The Best Vacation I Ever Had - Essay Example

The Best Vacation I Ever Had I put my hands over my ears, my face contorting towards my mother as the song played over and over. I was trapped, confined in a small boat watching small children cavort in looped sequences over and over. Their legs kicked, their arms jerked and their little mouths yanked open and closed as that song assaulted me with its inane repetition, swimming in a litany of irritation like a swarm of nits that you just want to slap away and be rid of, but persist in swirling around your eyes and ears. “It’s a small world after all…”. The song caught inside my brain and as I squinted to step back onto the too clean cobblestone walk to see the man in the bowtie sweeping up in the corner, I made a face that looked like I was about to throw up. This moment, caught in a swirl of nausea and bile, fit for a vomitorium, described the worst moment of the best vacation that I have ever experienced. Most of this world, this chaos of saccharin sweetness that saturated into my pores as I walked along the false main street, looking at the venders whose merchandise was consistently covered with three circles, folded onto one another to commemorate a mouse as the god of the place, consisted of such false happiness that I was infuriated during most of my time there. I looked away from my family, too old and too good to be thrilled by the appearance of costumed characters for whom all I could think of was that the interior of those costumes must be drenched in sweat as they stood out in the heat, signing ’autographs’ with pens and books and stickers all sold by the minions of the mouse. I looked over in disdain as my youngest sibling bounced up to meet the great god of the place, his face beaming as he held out his own little pen and he lifted his eyes to look up into the big plastic eyes of the head of the costume, believing that they were living and breathing beings who had deigned to come to him so he could worship. My patience was short for most of the experience, my arms crossed in prepubescent arrogance as I judged the place through my impatience and zeal for finding rides that would punish my parents, even though that never seemed to work. No matter how thrilling, spilling, twisting and turning the attraction ride, my parents seemed to be able to come off of it laughing and smiling, which only put me into a worse mood. I tried not to infect my family with my disdain, but I moved through the experience detached, engaging in it in brief intervals as we gave all my family’s hard earned money over to help in the worship of these creatures that seemed to have endless ways of taking our cash. A pin, a balloon, even a candy bar with pictures of the demi-gods, the beings to whom this enormous temple had been built all taking from those who came to worship at the doors. There was not a single experience of the day that didn’t have an associated licensed item that could be used in the daily devotion to the mouse and his cohorts. I was blessed with the clarity to see beyond all of this and find the ridiculous moments of excess in worship to be beneath me. At one moment, after a very long day having used their transportation to travel from place to place until the fumes from the bus only served to encourage the horrific smells and air inside the monorail, I exploded. I quoted Marx. I quoted Shakespeare. I quoted Bobby who had made fun of me when I told him where we were going on vacation. I told them that they were spending money in a place that was the epitome of capitalistic horrors and that I was ashamed. I lost my temper until my eyes stung with tears and after being told to go to sleep, I did. I slept hard and long, dreaming of spinning teacups and a mad hatter spinning the world. When I woke, I was calm and my family acted as if I had never said anything to them except one moment when my father looked at me and grinned, asking “so, you’ve read Marx….did you understand it?”. I did not fully understand it at the time, only enough to use it as a reference to bad capitalism. I turned red and just left the room to grab a shower, sulking as the water hit my face. Breakfast was like a breath of new air, my anger of the night before gone as I went back to my silent commentary on the experience. I couldn’t believe they had dragged me to this commercialized, over indulgent experience designed for children. I, after all, was no longer a child and was not about to give into anything that expressed delight or wonder at such a false pretense for which beliefs and traditions had been built. Some things were not all bad. Although I had strong opinions on the idea of capturing water mammals and holding them captive in a part of the place ironically called “The Living Seas“, it was interesting to watch them up close. Of course, the three dimensional technologies used in some of the attractions were interesting, purely from a technical perspective as I decided to study up on how three dimensional movies were made possible. I decided during that day to give the rest of the vacation a chance as we walked through cobblestone pathways that looked like Paris, Venice, and Japan, taking special delight when the Norway ride broke down and my parents thought for a moment we were actually going to fall to our deaths. Would have served them right. There was this moment, this small moment when my younger brother got so excited that I thought he would turn inside out. His laughter, almost hysterical, started me laughing and soon my whole family was laughing as his hysteria over seeing a pirate was beyond compare. I let go at that moment, and began to think that maybe Marx wasn’t the answer to this place, nor was a pompous rhetoric of consumerism, topped with commercialism, throwing around the word ’proletariat’ as if I understood what that meant. Maybe to understand that place, one had to watch a little boy become consumed with delight to the point that his laughter was contagious. I said this was the best vacation of my life. It was. I got nothing from the worship of the mouse, and to this day that horrific song breaks out in my head and I find myself obsessed with the round of “it’s a small world” plaguing me like that swarm of nits. What made it the best vacation of my life was that moment where I caught myself laughing with my family until it felt like my sides would split open. That moment opened up my heart to see the next most important moment of my life. I saw my mother in the shadows, her face lighting up against the backdrop of the castle and the spray of fireworks that showered above our heads. She glowed. She was serene and at peace in that moment, her features softened in the half light as the sparkle of the lights in the sky hit the curves of her smile. She glowed, and I was at peace with her. The worst vacation of my life turned into the best vacation as I say in her delight and her soft glow of happiness and peace a space in which she became human to me. I saw her soul written in her eyes, the way I see it in the eyes of my peers. She wasn’t a shield against which I could break my prepubescent angst, but a person with feelings and heart. My parents had seemed remote up to that point, but now I knew they were people: fallible, perfect, childlike, mature, and human. My best vacation was the one where I learned best how to understand my family…and I’ll be darned if it wasn’t earned at the temple of the mouse. Read More