VACATION!

Is there any more stirring moment than a Friday afternoon for the working man or woman? People who start Monday with the growl of the proverbial lion with a thorn in their paw on Friday are smiling gently as refined creatures of almost angelic proportions. They are at their happiest when the weekend looms! Actually who we are on Monday is a good gage of where we are as a society. On Friday we fulfill the potential of the human race and engage one another as we would like to be treated. That is until we leave the office. Then out on the highway the carnage begins. Who gets somewhere the fastest to reclaim the lost part of their life can look ugly especially at the beginning of the weekend. Only the drive to the office Monday morning could be worse.

Criminal statistics suggest that most individuals are victims of violence after dark. What they don’t tell you is that most such mayhem occurs between people driving to work in rush hour traffic before the sun comes up. If not overly aggressive there is certainly very entertaining creativity in the art of in-cockpit driver gestures toward fellow commuters. The faces made are tortured, precious, and comical. It is like watching the contortions of Donald Duck!

Donald’s gesticulations are similar to your boss’s at times when the vein in his neck begins to bulge. That usually happens over something as simple as
your mistakenly sending his secret computer file of girlie pictures to corporate headquarters “NO I SAID SEND THE TIT FOR TAT FILE TO MY HOME, NOT THE HOME OFFICE!!! Sheesh ya make one small flub and the old boy has a conniption!

Somewhere between Monday and Friday people have varying degrees of stress and reprieve from it. The relief is akin to how we feel when we take vacation. The behavior is nothing short of a series of weekends strung together through an entire week. If you’re not drinking and you’re on leave for a week just decompressing at home it is kind of eerie around the neighborhood. Actually it’s reminiscent of being in a desert on the moon. Your little neighborhood, which you only really know on the weekend, is no longer bustling with the buzz of assorted activity. It has become a ghost town! You are the only one there and the streets are empty except the homemaker whose husband is still able to support his wife and 2.1 children with a job at the sludge factory. You never knew there was so much money in waste! He must be wealthy and just never flaunted it. Argh! Now how do you keep up with the Jones’ after that new discovery?!

Nevertheless you get to hear the sounds of the newspaper delivery boy, sanitation workers, the mailman, and the neighborhood recluse who keeps stealing you kid’s two-wheeler from your front porch. He has secretly ridden it daily for years to the nearest store to buy himself a pack of smokes, a Slim Jim snack, a slurpee and to flirt with the counter help. He apparently is partial to foreign women with thick unrecognizable accents! You always thought the cherry slurpee stains on the bike were from your sloppy kid. Now you learn the truth! She has recluse potential!

Vacation gives you perspective whereas you get to see everyday stuff you normally miss because of work. Some of it is scary, but most of it is refreshing. If folks really knew what went on in their neighborhoods when they’re working they would stay in bed under the covers quivering at how much the usual laws of nature don’t seem to apply during the week.

You can rise above the oddity of this new world because most importantly YOU ARE OFF WORK! Nothing you’ve thought has carried that much reverence and at the same time fear since you were a child willing to give great grandmother a kiss because you knew she was gonna reward ya with bucks!. Good old reliable great grandma, her whiskers, and her money!

When we grew up our parents (our mom’s at least) knew the weekday environs and their oddities as everyday happenings. But as a culture we have forgotten stuff much like the Native Americans no longer remember how to perform their cultural rain dance. I think they’ve forgotten. Could be in those years of harsh drought when we go months not being able to water the lawn because of the lack of rainfall Native Americans are chugging from water coolers just laughing their asses off at the rest of us in some sort of self imposed cultural reparation. It’s either that or a memory lapse of how to get the sky to open by pleasing the rain god.

If you are taking time away from work to go somewhere on a trip well then this can be even more exasperating than going to the office. True the attitude is usually laid back at the beginning of the excursion. However, traveling with your kids or even worse, the in-laws, could be a harsh sanity stealing, nail on the blackboard, heart palpitating environment all it’s own.

You certainly have moments of fun but there always seems to be a Russian roulette of emotions being played on those getaways. One person it seems is always unhappy. The rest of the group is saying things like “I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but what do you expect from a guy who’s favorite dwarf is grumpy,” or the guys whisper “PMS” under their breath. The journey seldom lives up to your expectation because there is always some sort of irritation. Whether it is that check-out is at dawn and check-in is at dinner time, or that the room has hangers that don’t come off the rod, it seems like you always end up with some bizarre hotel neighbors. My last trip included a lodge booked with a convention of transvestite truckers.

Traveling with my family always seems like I’m in an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies. It’s pleasant and down home yes, but how relaxing can it be it when the family’s idea of take out food is going behind the shack to “blast some critters?”

No matter how your vacation turns out however there is always one grim fact. It has to end and you have to go back to work. That is even worse than a bad holiday expedition. You knew it when you first left for vacation. You counted the days. It seemed in the beginning like such a large amount of time. Then it creeps into your mind midweek that it’s half over. You give it scant thought at that time. By the second weekend you are lamenting the coming Monday. Sunday night before going back to work you end up staying awake until 3:00 a.m. just to squeeze every last ounce out of the time you deserve for yourself. The next day you’re off to work like a lion with a thorn in your paw that can barely keep its eyes open. It’s better that way though. After all what’s there to look at now that the boss’s “fun files” are gone!