’t speak great English, so I spent the majority of the time beforehand sitting in the locker room, because the person I checked in with said “your therapist will meet you…” and then pointed down, the universal symbol for “right here.”  I only found out about 3 minutes before my massage was scheduled to start that they apparently meant “downstairs,” because I befriended a middle-aged man in the locker room.  This guy was incredible; he owns a construction business in New York and apparently goes on 4 cruises a year; he claims to have been to enough places that he doesn’t care where they go, he just stays on the ship and gets a massage every day.  I want his life.

In any event, upon meeting my therapist (I requested a dude; apparently they are able to apply more pressure), I was told to disrobe, and was covered in a sheet.  (I later found out from some massage experts that they never completely disrobe, but everybody else says that they do it totally naked, which is what I did.)  My masseur immediately worked his way up my feet, calves, and thighs, during which time the following thought ran through my head: “Well, I better prepare for insertion.”  Luckily he sorta glanced over my butt before focusing all of his deep-tissue attention on my back for a good 15 minutes.  He was all elbows and thumbs, and I mean that in absolutely the best way.  He eventually managed to get my arms, legs, and head worked into the mix before he cracked my back (the position he got into to do this is best described as him roughly mounting me, which by this point I was totally OK with).  It’s several hours later and I haven’t moved since, because I’m too relaxed to want to.

Otherwise, I watched (another) bocce tournament, which Tim and Allen won (again!); then I played Tim and Allen and we totally won on a come-from-behind 4-point round, which was totally badass.  … OK, maybe you had to be there.  Also, I rediscovered my feeling of full; for four or five days prior, I had lost all sense of being full and only felt either hunger or a sensation best described as, “Eh, I could eat more,” but at lunch I had a plate of pasta and legitimately stopped eating the food on my plate, not because I knew it would kill me, but because I didn’t want any more.  And it was tasty food, too.  This feeling returned at dinner; we’ll see how it goes tomorrow, but I’m hopeful it will go away and I can manage whatever they have on tap for the last formal night on the cruise.

Day 11: Dalmatian Coast / Dubrovnik, Croatia

8:15 in the morning is, even in my opinion, too early for a wine tasting.  Luckily, it took us an hour and a half to get to the winery, so we didn’t start until about 10:00.  Unfortunately, we started with a grape-based liqueur, somewhere around 40% ABV, that our guide described as a cure-all and “the best window-cleaning fluid in Croatia.”

On the bus ride there, we learned some about the history of Croatia generally and Dubrovnik specifically.  In a sentence, Illyrians called the Dalmati settled the area and were wiped out by the Romans, before the Romans were chased off by Slavs from the North, who eventually set up the city-state of Dubrovnik, which rivaled nearby Venice through the Renaissance (and had a GDP of approximately half that of the entire Spanish empire at its height); this state was eventually conquered by the Ottomans and turned into Yugoslavia, which broke apart into several Slavic countries, including Croatia, in the early ‘90s, after which it was discovered that the American Zinfandel actually hails from this region.  (I didn’t say it was a short sentence.)  The wine we drank was actually a child of the Zinfandel grape and some other grape, producing a a full-bodied, dry red.

After the wine tasting (whereat we purchased a sage-flavored liqueur), we had a pleasant surprise in that we were served lunch, which came with more wine (woo!).  We also tasted some of the world’s finest oysters; oysters aren’t really my thing.  After that, we went to a local village where they produce olive oil in the same manner that it had been produced centuries ago; they used a horse to grind up the olives into a powder, put them into coconut-rope baskets, poured boiling water on them, and crushed them with a screw press.  The water and the oil pour out of the baskets into a cistern of sorts, where eventually the water and oil separate, and they scoop the oil off the top.  Also, we were served prosciutto, olives, and wine, so all in all it was a pretty great experience.

By the time our tour got back, we had been drinking for 6 hours and it was only 2:00, so we wandered into the old city of Dubrovnik, which is surrounded by a mile of walls.  Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to walk the walls, but we explored the old town a little bit and found plenty of stray cats.

We managed to make it back to the boat despite a harrowing cab ride with plenty of time to lounge about in the sun and get ready for the last formal night, where one of the guys in our group had no fewer than 3 lobsters.  We also did the thing where we cheer for the kitchen and wait staff to thank them for their work over the cruise, since we knew it was coming we were able to write out signs saying “We love you Ernesto & Esteban” and wave them about during the affair.  They actually seemed pretty touched, and it may have been one of the nicest things I’ve ever been tangentially a part of.

Otherwise, the night ended with cards at the Molecular Bar, where we have at this point become somewhat regulars.

Day 12: Venice

We didn’t get in to Venice until about 1:00, but we sailed in along the river that borders the city, so we were able to see St. Mark’s Square and the many churches lining the Grand Canal.

We decided we would have a brief journey into the city and just walk to St. Mark’s and come right back; we ended up spending 7 hours in the city all told attempting this feat.  The confusion started with our taking the famed People Mover from the port, which is heavily advertised, and only a euro.  It took us no more than about 200m, and we waited for it for 7 minutes, so altogether I’d say it wasn’t worth it.

Once we made it into Venice proper, we began following what seemed like helpful signs to get to San Marco, but it turns out these signs are apparently put up to lure unsuspecting tourists trying to get from Point A to Point B through the entire rest of the city (at certain points we literally saw signs saying, “<- San Marco | San Marco ->”).  On our way back we passed an elderly couple who was standing and looking at a map and a series of signs; when we asked where they were headed they said they were trying to get to St. Mark’s but they were giving up, because they’d been trying for hours.

The city is actually really cool, because there are no roads, only canals; the taxi service and public transportation are all boats, and there’s gondoliers everywhere (although they look kind of sad, in that their black-and-white striped shirts are clearly mass-produced and kind of cheap looking, as though they are wearing them only because they know it is a stereotype).  There were also little shops everywhere we went, where they sold Murano glass (or glass purporting to be from Murano, at least) and other standard trinkets and baubles.

San Marco itself was impressive; the local church was constructed in the 9^th Century, and the square had apparently been burned down 4 times, and rebuilt to be more impressive each time.  The Grand Canal is lined with enormous churches and basilicas and the like, and altogether the city was quite impressive, if a bit difficult to navigate.

We made it back to the ship with about an hour before dinner, just enough time to pack up and head to the Molecular Bar for a pre-dinner cocktail.  The bartenders regaled us with tails of bartending horror at the pool bar (a blended frozen Heineken and virgin screwdrivers were some of the orders mentioned).  Dinner wasn’t particularly exciting, other than it seemed like everyone had run out of steam, so most people only ordered one entrée for a change.  After dinner we headed back to the Molecular Bar for one last hurrah before heading our separate ways; the next day we’d all depart, largely to different destinations at different times.

It was a good trip.

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So concludes my Mediterranean experience.  I’ll put together a (short) collection of thoughts about the whole experience for next week as a sort of conclusion piece, then it’s back to my regularly-scheduled programming of forcing my ill-formed opinions into your brain.

I’ll admit that I’m writing this late.  In general the nights have been a bit packed, so I haven’t gotten a chance to write after each one.  At the moment we’re actually aboard the Celebrity Equinox, headed towards Nice and Villefranche.  I consider this a failure on my part.

Day 1: Plane / Mont Juic, Part I

We flew into Brussels on the aptly named airline, Brussels Air.  The flight was long and super cramped and I watched a couple movies aboard; American Hustle was pretty good, The Watch was pretty terrible, and I’m actively judging my friends who used to watch Chuck, because the pilot was available, and the show seems like it has nothing to offer other than Miranda from Mass Effect in her underwear for no apparent reason, which kinda makes up for the rest of it, so I take it back.

The flight took off at 10:30 or so and got into the Brussels airport sometime around 11 the next day.  I was surprised both by how dirty the Brussels airport was and how all of the advertising was in English.  I had no euros and was unable to make any purchases there, but I would totally have gotten some Belgian hot chocolate had I had the chance.  That ish is thick.

The plane we boarded in Brussels to take us to Barcelona didn’t come to the gate we were boarding at; instead, we went through the gate and got on a bus and drove around the airport until we arrived at the plane that would actually take us to our final destination.  The bus must have been driven by Derek Zoolander, because it ultimately came to a gate like three to the left of the one we boarded through, but we drove all the way around the airport to get there.  I assume the bus could only make right turns.

The flight from Brussels to Barcelona was much better; it was only an hour and a half, and in addition to being in “flex economy,” which apparently means more legroom and better service, the flight was sparsely populated, so there was no one in the middle seat of our row.  Also, they were playing Looney Toons, which distracted me from reading and had the benefit of being watchable with my own soundtrack (which consisted largely of music that was popular 20-30 years ago).  All-in-all, a pretty OK experience.

We got to Barcelona around 3:00 or so and checked into our hotel with relatively little issue; the cab driver did not speak English, but the hotel people did.  After a shower, I barely remembered that I’d been awake for 27 hours or that I’d spent the night in a 2’ x 2’ square of space.

Yelp! recommended a tapas place a couple of blocks away, and it was INCREDIBLE.  They served tapas on bread (we later learned this is the Basque way to serve tapas, as montadidos or pintxos, held together with a toothpick).  They count the toothpicks on your plate at the end and they charge you one euro per toothpick.  Adventurous folks can attempt to get a discount by eating the toothpicks.  All of their tapas was a single euro, too, despite being unbelievably tasty and altogether not that small, and pitchers of the best sangria we had on the trip cost only ten euros.  (I’m having trouble figuring out how to type the euro symbol, esp. since I don’t have Internet right now.  Euro problems, amiright?)  Plus, the proprietress was kinda cute in a “I’m foreign, but I speak a little English, and I’m going to serve you delicious tapas” kind of way.  I guess you had to be there.

After that, we climbed partway up the mountain near our hotel, Mont Juìc (or maybe Mont Juíc?).  We made it to a restaurant with a beautiful view of the city and ordered a bottle of wine. Eventually it got cold (the weather, not the wine), and we went back down the mountain, and some combination of the wine, the cool air, and the fact that it was only 8:00 (2:00 PM back home) combined to give everyone a second wind.  We went to another tapas place near our hotel to get another bottle of wine and quickly lost our second wind, amongst some fish-flavored olives that were, quite frankly, really gross (but free, with a brief and repetitive Spanish lesson).

After that, we went to our hotel, and so concludes the first day of the journey.

Day 2: Walking Tours / Grilled Meat

The second day started with us sleeping for a long time.  We were able to meet up with two more members of our group, who got in late on Saturday night.  These two were the organizers of the whole shebang, so they had stuff for us to do.  That stuff largely involved walking to points that were walkable and reading from Rick Steve’s Barcelona.  We also checked out the cathedral in town, and as it was Sunday, the locals were doing a Catalan folk dance out front at noon.  The braver members of the group attempted to participate, but when it became somewhat clear that they had no idea what they were doing, they were invited to leave.  I did not participate, because I have the feeling that if a bunch of foreigners came and treated my heritage as a tourist attraction, I’d be somewhat miffed.  But that’s just me; also I don’t know what my heritage would be other than eating too much and inventing McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, and I’m not too worried about foreigners stealing that from us.

Not a lot else really happened that day; the afternoon largely consisted of walking tours guided by Rick Steve’s book; we made it to the harbor and checked out a cool lobster statue that was left over from a restaurant built for the 1992 Olympics (although at the time it was just a mystery to us why it was there), and an enormous column modeled after Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square, topped with a statue of Christopher Columbus pointing, inexplicably, toward the Mediterranean.

We knew that the last of our party would be arriving that night, and that we should wait for her for dinner, but we were all pretty hungry, so we attempted to find a café in which to order a snack and maybe a pitcher or two of sangria.  The promise of sangria and the lack of viable options (we wanted to find somewhere off the main drag, since we had seen 10 euro sangria the day prior and the main tourist road, La Rambla, was posting prices in the 20 euro range), led to a condition of sangria-induced crankiness known as “sanger” (largely in me).  Eventually we found a suitable option or two near Maria del Pi, a church nearish the cathedral, and no one was sangry anymore.

Eventually we met up with our last member and grabbed a late dinner (even by Spanish standards) near our various hotels; paella was served.  I got a dish called “grilled meat.”  I was not disappointed.

 

Day 3: Best Tour Ever / Factory Burger

Monday started off with more of the same; we did some more walking tours out of the book.  We actually walked all the way across town and climbed a mountain and made it to a park that overlooked the city; it was probably about a 3-hour walk.  The park, or at least parts of it, was designed by a Catalan architect named Antoni Gaudi who may or may not have been the inspiration for the word “gaudy” (actually) .  I won’t go into detail about him (at least not today), but suffice it to say that I have no patience for his nonsense.  Also, we visited a market along the way.

The park would have been greatly improved by a zip line taking park-goers into town, but we had no such luck.  Instead, we walked down the mountain and took the metro back to the hotel, as we needed time to change and get ready for our outing that evening, which was a guided tapas and wine tour through the city.

At 5:00, we met in a public square with our guide, Paul, who would take us on our guided wine / tapas adventure.  We made four stops, three food stops and an extra wine stop, during which we learned a bit about the city’s history, the geography of Spain, and the context for the wine we were drinking and tapas we were eating.

Basically everything I know about the city comes from this tour.  Here we learned about lobster statue previously mentioned, not to mention that we were correct about the overpriced food and drink on La Rambla.  We learned that the montaditos we ate the first night are called pintxos when they’re held together with a toothpick, we learned that the letter “x” is pronounced either like a “ch” or a “sh” (i.e., some restaurants refer to their chips as “xips”), and we learned that the scars in the face of a monastery we had visited the first day were from bombs dropped during the Spanish Civil War.  We heard about the movement to free Catalonia from Spain, and what the various flags flying from windows in the city mean; we learned about the classical method for making cava (the Spanish equivalent of champagne), and we found out that the most delicious tapas are spinach croquettes and iberico (both these facts are disputed, but only by the foolish).

We also had a lot of wine.  Like… a lot of wine.  By the time we got back, we were pretty sauced.  However, two of our ten-member group didn’t join us on the tour and still wanted to go out afterward.  So of course we did.  This was the beginning of a night of poor decisions, starting with the bottle of wine we had at a bar down the street, and culminating with what can only be described as Grade D rat meat at Factory Burger across from our hotel.  And I don’t mean like meat that’s so bad it’s barely legal and might as well be rat meat, I mean if you took all of the rat meat available in the city and graded it, this would be second-to-last.  It was that bad.  And undercooked, at that.  The next day it was all I could taste until about 3:00 in the afternoon, but through some miracle, no one got food poisoned.  That was pretty much the only plus to come out of the night as we stumbled back to our hotel room sometime between 2:30 and 3:00 in the morning.

Day4: La Sagrada Familia / Nice Restaurant, Part I

Tuesday begins too early and with a crippling hangover.  We have to be across town at La Sagrada Familia, a Gaudi-designed megachurch that’s been under construction for the last hundred years.  I’m not exaggerating; they’re hoping to finish in 2026 in time for the centennial of Gaudi’s tram-accident-related death.

The church is certainly impressive.  It’s easily the tallest thing in the city (from the mountain park the day prior, it seemed to barely be below us, despite being all the way across the city and down a mountain).  It has 3 facades (two of which are even complete!), which I, with all of my inability to judge scale, will claim are at least infinity feet tall, with sculptures depicting in incredible detail and symbolism the birth of JC and His passion (incidentally, “the passion” always seemed a weird way to describe His being brutally put to death, but maybe that’s just me?).  It had interior columns made of granite, basalt, and porphyry, which you can tell from the number of “y”s it has is incredibly expensive and strong.  And these arches branch several times and eventually spread into beautiful Catalan arches, which are a apparently thing that Gaudi invented using hyperbolae, just for fun.  It’s actually a pretty cool effect that makes it look like the building is being supported by big stone trees.

On the other hand, at the center of each arch is an electric light, because there’s not enough natural light entering the church. Midway up each porphyry column, where they branch into smaller columns, is a weird knob described by Gaudi as “an ellipse, then rotated about its major axis 45 degrees, then rotated again about its semi-major axis 30 degrees, then again about its major axis another 45 degrees the direction whence it came, which rotations shall be performed at the apex of the first full moon of the first year of the new millennium, repeated thrice forward and backward in a graveyard whose sixth stone from center reads ‘The One’ and whose caretaker is a wolf, howling once only every third moon,” or some other total nonsense.  And on these is inscribed a cartoonish drawing depicting the spirit animal of each of the four Gospels (not kidding). The outer bell towers are made of concrete and made to appear to be melting for what is best described as “no apparent reason.”  The aforementioned symbolic sculptures on the facades are concrete (rather than, say, a carveable stone like marble), and appear to have been stamped out by a factory press.  The whole thing reminds me of a child who draws a picture of a flower and immediately thinks, “… but what if we added glitter?  And a dinosaur?  And … a … jet?  And an explosion!  And then the jet is shooting the dinosaur with, like, a missile! And it’s happening on the moon! And there’s lightsabers!”  The end result is something that’s breathtaking to behold in its scale, but that looks like it should be given a gold star for having technically taken the assignment to completion and hung on a refrigerator until the gold-painted macaroni necklace gets made for Mother’s Day while shelving any plans for little Mikey to go to the local arts magnet school.

After that, we headed across town and spent most of the day walking up the hill overlooking the water.  Nothing much exciting happened on our journey, but highlights include seeing the ’92 Olympic stadium (remarkable in that a: its gift shop was open and b: it evidently predates the seemingly universal directive to build overly enormous coliseums that will never be used again – this was a pretty small stadium that will never get used again), a fort overlooking the city (remarkable in that it was the site of the last pre-Franco Catalonian head of state’s execution), the national Catalonian museum of art (remarkable in that it is enormous and has huge waterfalls out front leading to a fountain), and a black-and-white bird (remarkable in that it has made a powerful enemy and I will destroy it… assuming I encounter it again on my journeys through the Mediterranean).

That night we went to a Michelin-rated restaurant and ate a seafood-heavy dinner; the meal was for the most part excellent, but occasionally ventured too far toward the edge with such dishes as an iced strawberry tartare swimming in a pool of strawberry vinaigrette.  All-in-all, really good though.

Day 5: Picasso Museum / Nice Restaurant, Part II

Wednesday was our final full day in Barcelona; two of our group of 10 left us for good, and the rest of us woke up late and spent most of the day wandering about, doing stuff we hadn’t been able to do yet, like see the Picasso museum.  This led to a fun game we call “Picasso or Childrens’ Art,” which will come up again when we get to the ship.

The rest of the afternoon was spent making sure we had discovered all that Barcelona had to offer from a culinary perspective.  First, we ventured to “the best churros and chocolate” in the city, according to our aforementioned guide Paul, where we discovered that “Spanish hot chocolate” is a codename for “a melted brick of semisweet chocolate served in a cup.”  We found another café near Maria del Pi and made sure no one got sangry, and then we headed back to the hotel to get ready for our second Michelin-rated restauarant.  This dinner was less edgy, but overall probably better, with a delicious … actually, I don’t really remember a lot about that dinner, because we were pretty drunk when we showed up.  But it was really tasty, trust me.

We had a good time in Barcelona, but by now everyone was ready to get on the ship.  Stay tuned for adventures from the sea!

 

I spent last weekend in Vegas as part of a bachelor party.  Suffice it to say that adventures were had and mistakes were made.  Predictably, one of our party ended up in the hospital.  Somewhat unpredictably, it was me.

Unfortunately, the story of how isn’t that great.  I wore my admission bracelet all weekend as a battle scar of sorts; when people asked what happened I just told them, “This is what happens when you put the team on your back.”  In reality, a girl was getting kicked out of the VIP section of a club during a concert after hilariously getting in by stepping over the velvet rope in full view of the bouncer.  The bouncer turned her around and told her to get out the way she came in, which she attempted to do, somewhat unsuccessfully.  She tripped over the velvet rope and down went a stanchion, right onto my big toe.

I left the party and went back upstairs in considerable pain; getting to the room revealed a toe that was a morbid mixture of black and purple, and because I’m a huge wuss and I’ve broken toes before, I thought, “well, probably a good idea to get this looked at.” So I got into a cab and headed to the nearest hospital to get an X-ray with the bride’s brother, whom I ran into on my way from the room to the cabstand.  What happened when we got there was, frankly, eye opening.

Checking in at the triage counter (motto: “When chicken soup isn’t enough: Triage!”) around 3AM, we discovered they’d been having a worse-than-usual Friday night; a lot of the people in there had been waiting for 10 hours or more.  They advised that it would probably be a few hours at least.  Then they advised that we take our seats and we’d be called momentarily.

Sure enough, I shortly heard my name called.  Well, I heard my first and middle name called; it was a little weird.  But it was my name, so I went back.  They asked me what I was in for, I told them I thought my toe was broken.  They asked pain level then told me they’d get me a painkiller.  They sent me back out.

They called me again, same deal with the name. I took off my shoe and a nurse said they’d order me an X-ray and to listen for my name again.   They sent me back into the waiting room.

At this point, I’d been there for maybe 20 minutes – I took this as a good sign. About half an hour later, I’m still sitting in the waiting room, and they’re still calling names.  One guy is particularly loud as he calls the names, and a woman asks irritably whether he can tone it down a bit.  He indicates that he cannot and he will call names as loud as he wants; the woman launches into a diatribe about his lack of consideration for the nerves of the people waiting, and he mutters, “whatever,” and turns back into the medical area.  It was a pretty professional thing to do, all-in-all.

Another half-hour goes by and my name is called again (same thing, and incidentally by the guy calling names super loudly, who turns out to be the X-ray tech.)   He takes me back and X-rays me hurriedly; he’s a nice enough guy, just frazzled from the busy night, and he indicates his disdain for the woman who asked him to be quiet.  He sends me back on my way and says they’ll call me when the results are in, just listen for my name.

Not five minutes later, my name is called.  Woohoo!  A woman takes me back to a bank of computers and I discover they are not ready to deliver my X-ray results, they are just doing paperwork.  Here they finally discover that they have my name incorrect on the paperwork; they add my last name correctly and that seems to be it.  She sends me back out, same deal – listen for your name.

At this point it’s about 4:30 and there is hope we will be out by 5. I’m still waiting to hear back about that painkiller they mentioned, but I can survive.  At 5, we notice that there’s only one MD back there, and he emerges to call names only sporadically.  Aha, we think, here is the bottleneck.  Certainly an X-ray result will be quick to deliver and they’ll want to scratch us off the list.

At 6:00, a new MD appears – shift change!  He calls a whole list of names; none of them mine.  They’re making progress!

The sun comes up.  At 7:00, another list of names is read; again, my name is absent.  Ditto at 8:00.  We’ve been here 5 hours at this point, but certainly my toe injury isn’t life threatening, so it makes sense that others would go ahead of me.  This is the entire point of triage, after all.

At this point, the pain my toe has become somewhat unbearable; I can’t elevate my foot because I’m sitting in the waiting room, and blood is pooling in my feet.  I basically can’t walk, and I’m shaking from the pain.  I’ve been trying not to make a fuss; the nurses have been dealing with irate patients all night, and at one point a fight had to be broken up by the police (no punches were thrown, just yelling and gesturing among those awaiting treatment).  But I decide that at 9:00 I’m going to complain if my name isn’t read out.

9:00 comes and goes and we hear nothing; no names.  I approach the window and, bearing in mind that they have been dealing with jerks all night, request an Advil as politely as I can.  The nurse looks at me impatiently and asks for my name.  She goes to find my chart; it’s not there.  That’s a bad sign.  I tell her I may be under my middle name; she asks how that happened and I indicate that I do not know, I gave the nurse my ID and he made my chart, and she rolls her eyes.  Then she tells a nurse that my registration will need to be re-done, that this mix-up is the source of at least some of my wait (not in so many words, of course), and tells me that I should go take a seat.

I wait fifteen minutes (during which time my compatriot, the brother-in-law, has set off to find a CVS so he can just buy me Advil – seriously, what a guy), and then go back to the counter to ask about that Advil.  She says it’s out of her hands; the nurse who will take care of me is back there somewhere and I should wait for my name to be called.

I sit back down; my compatriot returns, I take his Advil.  It is of only moderate effect.  We continue to wait.

At 9:50, the nurse calls me back.  She tells me there’s been a paperwork issue, but that everything should be sorted out; she gives me a prescription painkiller (hooray, relief!), and scans my wrist.  The scan does not go through; the paperwork still hasn’t been worked out.  This escapes her.  However, she does take me back even further into the medical area and says, “Might as well have the doctor see you now.” I take this as a huge victory for Team Me.

This is where things get real.  The system of calling in several names at once has moved the backlog from the waiting room in triage to a series of chairs in the ER proper.  The doctor does not have enough room for patients, and is working as quickly as he can, so he simply pulls the patients one at a time from the chairs and interviews them in full view of everyone else, then he gives diagnoses or orders tests as necessary; admittedly, he was pretty efficient in this regard. The following cases are in the ER that day, and are being disclosed to me, a total stranger:

• A man complaining of chronic chest pains worried about heart problems who has waited 8 hours to be told he has heartburn.
• A man complaining of high blood pressure who, no, has not been taking his blood pressure medication; after waiting 9 hours he is directed to take his blood pressure medication.
• A man who has been there since midnight who had surgery last week and whose sutures ruptured, he is literally bleeding from an enormous gaping wound and has not been seen, nor given pain medication, for ten hours.
• A Dutch man with a sore shoulder who has been waiting 2 hours.  He is directed to rest his shoulder.
• An 18-ish looking young man who is worried he may have caught a communicable disease due to a recent bout of unprotected sex; he is asked about this encounter and his worries thereabouts in full view of everyone, and tests are ordered.  It is unclear how long he has been waiting.
• A 20-something guy who has been waiting for eight hours, and whose toe is in fact not broken, and whose pain is caused by blood pooling under his toenail.  This is me.

Meanwhile, all around us a seemingly scripted world is taking shape. There’s the nurses complaining to each other about the other nurses, and how the backup is their fault because they don’t understand the system (this was in relation to my paperwork snafu, I eventually put together).  There’s the cute nurse who’s clearly dating the hunky EMT, possibly even secretly, as their behavior changes radically when other hospital personnel are around.  There’s always exactly one nurse around, whose response is inevitably, “You’ll have to ask your nurse,” to any inquiries about what the next steps are, despite no one having been told exactly who their nurse actually is.

From the time I got back there to the time the doctor saw me was about 45 minutes.  After the doctor saw me, I waited another 40 or so minutes to find out what the next steps were, during which time I struck up a conversation with what I thought was going to be a kindly Dutch man, but turned out to be a crotchety Dutch man.  He complained about his two-hour wait in predictable fashion (just like everything else): “In Holland, this would take 5 minutes.”  The next steps for me, by the way, were to receive a printed out fact sheet about subungal hematomas (incorrectly describing treatment that hadn’t been given), and then I had to sign a paper saying I had received said sheet. Then, eight and a half hours after I had arrived, I got to leave.

When I heard the Dutch man’s comments, my response was, “There’s a lot of talk in this country about reforming the health care system, now you know why.”  And I know that my story is just one of millions of stories that take place every day, and is comparatively not as bad as in many instances, I’m sure.  Certainly not as bad as others I saw that night; maybe it’s not that bad when a guy waits an extra 4-6 hours because they got his name wrong when they admitted him.  But when a guy is literally bleeding from an open wound for ten hours before a doctor sees him, that’s bad.  When a kid is asked private questions about his sexual history in front of ten to fifteen strangers who are under zero legal obligation to not divulge his medical history, something is broken.  I don’t know a lot about the healthcare system as it exists today, or as it will exist in the future under the ACA; I don’t know if there are solutions in the works, and I don’t have any ideas on what those solutions should be, so I mercifully won’t go into those.  All I know is that it’s somehow Obama’s fault.  Thanks, Obama.

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Apologies for the preachy post today.  I have just completed my second straight Friday night sans sleep, this time on my way to Barcelona!  (My life is pretty OK I guess.)  I will be out of the country for the next 2 1/2 weeks;  I am live-tweeting my trip again @Carscafmoo, but I should warn that I may be unable to post regularly.  I will do my best to keep about 10-minutes of time per night to write about what happened during the day; no guarantees I can get them out on Saturdays, but they will come out eventually.  Expect regular posts to continue on or about 5/24

 

It’s Thursday night, and I’m on a plane headed toward Vegas.  I’m a tiny bit drunk (but we’ll get to that in a minute), and I’m ashamedly out of things to write about. That’s not to say I don’t have ideas – it’s really that I don’t want to write about them on a plane; I think those ideas deserve at least the modicum of fact checking the Internet allows.  Unfortunately, almost certainly the next time I write will be on a plane too, and the time after that will be on a bus… but we’ll get to those when we get there.  In the meantime, what’s important is that I’m on a plane headed toward Vegas, and I’m a tiny bit drunk.

I’ve been to Vegas before – twice, in fact, both times with friends from work.  When we’ve gone, we’ve had a good time.  We’ve played blackjack and craps, we’ve lost money (except for Patrick who I swear always comes out ahead somehow); we’ve seen shows and had dinners that were probably too expensive and stayed in rooms we had no business staying in.  We’ve drunk too much and eaten too well and in one instance I chewed on a cigar and I got a bit queasy from it, before staying up all night and seriously considering (but not following through on) ordering a stripper wake up call for Patrick, because he went to bed and because he seriously keeps coming out ahead. 

This is how I prefer to spend my time in Vegas – just testing the waters of things I wouldn’t do at home, without really committing to them.  I like playing $5 blackjack.  I enjoy spending a couple extra hours in the hotel room playing drinking poker (incidentally this is an awesome game we made up while we were in Vegas).  If I go to the hotel pool, I want to go to the pool; I want to read a book in the sun or stand in the water and feel refreshed.  I want to make fun of the frat stars waiting in line for the pool day club from afar while relaxing and doing my own thing. (All Vegas hotels have pool clubs; it’s weird.)  In the generously paraphrased words of a guy who went with us last time (whom we shall call Gunnar – he reads this blog and tweets @gr8whitehoprah and is a Pretty Cool Dude), “I’ve done Vegas before, but it was 36 hours I mostly don’t remember; it wasn’t like this.  I enjoyed this.”

This weekend I will not get to do those things, and I am terrified. 

I am going to Vegas this weekend not with my work friends (who, as you can imagine, are all total nerds – sorry Gunnar).  Instead, I am going to meet a couple of friends from school for a bachelor party. I thought that my brother’s bachelor party with 20 ex-frat stars in West Virginia was the bro-iest thing I would ever do, but I was wildly mistaken.  As I’m on a plane (and too cheap to pay for internet), I can’t check my email to quote exactly, but to give you an idea of whom I’m going with, I received the following communication yesterday from the guy planning the party: “Bring bathing suits and stuff to swim in.  Sun’s out, guns out, bitches.” He also began the email with “bitches,” and at least three other emails have begun in a similar vein. 

I should be clear – I know the guy, and he’s a stand-up dude.  In fact, all the guys I know that I’m meeting up with are stand-up dudes (I think there’s a friend from high school, and the bride’s (little?) brother will be there, so they’re kinda wild cards).  They’re just distinctly not the dudes I really hung out with in college.  They were basically the frattiest guys I knew – and to their credit the reason I didn’t really hang out with them all that much wasn’t that they thought they were too cool for me.  It’s that I thought they were too cool for me.  These guys were total frat stars – exactly the kids I want to be making fun of for standing in line at AQUAPOOL (they have to be in all caps and be water-themed, by the way).   They were hooking up with strangers on the D-floor of Shooters II while I was trying to convince my less-adventurous friends that maybe it’d be cool if we just went to Sati’s tonight so we could say we did something this weekend.  They were the people who, spring break senior year when seemingly the entire class went on a Caribbean cruise, won sexy legs competitions despite (or because) of their recent bilateral ACL reconstructions rendering them wheelchair bound; they were the people who, when we heard someone dove head-first into an empty pool and had to be airlifted off the boat, we were all worried that it just might have been them.

On the other hand, they are also the people who got Fulbright scholarships; who went to MIT for PhDs and Masters in engineering; who work in Boeing’s Super Secret Futures Division (this is a title I’m making up), where they get to solve tomorrow’s problems, today (or other trendy tech catchphrase).  Hence my solid belief that they are, and always will be, cooler than me. 

What I’m getting at here, in typical roundabout fashion, is that although I outwardly look down on their kind, in the end, specifically with these people, I actually admire them.  That’s somewhat painful to admit, but it’s true.  And this weekend, I will do my best to become one of them. 

This will be an enormous step for me, but I don’t see that I have any choice.  And not because I fear their judgment; they could have judged me for the three years they knew me in college before I had ever had a drink.  They could have judged me when I did the optional assignment or mentioned how I went to Sati’s for an hour on Saturday night while they were swapping weekend battle stories.  And maybe they did, but they were good enough not to show it.

No, I have to do this for me.  So that I can have a good time this weekend without thinking, “Man, I just want to be poolside and reading,” or, “I wonder how long I can keep $100 alive at $5 blackjack.”  And more importantly, because I’m a 26-year old man, and it’s long past time to do stupid things while I still can.

So this weekend, rather than standing in the pool, disdaining them from afar, I will join their kind.  I will ooze the confidence of those who know that nothing they do at that moment matters, because there is always tomorrow.  I will stand in line for SPLOOSHCLUB and make fun of the nerds reading by the pool.  If the sun is out, my guns will be out.  I will gel my hair and wear button downs at night clubs and go to “concerts” for DJs whose name are unpronounceable strings of consonants, and I will enjoy it.  No – I will crush it.

And when this weekend is done, I’ll never do it again.

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Addendum: 

It would be wrong to describe the weekend as an unmitigated disaster.  More like… a mitigated disaster, I guess?

I’m now sitting in McCarran International Airport in sunny Las Vegas.  I was supposed to take the 1:00 flight out — I ditched the party early in the hopes that I could avoid taking the red eye like everyone else — but my flight has been delayed by seven and a half hours while we wait for a plane that isn’t experiencing technical difficulties, and now I’m getting in at 4:30 in the morning.  Guess whose eyes will be red!  It’s my eyes.

Luckily, McCarran has free wifi (hooray!), so I’m able to write this addendum and hopefully post the whole thing before I get home.  Apologies if it makes no sense; I haven’t slept in 4 days.

To give you an idea of the disasters faced, in no particular order, I spent ten hours overnight in the hospital, the bride’s brother was roofied and mugged, everyone saw the groom’s ass, and we went to a Deadmau5 concert (it’s pronounced “dead mouse,” not “deadmow-five”).  We lost the groom one night.  We drank directly from bottles.  It rained.  One of the guys would shout his own name as a sort of animalistic warning to potential rivals and said “Damn, you look good!” every time he looked in a mirror.  In short, disaster.

And yet, notwithstanding all of those things, I had a great time.  (That’s not true, I also enjoyed the enormously vain dude, he is hilarious.  I don’t think he appreciated my near-constant judgment, though.)  It was really interesting to see that side of Vegas, which is definitely the side of Vegas that most people apparently come to see.  I didn’t do great at being a total bro, but at the same time I didn’t do terribly (I don’t even think that I was the least competent bro there).  I had always assumed it involves a lot of just drunkenly grinding up on girls, but it turns out it really involves just having yelled conversations above the music to meet new people, then using the music as an excuse to make your move and grind up on them.  Since my biggest problem is making moves, I can kinda see how this could help me out.  Unfortunately, in this context my biggest problem turns into being totally unable to hear anything or anyone except the music, so unless I learn to read lips, I don’t see how I would ever be able to succeed.  Of course, even among the group, there was a huge variation in success — some people were really good at meeting new people; meanwhile, the groom got propositioned by a bachelorette, which was … weird, to say the least.  (Also, I should note, he is the best wing man, probably because he’s not worried about going home with anyone himself.)

I also learned that apparently one of the biggest draws of Vegas is actually the day clubs — these are usually the pool clubs I mentioned above.  In the words of one of the girls I met, everywhere has night clubs; that’s nothing new.  Day clubs, on the other hand, are unique to Vegas.  And they’re exactly what they sound like — clubs that are open during the day.  It just happens that (especially in April), the weather is fantastic during the day, so a lot of them are outside / in and around pools (and get converted into outdoor nightclubs, where they typically cover up the pool).  They then stuff as many people in as they can, get a famous DJ to come by, and pump up the volume as loud as they can.  It ends up being kinda fun, or at least I can totally understand the appeal.  Although, to be fair, I think it varies wildly — mad props to the guys who planned this whole thing for picking really good clubs, both night and day.

On the other hand, this trip was the most expensive I’ve taken to Vegas, and that includes two 2-bedroom suites twice the size of my apartment back home.  I had always assumed that Vegas made its money on the casino floor; this is why there’s free drinks there, to entice people to just feed money into the system.  On the contrary, it turns out they make all of their money on booze in clubs.  At one of the day clubs we went to, we paid $12 for Coronas.  In cans.  Each.  You can buy a case of Corona for that much in most states.  Literally, the hotel minibar, the undisputed King of Rip-offs, was cheaper than this.  By 50%.  We did bottle service in one of the night clubs one night; this service is specifically designed to suck money out of you.  You can’t sit down anywhere unless you get bottle service, because all of the tables are reserved; the cheapest bottle available is about $500, and there’s a two bottle minimum.  We ended up getting three, because they give your little table its own velvet rope and bouncer, who goes out into the crowd and invites women to your section (it turns out they tend to be prostitutes; they give him a kickback if he gets them business). You end up giving away almost all of your booze in free drinks to other people, and once you’re out of booze there’s no reason for people to visit your section, so you basically can’t let that happen. We bought two bottles of Jamieson and a bottle of Absolut and wound up spending over $2000.  I don’t know what the total damage ended up being, but I’d guess it was at least double what I’ve paid the other times I’ve been, and it should be noted that I actually went slightly up on the house during the half-hour that I spent playing blackjack.

All-in-all, I had a great time; I really enjoyed hanging out with everyone, even the two new guys (I was wrong about the friend from high school, he was actually the bride’s cousin; the brother ended up staying with me at the hospital — that will be the subject of my next post).  It’s not how I would personally choose to do Vegas, but I knew it wouldn’t be going in; in the end it was exactly what I expected it to be: a chance to branch out and do something I would never normally do, in a way that I probably won’t ever do again.  And in that way, it was an unmitigated success.

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I also live-blogged my experience on Twitter.  It ranges from desperately boring to mildly humorous.  I tweet @Carscafmoo

 

I should preface this story by saying that most people already know it — it’s not a current event, it’s not something I’m about to do, it’s not a thing that’s weighing on my mind or that I have unsupported opinions about or that I found out about last week and skimmed some internet articles and then rambled some incoherent thoughts about to the internet (and yes, I used “ramble” as a transitive verb — expert ramblers are allowed to do that).  It happened to me about a year ago.  It is, however, 100% true — I am not making any of this up.  And because one day I will be old and gray, and The Disease will have rotted away my brains and I will no longer remember the story as my own, I find it necessary to gift this story to the internet, such that old, gray, brain-rotten me will be able to read it and laugh at the moron who wrote it, so many years before.

The story begins, as all great stories do, with a bump in the night.  Specifically, with a bump on my head — or maybe I just thought it was a bump on my head?  In any event, I woke up in the morning and the crown of my head hurt something fierce, and there was a lump; my explanation for this being that I must have hit the corner of my headboard while I was sleeping.  Maybe a bad dream?

Whatever the cause, I didn’t think much of it until the next day, when it somehow hurt worse than the day before and had mysteriously begun itching.  OK, so I serially hit my head on the headboard, and maybe there’s a scab, and those can be itchy I guess?  Totally explicable.  Nothin’ to see here.

On day 3 I had my roommate inspect my scalp.  It was weird; this is not a thing roommates should do for one another.  “It looks… red?  And maybe inflamed?” he said.  But no scab — no obvious wound of any sort, really.  Thanks, roommate — I owe you one scalp inspection.

Day 5, a Saturday, found the pain in my head subsiding a bit, but the redness and inflamedness spreading from the crown of my head linearly to just below my hairline; it looked like I had two or three bug bites, or maybe some sort of splotchy rash.  It wasn’t a good look, but it didn’t appear contagious.  It was moderately painful, but mostly in an itchy way, like chicken pox, where the pain comes from the tightness of the skin.  Also, from nerve damage, but we’ll get to that later.

At the behest of a tennis partner (I played tennis once.  Literally, once), I found myself that day at the Urgent Care center a few miles from where I live (actually, down the street from where we had lunch after tennis).  My roommate had driven us to play tennis, so he was kind enough to go with me so he could drive me back home.  This factoid will come up later, so tuck it away somewhere special where it’ll be safe.  Anyway, suffice it to say that I didn’t yet know the one cardinal rule of healthcare: don’t go to urgent care.

I checked in with the front desk attendant, filled out some paperwork indicating I was in for “possible rash, possible insect bites,” and was told they’d get to me eventually.  I fretted about what to do if I had some sort of disgusting pillow infestation.  I’d probably have to incinerate my pillow, like the Velveteen Rabbit; this brought me much sadness, because I love my pillow.  It’s very soft, and I have trouble finding others like it.

In any event, eventually they got around to me, and I left roomie sitting boredly in the waiting room (thanks, roomie!).  They took me to the back where a nurse asked me what I was in for (“possible rash, possible insect bites”), inspected me (“looks like you have some sort of rash, or possibly insect bites”) and told me to sit tight until the doctor came by.  Sit tight I did, for about five minutes, before in walked a man about twice my age who looked at me and said…

“I know exactly what that is.”

And at this point in the story, that is either a really bad thing or a really good thing — it’s either, “Ah yes, you have a case of the incurable face-eating disease that’s been going around!  We’ll have to purge you and everyone you’ve come into contact with for the last year, for the greater good!  Come with me to the incineration chamber!” or it could be, “You’re allergic to your shampoo.”  And there’s probably not a whole lot of middle ground here.

He put on rubber gloves and examined my scalp (two scalp exams in one week! Best week ever!), all the while murmuring confirmation that he did in fact know what it is.  Then he asked me a series of targeted questions:

“What do you do for a living?” Energy trader. “Sounds stressful!”  Indeed it is.   “So what’s that like?  In to work at 6, work til midnight, do it again?”  It’s more like … 10-7 for most people.  I tend to get in by 8, though?  “Hmmm.”

“And your sexual partners are…?”  (He did not finish the question.  He literally just left it open.  I stared blankly at him, but in my mind I thought, …really attractive…?)  “…Male…?  Or female?”  He sure left a lot of time after male… Uh… female.  “Mhm.”  (He looked doubtful.  Meanwhile my roommate was waiting for me in the lobby…)

“And when you have sex with these…” (he looks at his chart) ” … females…, you use a condom… sometimes?  Never?” Thank God, options!  Uhhh sometimes, I guess?  “Wrong answer!  I tricked you!  The correct answer was ‘Always.'” Thank you for tricking me while asking questions about my health.  

“And how many sexual partners have you had?” Oh balls is it X or Y?  Y.  Er… X?  It’s either X or Y.  It’s not like I don’t remember it’s just … like I knew all of them?  Like their names?  No strangers?  Pretty sure it’s X.  This is going poorly.  I did not expect this line of questioning for my possible head rash or possible spider bites.

“OK, well the reason I ask is that …” (drumroll) “… you have shingles.”

“Do you know what shingles is?”

I knew what shingles was — or at least most of it.  I thought it was when old people get chicken pox and it’s like way worse than when people get it as a kid — and that’s part of it.  But it turns out that if you had chicken pox as a kid, the virus just hangs out in your nerves, and your immune system just sorta keeps it from expressing itself; every time it makes a break for it, a typical human immune system will contain it.

“But here’s the thing,” patiently explained the kind doctor who was so recently inquiring about my sexual tendencies, “in people whose immune systems are compromised, the virus can express itself, and when it does it follows the patterns of nerves that are close to the skin; this means the rash usually expresses linearly, and doesn’t cross the center line of the body.  That’s how I knew you had shingles!”  That’s actually kinda cool.  “The reason it manifests so often in the elderly is because they tend to have weak immune systems.  However, it does occasionally manifest in people under 50, and when it does it can sometimes be related to stress.”  Ah, hence the questions about my work.  “However, it most often arises in AIDS patients, or patients who are HIV positive, so we’re going to go ahead and get you tested.”  Ah, hence the sexual history.  Wait… MOST OFTEN?

And here is the part of the story where I, like an utter fool, think Oh great, this will all be cleared up when the results come back negative, because in college they had those tests that took like 5 minutes.  I think it was a cheek swab.  And what I say to him is, “OK, that’s fine — it’s just a cheek swab, right?”

And what he says to me (and I cannot stress enough that I am not making this up) is, “Oh yes, they have those.”  They.  As in not us.  We do not have those.  There are people that have those, and we aren’t those people.  “We should probably get those.  No, we’ll need to draw some blood.”  Hooray!  “We send the samples away; the results typically come back in one to two business days, so you should hear on Tuesday morning.  We’ll call you.”  Woohoo!  “I’ll have the technician come in and then you should be good to go.”

And then, as he turned to leave, he stopped.  “Let me ask you this,” he started.  I didn’t really have an option; he wasn’t actually asking permission, it turned out.  He kept going, “Do you think because you’re straight, you can’t get AIDS?”

No, I thought, it’s not 1986 anymore.  I think because the people I have sex with DON’T have AIDS that I WON’T get AIDS.  I’m a rational, educated human.  But what I said was, “No.”  To which he responded, “Good — because you can.”  And with that he was gone.

Before I tell you the rest of the story about how I totally don’t have AIDS and am, in fact, certifiably 100% HIV-free, I should tell you that the person who has the single worst job in the world is the guy who draws blood for AIDS tests.  He knows what he’s there for.  He knows why your blood needs drawing.  And he has to handle a pointy object coated in your probably-tainted blood, an object that is just so pointy because it is specifically designed to pierce skin — you know skin, that protective layer around your body that keeps other people’s HIV-ridden blood out of yours?  Yeah, that’s useless against the tainted needle that he’s paid to touch that could go off for like… no reason.

Anyways, back to the story — here’s a tip for all of you future doctors out there.  I dunno if they have a class in bedside manner, but if they do I think probably the first thing they tell you is not to diagnose people with incurable, life-changing diseases before you run the tests.  Pay attention to this class.  Because, assuming that stress can destroy one’s immune system and cause one to, say, develop a case of shingles, do you know what’s really stressful?  It turns out that thinking you have AIDS is really stressful!  And that does not help the shingles.

The rest of Saturday and all of Sunday were spent playing it super cool.  I met some friends in the city: “How was your day?  That’s cool.  I found out I might have AIDS!  Who wants a drink?”  “Hey roommate, remember that time you inspected my scalp?  Turns out I might have AIDS!  Haha!  I probably don’t, y’know?”

By Monday I had stopped mentioning it at all.  I had also stopped talking to my then-long distance pseudogirlfriend, just to make it that much easier for her to hate me if I had to explain to her that it just might be in her interest to get tested.  No not for that, for HIV.  Yes, that HIV.

By Monday night I couldn’t sleep.

I was lucky, because the way to work on Tuesday was full of traffic, which meant I never got going fast enough for my mind wandering or my phone checking to get me in real trouble.  Tuesday morning at work was a waste — they could call at any minute!  No, they should call at any minute… Why haven’t they called?

At noon I resolved to go to the gym like any other day (If I have AIDS will they let me in the gym?  Can you get AIDS from someone’s sweat?)  When I got back, still no call, so I called them — yes my test results were in, no they couldn’t be shared over the phone. They said they’d call.  They didn’t call.  They can’t share the results over the phone, but who would care if I didn’t have AIDS?  I’m sure they could share that!  They’d leave the results for me at the front desk, and I could come in and pick them up whenever I wanted.

By 6 o’clock, I was literally shaking; I hadn’t done any work all day, and I gave up on it.  At 630, I walked through the doors of the urgent care center.  I inquired calmly and nonchalantly about some test results (“Totally not for AIDS, it’s a paternity thing.  I’m super virile.”), and the front desk attendant picked up a stack of envelopes, on the topmost of which was clearly written, in all capital letters, in what appeared to be marker, my name.  She asked me what my name was, and I read it off the envelope to her.

I know what you are thinking right now, and no, I did not have to show identification.  For someone who was willing to answer security questions on the phone in order to hear his test results but was unable to do so for “security purposes,” I found this total lack of security quite disturbing.  I didn’t have time to take offense at that until later, though, because I was still preoccupied with the mind-blowing anxiety of the test results, which were now sitting, wrapped, in my hand.  I calmly proceeded to my car, where I frantically tore open the envelope and saw the following phrase: “reactive in the negative threshold.”

“Reactive?” That’s bad!  “Negative?” That’s good!  By this point I had broken out in stress hives.  I was developing itchy blotches, and I was about two breaths per minute away from hyperventilating.

In the end it turns out that everyone reacts to the test, and there’s some threshold of reactivity (typically reactivity of 1, whatever that means) under which you’re like pretty much guaranteed to not have HIV — I had to look it up, and the best results came from Yahoo answers.  (Here’s a fun fact: do you know who needs to know how to interpret the results of their HIV tests?  People who use Yahoo answers.  Also, me.)  Then there’s a threshold in which you like maybe need to get another test done (1 < reactivity < ~10), and then above that you like pretty certainly have it.  I was well under the “you totally don’t have HIV” threshold.  But I was incredibly stressed out.

And in talking to people, it sounds like everyone knows someone under 50 who got shingles because they were stressed out.  It turns out it’s pretty common.  But I looked up the doctor afterwards, and I think I understand where he was coming from:

Actually, he was an AIDS specialist who earned his medical degree in the mid-’80s and spent the next 10 years on the front lines in the fight against an epidemic that we didn’t understand.  I’m sure that in his experience, most 25 year olds who present with shingles do have HIV.  I just wasn’t one of them.

In any event, as a fun coda to this story, that Friday night, about 8 o’clock, I got a call from an unknown number, so I let it go to voicemail.  I checked the voicemail, and (and again, I cannot stress how not making this up I am), it was the doctor.  He called to tell me the results of my tests.  Turns out everything was fine, it was probably just stress.

Welcome to week three of my three-week series tangentially related to addiction!  (You can find week one here, but it’s probably best to ignore week 2 altogether).  As promised, this week I’ll be talking about my personal motivation for the series (besides obviously educating everyone about delicious heroin, which is its own justification).  As I’ve beaten past the point of death (and will continue beating, thank you very much!), I’m a firm believer that, even if I’ll never be the person I aspire to be, I can at least force myself to be a crude approximation thereof through a combination of PEDs, successive gender reassignment surgeries, and sheer willpower — which is the reason I do stupid things like rigorously adhere to New Year’s resolutions and give things up for Lent, despite a no active belief in a God who cares, which teeters dangerously toward an active belief in no God who cares.

So this week we’ll discuss why I gave up drinking for 40(+) days and why I’ll be returning thereto once those days are up.

The Problem

I didn’t drink alcohol until I turned 21, like a good little boy.  (I had maybe 2.5 beers over the year I was 20, and I don’t think I finished a single one.  They were all Corona Light.  That may have had something to do with it.)  The night of my 21st birthday (which, thank the ambivalent God, fell on a Friday) was A Story that may need to be told later, but was my first real interaction with the delicious intoxicant; it was enough of an encounter that for years I shied away from beer and generally drank only on weekends and holidays, and at those typically not overly much; for the most part, unless I had a reason to be drinking, I wouldn’t really drink.

Sometime early last year, though, at a time of great tumult in my life, I started occasionally drinking wine with dinner.  Then I developed a taste for scotch, and I got really into IPAs.  Then I started to leave work earlier with the specific intention of having wine with dinner.  (The leaving work earlier thing was fine — I generally stayed too late before that; it’s the specific intention thing here that is concerning.)  Then I went the entire month of October and had at least one drink every day; then my roommate gave up drinking for a month so during that month I decided I would “drink for two.”  Through January and February of this year, I probably drank on average 2.5 drinks per day; on a median day that was probably a half bottle of wine (roughly 3 of your standard Earth drinks), but it varied a fair bit.

I should point out that 2.5 drinks per day is not the end of the world, and it’s not like I was getting drunk most nights.  I would have two or three glasses of wine over the span of two or three hours, or I would have a glass of scotch after dinner.  I generally wasn’t waking up hungover, I generally wasn’t drinking during the day, and you’ll notice that I didn’t say “I wasn’t sober the entire month of October,” rather, I just had at least a drink every night, and for the most part it was one or two — this is the reason I wouldn’t refer to my time not drinking as “sober,” because I was sober most of the time when I was drinking.  I should also point out that when my roommate gave up drinking, I had already decided to give it up for Lent, so it was sort of a “better do this now while I still can” thing rather than anything else.  (Also, the title of this post comes from his experience during that time, not my own.)

Still, it was pretty clear that I was drinking more than was healthy — a glass of wine a day may be good for you, but drinking a bottle on your couch alone at midnight on a Tuesday is liver failure waiting to happen.  Beyond that, I had three immediate concerns about my alcohol use: alcohol inhibits restful sleep (and I love restful sleep); three glasses of red wine or two beers comes out to almost 500 unnecessary calories a night (and I’m overweight — not cripplingly, and perhaps un-noticeably while clothed, but overweight I am — by about 15 pounds); and alcohol negatively affects athletic performance (and, presumably, other performance as well).  It seemed like the math was out of my favor, so I figured I’d keep track of some of this once I quit drinking and I’d see how it all stacked up.

How It All Stacked Up

So — how did it all stack up?  I’ve compared the last 39 days (March 5 – April 12, inclusive) with the 39 days prior to Lent (January 25 – March 4, inclusive), and I’m pretty surprised at the results.

Sleep

Admittedly, there are several factors at play here besides alcohol, and these data don’t measure the restfulness of the sleep at all; furthermore, the sleep is self-reported, it’s not like I’m hooked up to an EEG.  Still, if you assume that the human errors in reporting are independent of alcohol consumption (always a great assumption) and that external factors are randomly distributed through the 78 days in question, the data suggest that I did not sleep more during Lent than before it:

In addition to the T-Test values indicating that I haven’t gotten higher average sleep since Lent began (p-value is just above .1 for the opposite, so I won’t claim that’s a win for drinking), the shapes of the distributions are clearly meaningfully different; I was apparently more likely to get eight or nine hours of sleep while I was drinking that I have been since I stopped.

Anecdotally, this is explainable by two factors: the first is drinking related, which is that in the first two or three weeks that I wasn’t drinking, I had a lot of trouble falling asleep, which I think is directly related to having given up drinking.  The second factor is that in the last two or three weeks sunrise has just gotten to the point where it’s happening before my alarms goes off, so I’m waking up a bit earlier.

Still, the data suggest that my sleep while I was drinking is at worst no worse than my sleep while not drinking, and even if it’s not statistically significant, this suggests that my sleep might be better when I drink. I can’t award a full win to drinking, but it seems better than a tie.  Score: Drinking: .5, Not Drinking: 0.

Weight

I weigh myself at irregular intervals, usually in the morning, but sometimes during the day or at night; again, there’s mitigating factors here, but if we assume these factors are uniformly randomly distributed through the last 78 days, we should be able to draw conclusions from the data.  I had expected to lose a lot of weight while not drinking — somewhere on the order of a pound a week (500 unnecessary calories * 7 days / week = 3500 calories / week; 3500 calories = 1 lb of fat).  What happened instead was that I apparently gained weight:

I should add that I know a lot about day-to-day fluctuations and the like, having had to lose tens of pounds in days, but the repeated observations (n>=12) plus the stark difference in means allows us to draw meaningful conclusions from the data.  If you’re losing weight generally, you may gain weight from one day to the next, but on average over six weeks you’ll weigh less than you did before.  The message here is that I’m not losing any weight.

However, weight isn’t the only aspect we care about — it’s possible to lose fat and gain weight, by putting on muscle (which could be related to hypothesis #3).  I have a body fat-measuring scale, and I record that information too:

There’s not really any meaningful change here pre – vs. post-Lent, which means the weight I gained, inasmuch as it could have affected my bodyfat percentage, didn’t, so I probably gained lean / fat weight roughly in proportion to my pre-Lent lean / fat weight.

A couple of interesting anecdotal points here: I substituted soda for alcohol in some cases; I don’t drink soda very much, but especially in the first few weeks of Lent I would have a Coke when friends were drinking or a soda with dinner; that may have helped to offset the gains from not drinking.  However, I still think I drank fewer calories in soda than I would have alcohol; I think the key takeaway here is that my diet, irrespective of my drinking, needs to change in order for me to actually lose weight.

I don’t count the two pounds I gained as a win for drinking given the variety of other factors affecting the outcome here; instead, I count this as a huge loss for not drinking, since I was expecting it would make a huge difference here and didn’t.  Not Drinking, I’m disappointed in you.  I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.  Score: Drinking: .5, Not Drinking: 0

 Performance

I religiously record my workouts; how long they take, how far I go, etc.  What I should have done was re-trace my workouts from the six weeks prior to Lent and compare them to those same workouts during Lent.  What I did do was nothing.  I worked out five times a week, and some of the workouts were identical to workouts I did pre-Lent, but not meaningfully many.  Instead, this category is entirely subjective.

What I expected to happen was that I would feel like superman.  I would be able to lift twice as much weight and run twice as far, twice as fast.  I would be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning, and I would work into the later hours of the night, producing at the level of twelve men.  I would never be tired or achy or sore; I would have a positive outlook on life.

What happened was nothing changed; I had good days and bad days, days where I did the same workout I did last week and it took me longer, and days where I went farther or it seemed easier than it had before.  I stayed late a few nights, but that was generally because I had to, not because I wanted to get anything done.  I could still pinpoint the exact moment I ceased being productive every day.  I was still tired and achy and sore; what I had thought was a series of extremely mild hangovers had in fact turned out to be the hammer blow of Life calling every morning, demanding I get up and get out of bed, rather than self-inflicted wounds from last night’s fun.  This made my outlook on life decidedly more negative.

This category was basically a wash.  Score: Drinking: .5, Not Drinking: 0.

Conclusion

Drinking wins, but by less than a point.  The real conclusion here is that Not Drinking doesn’t win.  Of course, that’s only in the context of the hypotheses I had going into Lent; there are a couple additional takeaways that shift the math into favor of giving up this experiment once Lent is done.  (Actually, I’ll be giving it up before Lent is done; apparently the “Sundays don’t count” rule is true; the 40 days of Lent do not include Sundays, although I did not drink on Sundays, so technically my 40th day ends tomorrow night at midnight rather than Easter morning at midnight.  To that end, I’ll be drinking again happily on Good Friday — more than 40 days, but not quite to Easter).

The first takeaway is that I enjoy drinking; I made steak one night during Lent, and I prefer to eat steak with a glass of wine.  I enjoy drinking with my friends (and I found I really don’t enjoy not drinking while my friends are drinking).  It also helps me unwind — call it self-medication if you like; that’s basically what it is (and this harkens back to the premise of the psychodynamic model from the first addiction post).  I’m fine with that, as long as it doesn’t become a problem.  What I was really worried about was that it was a problem — that I wouldn’t be able to do it, that I would have intense cravings, that it was negatively impacting my life.  I’ve already shown that it wasn’t really negatively impacting my life (at least not in the ways I thought), and while I frequently saw people drinking and thought “wouldn’t that be nice?” I never had true cravings. (And I know cravings — having counted down every day for four months until wrestling season ended and I could go to the grocery store and buy everything on a 40-item list and eat them all in one day, I know cravings.  Right now I have Sweetwater on my grocery list, and that’s just because we ran out before I stopped drinking.)

The second factor is that it’s surprisingly inconvenient to not drink.  You are always DD, which is great, because at least someone is doing it, except that now you have to hang out with drunk people because you have to get them home, and you’re not having nearly as much fun as they are, but you can’t leave.  It’s also really awkward to have to tell people you’re not drinking, because it’s immediately inferred that you have A Problem, and people get really tip-toey about it, like you’re going to judge them for drinking.  I at least had the Lent excuse, which of course implied that I’m some sort of religious zealot … try dropping that one on a first date.  Oh, and by the way, “going out for drinks” is now off the table; if you want to go on a date it’s either dinner or coffee (not that there’s anything wrong with coffee, but I can’t do it except on weekends).

Finally, if you accept the premise that drinking can be a responsible avenue for self-medication, man did I pick the wrong week to quit drinking.

Since I’ve given up drinking, I’ve been confronted with what amount to fairly minor inconveniences: a team dinner where the cocktail menu featured something called “We Made a Blue Drink!” (I love blue drinks) and a cocktail featuring — and I am not making this up — “meat ice,” which is exactly what it sounds like.  I’ve been confronted with social engagements made awkward by my lack of drinking: the team dinner, three dates, and an out-of-town wedding.  Duke has lost three times; twice in soul-crushing fashion, once to Wake Forest of all teams, and once in the first round of the NCAA tournament.  Brian McCann is playing for the Yankees, and the Braves lit the American flag on fire.  And to top it all off, my company laid off 20% of its work force, and as an elected pseudoliaison between management and the proletariat, I have had a front row ticket to management’s We Don’t Care About You Show, plus the distinct pleasure of relaying that message to my friends and colleagues.

In short — man, I could use a drink.

Welcome to part 2 of my collection of largely uninformed thoughts on addiction!  Anyone who missed it can find Part 1 here — it’s a poorly-thought-out mess, just like everything else on here.  Enjoy!  This weekend’s post will be somewhat shorter (for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I don’t have a lot to say — not that that’s stopped me from writing too much before).  It’s a random collection of unsupported facts and thoughts about one of the most addictive substance known to man: heroin.  Also enjoy!

I was a resident assistant in college, and man did I see a lot of heroin use.  No!  That’s crazy.  Instead, I took part in mandatory training sessions about the hip new trends in college-aged kids: stress (as managed through alcohol abuse), sex (as effected through alcohol abuse), suicide (through alcohol abuse), and alcohol abuse.  Through this rigorous training, I gained a deep and fundamental understanding for just how much college students like abuse alcohol.  Spoiler alert: it’s a lot.

However, one of the presenters during training struck a chord with me (it was actually the training on rote alcohol abuse) — a guy named Wilkie Wilson who professes Prevention Science (whatever that is?) and has a PhD in pharmacology.  Not only was he a Pretty Cool Dude (and as a PCD myself I’m an authority on the subject), but he seemed to have a pretty good handle on why people were using (or abusing) various substances, and he presented us a different picture than the one that I had heard a thousand times in training, which was basically “college kids like to drink, it’s our job to stop them from drinking [at all  | too much].”  Instead, he focused on the dangers of alcohol in particular and sort of left it up to us to decide what constituted risky behavior. (Ed. note: Honestly I don’t remember a whole ton about this training, other than that it was interesting and he was a Pretty Cool Dude.)

At the end he plugged a book of his that went into the details of the pharmacological effects of a bunch of heavily-abused drugs called Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy (ignore the fact that it should be called “The Straight Dope About…”).  His talk provided an interesting enough perspective that I decided to pick it up.  Interestingly, the key takeaway that I got from it was that drugs aren’t as terrifying as they seem, that alcohol is more dangerous than it seems, and that heroin in particular isn’t so bad … sorta.  And that’s the one that’s stuck with me, because heroin is always used as the example of the most dangerous drug.  At this point in my life, I know a lot of people who have done ecstasy or smoked pot or even done cocaine — I know no one who has even thought about doing heroin for that reason.  With that in mind, here’s a list of crazy things you probably didn’t know about heroin!

Heroin: Safe Drug? Or the Safest Drug?

This is the most interesting thing about heroin to me.  You know that scene in Pulp Fiction where they Uma Thurman accidentally snorts a line of heroin thinking it’s cocaine and overdoses and they have to go to the dealer’s place and she gets stabbed in the heart by the world’s largest needle to give her a shot of adrenaline?

I always assumed that was a bit of creative license.  And guess what!  I was right.  You can’t reverse a heroin overdose with adrenaline.  You can reverse heroin with naloxone.  Immediately.  As long as the heart is still beating, it has close to a 100% success rate.  To paraphrase the book, doing heroin (or other opiates) in a hospital is probably actually safer than doing most non-opiate prescription drugs (in or out of hospitals), since those can’t be immediately reversed.

Granted, most people aren’t carrying around a whole bunch of insta-revival juice, and even if they are the people they’re doing heroin with aren’t usually in a state to revive them, since they’re … on heroin.  However, heroin has another property going for it — no long-lasting effects.  Whereas prolonged cocaine use can cause psychosis (and something called “swiss cheese brain,” which is where you basically lose blood flow to parts of your brain through a series of tiny strokes so it looks like swiss cheese when they do brain scans), if you quit heroin the only thing you’re left with is a crippling longing for more heroin, an inability to medically manage pain, and something I like to call “swiss cheese relationships,” where your heroin addiction has carved holes into all of the relationships you used to have and you’re left with a path of destruction in your wake. But medically it’ll be mostly like you never abused heroin at all!

Heroin can be snorted

I always thought you could only inject heroin, and a key component of the Pulp Fiction thing was that she had snorted it, which I assumed meant instant overdose.  But it turns out that’s not true — most people start heroin by snorting and move on to injecting only after they’ve gotten bored with snorting.  (In Red Hot Chili Peppers lead singer Anthony Kiedis’s autobiography Scar Tissue, he describes his first experience with heroin as mistaking it for cocaine.  Spoiler alert: he didn’t die.)  Who knew?

There is a crazy problem with heroin in America right now

Thanks largely to readily-available and easy-to-abuse (not to mention incredibly addictive) opiate painkillers, the US has experienced an incredible uptick of opiate addiction — and thanks to an increase in the price of those painkillers and a market flood of heroin driving prices well below those of the prescription opiates, the US is experiencing a record heroin problem, even outside of urban centers in suburban and rural America.  This was highlighted recently by the death of famed actor and heroin addict Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died with seventy bags of heroin around him.  When I heard this I immediately thought, “Certainly this is an amount of heroin no mortal human could hope to afford! You’d have to be a rich and famous movie star to get 70 bags of heroin!”  I was wrong — a bag of heroin is roughly a dose* and goes for about $10 on the street now, so that was like … $700 worth of heroin.  That’s surprisingly affordable for the average suburbanite junkie.  And that’s crazy.

Conclusion

This was just a couple things I found out about heroin that were interesting to me as someone who has seen literally zero heroin in his lifetime.  These are presented as interesting facts (in particular the “safety” section) and in no way are meant to condone heroin use.  Don’t use heroin.

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*I googled this on my work computer.  It was almost certainly a mistake.

 

This week begins a 3-week series of posts about addiction, the driver of which will be made relatively clear in the third week. The series starts this week with a brief discussion of addiction models, and how empirical evidence and recent scientific study suggests that those models have been misrepresented or misunderstood by the masses and experts alike.  In short, I’m going to totally defend my heroin habit.  Just kidding!  That’s next week’s post.

Before we begin, we should discuss what characterizes “addiction.”  The layperson would probably describe addiction in terms of physical dependence — if a user stops using something and experiences withdrawal symptoms, they are physically dependent.  Alternatively, a compulsion — a total lack of control, indicating a psychological dependence — in relation to a substance or activity would indicate an addiction; the inability to not smoke for 24 hours, or even anxiety at such a possibility.  (Interestingly, the time limit seems to matter — if I told most readers they’d be unable to drink for an entire year, they’d probably experience some anxiety, though this wouldn’t be construed as addictive behavior by most people, whereas anxiety at the thought of a day or maybe even a week alcohol-free would.) The standard definition goes a bit beyond this and mentions that it is the persistent nature of these behaviors despite adverse consequences that characterizes the addiction (you can be addicted to sniffing glue, but you can’t be addicted to breathing), but the idea is generally there: physical or psychological dependence on something despite negative consequences.

In any event, we’ll start with the model that was presented to my generation in grade school.  It went something like this: “If you take any addictive substance even one time, you will be hooked for life, and you will die.”  This model bred some of the absolute greatest anti-drug PSAs of all time, including my personal favorite:

Now, before you call me out on this (too late?), this PSA doesn’t really discuss addiction in any way, but it does give you the “just one hit can kill you” message in spectacular fashion, and you’ll notice the ad presents his friend in the addict role — someone who justifies his habit as harmless in the face of reasonable protest, who presumably started out with a very similar “just one hit.”  Jesus people, do I have to walk you through everything?  It’s called subtext — heard of it?

Also, if you look closely you can see that the kid who ultimately blows his head off was clearly already high as a kite at the beginning of the PSA.  I don’t know what that’s supposed to signify other than “we only had enough budget to do his makeup once.”  Also, who smokes weed in their dad’s office?

In any event, everyone knows this model is totally bogus — who amongst us hasn’t had, like, a single drink and then stopped drinking?  Who doesn’t know someone who smokes cigarettes or cigars sometimes on the weekend?  Who amongst us doesn’t know someone (living on Colorado, obviously) who used to smoke those jazz cigarettes from time to time in college?  And for the most part, most of us don’t really know a bunch of alcoholics or chain smokers or reefer madmen.  People continue to function even in the context of occasional use of highly addictive substances, but we simplify the message to children because it’s hard for them to understand the concept of a gradual slide into oblivion, so we say “just once is enough to get you hooked,” and we let them figure it out as they get older.

Of course, my statement above completely ignores the common knowledge that some drugs are more addictive or dangerous than others.  Science has classified drugs as more or less addictive, and even put together this sweet chart about how likely you are to keep doing them for the rest of your life and how short you can expect that life to be (more addictive, more dangerous substances show up on the top right, less addictive, less dangerous on the bottom left; the X-axis describes how much it takes to have the intended effect (a “dose”) vs. the amount it would take to kill the average person — basically, how likely you are to accidentally overdose to death, hence danger):

OK so sure, one cigarette isn’t the end of the world, but what about one heroin cigarette?  The kind of cigarette that comes from a needle?

Everyone knows heroin is basically the most addictive substance on earth, so one … dose?  hit?  smack? (I’m not down with the hard drug lingo) of that and you’re hooked for life.  Then again, if you look at the chart you’ll notice that, while heroin is indeed the only drug listed at “very high” (hahahahahaha lolz) in its dependence potential,  nicotine is one level down in “high,” along with morphine.  So maybe cigarettes aren’t that safe?

Or maybe the idea that anything can get you hooked in one shot is totally bogus.  I won’t go into too much detail about heroin in particular, but even in the case of the single most addictive drug on the addictive drug chart, it seems like the slide into addiction tends to be something more along the lines of a long, slow slide rather than a single instance ruining the rest of someone’s life.  It goes beyond that, though; there’s also the feeling that long, slow slide is inevitable; maybe you can quit after your first time, and some users do, but maybe it’s your second, or your third, or your tenth that really gets you; maybe it’s when you’ve been using twice a month for a year.  At some point, you’re well-and-truly hooked, right?

At this point, it’s relevant for us to bring up the (adult) models of addiction; in particular, the medical model and the psychodynamic model (although the moral model’s assertion that “Drugs are evil” certainly deserves some commentary).

The medical model is what most people think of when they think of addiction — it’s a disease; it’s not the user’s fault, their brains have been changed and they have a physical dependence on the drug to function normally.  The psychodynamic model is probably what addicts subscribe to right when they start using: the drug is a form of self-medication in reaction to an outside stimulus; when that stimulus resolves, the drug use will be unnecessary, and the user will stop.  The bio-psycho-social model (which basically says “Yeah, all of it’s true, more or less”) would argue that both of these are contributors to addiction, and I think most people would agree with that; after all, how many movies or TV shows show someone getting laid off or divorced (outside stimulus) and hitting the bottle (self-medication), only to do the long, slow slide into a physical and psychological dependence (disease)?  Isn’t that how it works?

I think that in many people, it is — I absolutely do not mean to demean people for whom their addiction is a disease by what I’m about to say (although I’m sure I will anyway).  But I think that the disease model is a convenient thing for users to hide behind; “It’s not my fault, it’s a disease! I can’t help it,” is an easy out for a lot of people, and anyone saying otherwise “just doesn’t understand the disease;” denying the medical model sometimes seems like it gets you the bad rep of denying the holocaust at times.  I also don’t mean to say that the disease model doesn’t provide a framework — and perhaps even a good one — to address these issues; putting the blame entirely on the individual could be counterproductive in any number of ways, and this model provides cover and context for those who legitimately need help while allaying social stigmas that might cause vicious circles.

But let’s address a key tenet in our collective understanding here: that the actions of psychodynamic model necessarily lead to the case described by the medical model.  This theory seems to be pervasive, but it doesn’t always seem to pan out in real life — and the model’s pervasiveness may be detrimental to the addicted population as a whole.  It is unpopular, for instance, to espouse the idea that addicts can be rational actors (i.e., that it’s not a disease beyond their control), in the face of fairly significant evidence.  That last article is actually a NYT article citing a Columbia University study (Columbia — heard of it?) that suggests that crack addicts (crack — heard of it?) display rational behavior.

(For those who did not read it, which I encourage you to do, the study went like this: every day a nurse would give a crack addict a varying amount of delicious crack, and said addict would be given the opportunity to have money added to a fund for their use at the end of the study or more of the same amount of crack.  What the study found was that the more money offered, the less likely addicts were to choose the crack, and the smaller the dose, the more likely they were to choose the money.  The addicts were valuing the crack — even if they were going to ultimately spend the money on crack, if they thought they could get more crack later from the money they were given, they would choose that option.  This flies in the face of the definition above, which states an uncontrollable impulse; the addicts in the study were clearly in control of their impulses.)

The article is interesting to me for two reasons; first, the paper explicitly mentions that “Eighty to 90* percent of people who use crack and methamphetamine don’t get addicted” (Carl Hart, study author) — completely refuting that “one time is all it takes” model.  Of course, we already established that that was bogus, so the second point is more interesting: even in the case of the 10-20% of people who are addicted, Dr. Hart basically espouses the psychodynamic model, that people are using the drugs as a form of self-medication, and that the medical model doesn’t seem to hold, given their rational decisions:

“If you’re living in a poor neighborhood deprived of options, there’s a certain rationality to keep taking a drug that will give you some temporary pleasure,” Dr. Hart said in an interview, arguing that the caricature of enslaved crack addicts comes from a misinterpretation of the famous rat experiments. [Referencing studies suggesting that rats will self-dose well beyond the point of detrimental effects when given the chance.]

“The key factor is the environment, whether you’re talking about humans or rats,” Dr. Hart said. “The rats that keep pressing the lever for cocaine are the ones who are stressed out because they’ve been raised in solitary conditions and have no other options. But when you enrich their environment, and give them access to sweets and let them play with other rats, they stop pressing the lever.” [Referencing this study, which itself is a refutal of previously-mentioned famous rat studies.]

This was particularly interesting to me because it struck a chord with another story I had heard on one of my favorite podcasts, about the fear that American soldiers in Vietnam were abusing heroin and would return home with crippling heroin addictions.  And while heroin use among troops in Vietnam was high, what they found was that even habitual users quit using when they returned home — the elimination of the underlying stimulus for using the drug (in this case, the Vietnam War — heard of it?) eliminated the need for the drug, again lending empirical evidence in a large population to the psychodynamic model:

This just goes to say that there is still a lot of work to be done in understanding the underlying causes of, and treatments for, addiction.  That NYT article quotes Dr. Hart as saying, “Eighty to 90* percent of people are not negatively affected by drugs, but in the scientific literature nearly 100 percent of the reports are negative,” a point which belies the closed-mindedness about drug use and the addiction model in general.  Popular acceptance of the medical model may actually do more harm than good.  Bringing someone out of a toxic environment, getting them clean, and teaching them about how their disease makes them an irrational crack-fiend, then releasing them back into their toxic environment probably isn’t a the best recipe for treatment; neither is excusing people’s behavior as beyond their control.  Rather, treating addicts as rational actors and clarifying the costs and the benefits of their behaviors may be a more suitable path for treatment; by pointing out the negative internalities and externalities of their behavior, those 10-20% of users who are negatively affected may see the math shift out of favor of their behavior.

But the point here goes way beyond this strategy — rather than pointing out that the math is already against them, why not change the equation altogether?  The primary benefit of drug use is an escape from some external stimulus: poor conditions, squalor, lack of education or opportunity, and social inequality.  Eliminate those stimuli, and the benefit of the drug is similarly eliminated, just as it was for the soldiers returning from Vietnam.  In short, the drug epidemic, and perhaps certain cases of all addictions, is a symptom, not a cause, of underlying problems.  Treating the causes rather than the symptoms could go a long way to eliminating the addictions altogether.

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* It’s super weird to me that they say “Eight to 90” rather than “Eighty to ninety” or “80 to 90.”  Anyone else?

I recently joined a book club. I think there’s something wrong with our book club, because instead of doing what normal book clubs do, which as I understand it entails being women over 50, drinking mimosas and bad-mouthing our husbands, we actually read books and then discuss them.  Certainly the discussions get off-topic or only touch tangentially on the books themselves, but at least we get publicly shamed if we haven’t finished the book by the time the meeting rolls around, and the books that we’ve chosen have been fairly high-quality and outside the mainstream — rather than Twilight or The Hunger Games, the club has read House of Leaves, Pulitzer Prize nominee Swamplandia!, and On Such a Full Sea, among others.  Most recently we’ve tackled the David Foster Wallace essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

Now, I’m an intelligent guy; I’m curious, I read nonfiction for fun.  I’m young enough and just-not-quite-jaded enough to subscribe to the view that the world is a wondrous place full of more incredible stuff than I could ever hope to experience, much less truly understand, yet old enough to know that a wealth of forethougt went into the hidden complexity in the subset of things I will experience.  I (obviously) have an inflated sense of self-importance.  I’m in my mid-to-late-20’s.  I have an above-average group-of-words-I-know-the-meaning-of.

In short, I’m in the prime of my hipster years.  And David Foster Wallace is kinda the patron saint of hipsters; the “hipster lit flowchart” literally (ha) starts off with “Have you read Infinite Jest?” (IJ of course being his magnum opus), and this article about his biography from the LA Times, which I self-servingly dug up just to make this point (by googling “David Foster Wallace hipster”), specifically refers to him as a “hipster sage” in the headline (which at the very least means I didn’t have to dig far to prove my point).

Full disclosure, I’m still only about halfway through the essays, but I thoroughly enjoyed the title essay, and the first essay wasn’t that bad either.  (Don’t worry, I was publicly shamed at the last meeting.)  Maybe I’m just not close enough to 30, maybe it’s because I shave my beard (the source of true hipster power), or maybe I’m the vanguard of a new, no-BS literary generation, but I found the second essay, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, borderline unreadable.

I’ve never had a beard, but I rocked a pretty sweet ‘stache and ‘burns combo from ’74-’77

 It wasn’t that I disagreed with (all of) what he was saying — it was that I had a whole lot of trouble figuring out what he was trying to say because it took him 42 pages and 27 uses of the phrase “postmodern” to say it. What I got from it is that TV is a pervasive medium that has altered the way his generation interacts with media, and that it is difficult for his particular literary group to react to this new medium (as literary groups are wont to do with pervasive media), because the standard reaction, which is to ironically parody the medium, is already being done by the medium itself.  That took one sentence.  It was a long sentence — perhaps it even should have been 2 sentences — but it was one sentence.  I did not require 42 pages or any 100-dollar words to make the point.  Admittedly, I’m probably missing a whole lot of the subtlety and context, and perhaps even some of the main concepts, that he so eloquently put forth on (so, so many sheets of) paper, but I’m not sure that the world is poorer for not having read something that was so, in a word, over-written.  His treatment of the material was so far above the material itself, both in terms of length and reading-level, that it did him disservice as an author; at various point he describes Married, with Children (yes, that Married, with Children) as “novel,” “irreverant,” “bitingly witty,” and “the ultimate sitcom parody of sitcoms.”

It was actually somewhat reassuring to see that this problem has been around for so long.  (The essay was written in 1993.)   I had assumed it was a result of the overeducated, underemployed masses practicing the fine art of spewing mindless content into the insatiable gaping maw of the internet, because that’s where I first encountered the phenomenon of overly-written hipster dross — the kind of stuff that’s about nothing, but you just know the author is referring to as a “piece” to his overeducated, underemployed hipster friends.  (To be fair, the author I just linked does not fall into this category, he’s just the first overeducated person I could think of.  I actually really enjoy his work.)  It seemed easy enough to blame this on the oversupply of college graduates with expansive vocabularies and four years honing the luridness of their prose as English majors and time to kill in their parents’ basements after their shift “ironically” making lattes at Starbucks having run out of interesting ideas to write about and deciding to write really, really well about the utterly mundane, but now that I know there’s a Literary System to rail against, I feel a bit more justified, like I’m the harbinger of a new generation of people who just say what they mean and treat the material at the level it deserves to be treated.

I don’t mean to say there’s not a time or a place for this sort of thing; a well-crafted over-writing can be nothing short of hilarious, but it takes an honest effort to get the tone right so that the irony shines through.  Going into exquisite detail about, for instance, one’s balls effectively contrasts the seriousness of the subject (zero) with the earnestness of the treatise on said subject (very).   The key to success in this situation is the irony that is established by the author and recognized by the reader; absent the irony, you end up with an incredibly sad portrait of a guy who buffs his balls “with a hand-held electric orbital polisher.”

And that’s the problem with the overly-written nonsense I see today: it’s written free of irony.  I love my dear brother very much, and he is an excellent writer (much better than I will ever be), but he does himself a disservice by, for example, spending 6 paragraphs denouncing the writing in a review of Fast 6**, including the phrase “erstwhile McCarthys Cormac.”  I won’t even go into this one about Cosmopolis, which has the benefit of being about a pretty artsy movie but the detriment of being about a pretty bad artsy movie that stars Robert Pattinson.  (To be fair to my brother, I found his reviews of World War Z and Taken 2 to be absolutely spot-on with respect to their subjects, and if his review of Lincoln was perhaps a bit hammy, at least it was earnest.)

However, (and I feel bad about saying this because I am not blood related to the author and, to the best of my knowledge, he is still alive,) the absolute, without-a-doubt worst offender in this regard that I have seen has to be an article from The Atlantic called “The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird,”  posted in February (you remember, when Flappy Bird was relevant?).  It literally starts off with “Games are grotesque.”  As an entire paragraph.  ¡Que literary! He then goes on to defend his choice of “grotesque” for games in general with my new favorite sentence, “Games are encounters with squalor,” in which he evokes some sort of alternate definition of “squalor” that has nothing to do with being a dirty, downtrodden, destitute wreck and has everything to do with … that feeling you get when you fix something that should work on its own but isn’t, and it takes, like… way too long?  But you keep going for it?  He then goes on to contextualize the game as part of (or is it not part of?) the “masocore” school of gaming, which he describes as “more of an aesthetic community than it is a material aesthetic,” and goes (further) on to compare said school to “the poetry and painting that emerged from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.”  He’s talking about MegaMan.  This is a game where a robot jumps between platforms and uses his arm, which turns into a totally rad laser gun, to shoot other robots who also have totally rad laser arm guns, so that he can absorb their powers.

He then goes on to who cares what, because he’s been going on for way, way too long, and I’ve lost interest, so I’ve stopped reading.  If you want to make the point that these games fill an unexplored emotional desire to fix broken things, rather than create enjoyment on their own, then say that.  If you want to contextualize Flappy Bird’s design by comparing it to other games and point out the elegance of its design’s simplicity, then do that.  But don’t tell me that it’s “unapologetic—stoic, aloof. Impervious. Like a meteorite that crashed through a desert motel lobby, hot and small and unaware.”  It’s a game about a bird.

As the self-proclaimed leader of this new literary school (more like literary special ed, amiright?), I proclaim it time that we, as a group, stop wasting our time with this overly-written trash.  Let’s give our subjects the treatment they deserve — Flappy Bird is an immensely popular game seemingly in spite of, but actually because of, its difficulty and core simplicity.  The TV culture is difficult for authors to rebel against, because its self-awareness allowed it to beat literature to the punch and rebel against itself.  These are interesting premises and excellent points; they deserve to be explored.  But let’s not waste our readers’ time by spending 42 meandering pages on them, and let’ not call Flappy Bird “squalid.”

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* There’s a Harbinger soundboard!

** This is  a movie best described as “THEY BRING A TANK TO A CAR CHASE AND CARS TO A PLANE CHASE!”  And yes, it is best described in all caps.