#146. Cruising (Monday, December 24, 2012)

What was your best day…of holding yourself back because you wanted to?

While the emotional highlight of my 2012 family Carnival cruise vacation was undoubtedly the part leading up to the cruise (#20), the part where I spent seven days in the Caribbean with unlimited food was also pretty good.

This was my first warm-weather¹ vacation, at age twenty-two. So, all of it was new to me: the buffets, the live entertainment, the sheer fact that a whole mini-civilization could exist on a floating vessel moving across an endless sea. Out of this, only a few specifics stood out:

We were traveling with two of my brother’s friends—Alex Jiang, and David Hou—and their families. David was a bit quirky, so my brother and Alex (not usually bullies, I think) made fun of him constantly. Notably, once during the comedian Willie Barcena’s packed nightly show², David decides to leave midway through (don’t know why). So he walks out in full view of the lounge and Willie himself. Willie then interrupts his stand-up to point to the “suit guy” (David was wearing a suit, and I really don’t know why), who completely ignores him as he takes his sweet time shuffling out.
I only went to the casino once. There, I win fifty dollars at blackjack. A few Singaporean guys join me and share their beer. I win another fifty dollars, and then I’m go. “That’s it, I’m done,” and say farewell.
My brother, by contrast, was having some very bad luck with his (non-age-restricted) chance games. In a small corner of the ship, they have this dexterity game where you have to clamp onto a moving box to win an iPhone—the type of game that looks deceptively easy, but is just a shameless money grab. And my brother dumped the equivalent of all my blackjack winnings failing at this. (He also unknowingly wasted that same amount of money accessing the internet terminal, using the cruise’s primitive 2012 technology.)
For the excursions, we did San Juan, Nassau, and Grand Turk. And it was at Grand Turk, swimming several meters from the shore and staring at the blazing sunlight and vast ocean around me, that, for the first time ever, I think to myself, “So this is what it’s like to truly be on vacation.”

What’s most interesting, though, is what I did not do. Despite this being a rowdy Carnival party boat, I did not do any actual partying or have any alcohol (besides the Singaporean guys’ beer). I watched the daytime and nighttime deck parties—with their intense overplaying of Gangnam Style and Pitbull’s Don’t Stop the Party—from afar on the upper deck, while pondering my grander life, without ever sensing a need to participate. And it’s not like I was still sheltered at this point: I’d already had my share of wild parties at Duke in the past few months (#81, #67, #61).

My only explanation³ is that the serenity and rare peace in my life I was experiencing during that vacation translated into a feeling that I was now “mature”. Not in the conceited sense that I thought I was now above that stuff (I knew I wasn’t), but the sense that things were going so well that I didn’t need to let loose and dance wildly and get violently drunk to feel satisfied.

Clearly, the stress of my later years hadn’t hit me yet; because those seven days of sobriety were a definite anomaly from how every one of my Christmas vacations had gone thereon (#141, #67, #49, #14, #5). And in a way I still can’t adequately explain, that was a good thing.

Specifically, warm while it’s freezing cold where I normally live. Hence why my Disney (#92) and California (#114) trips in the summer don’t count. Though, realistically, this one might not either since I was living in North Carolina at the time.
He was actually pretty funny, mainly because he actually had restraint—unlike every other low-budget comedian I’ve seen vacations.
Besides the simple fact that my parents were there too, and I was still a college student with limited money of his own to just burn on endless drinks.