The Chronicles Of Jessica

I've given up waiting for Paul to have time to finish the honeymoon blogs with me. His new semester started last week and he's pretty swamped, so I told him I was going to proceed on the project without him. He seemed, frankly, pretty okay with it.

Where were we? Well, we did finally make it onto the boat, sorry if anyone has been gripped in suspension for the last 3 weeks. The morning we embarked we saw Psycho and Mrs. P waiting to get on, too. We made pleasant small talk and then beat a hasty retreat but oddly, we didn't run into them again the whole rest of the week. The cruise line had "sent" a taxi to the hotel to pick us up and bring us to the pier. I'm not exactly sure this transaction was on the up and up, because they called to let us know they were "sending" a taxi, which to me implied "paying for." After all they stranded us and left without us and forced us to stay at the Fort Lauderdale Airport Ramada, a fate no one should have to face. But when the driver dropped us off at the boat, he told us it was thirty dollars. It only occurred to us much, much later that he might have been doing the ol' double dip. But even if we thought that I don't know how we could have called him on it. We're not so much the type to call people on stuff. We're more the type to discuss things later at home and think up clever comeback lines from a safe distance.

So we were finally on the boat! We met our steward, Mario, a charming Italian who kissed me on the back of my hand (LOVE THAT). He had decorated the door of our stateroom with balloons that said "Just Married". He was very sweet, and he felt very sorry for us, which we felt we were due. In fact, we were a little miffed that every single employee we met didn't have a ready apology for leaving without us. They really should have been a little more placatory in general; I think we would have been mollified with a fully choreographed musical production entitled, "We'll Make It Up To You".

I'm sure you're all wondering about the sectarian deck chair violence. Well, blows were never actually exchanged. There's a wealth of knowledge and procedure among regular cruise-takers. People seem to have the way that they do things, and since we came three days late to the party, it took us a little while to catch on. The deck chairs were an example. Everywhere you look there are these signs posted about how you can't reserve deck chairs. You can't save your seat; if you get up and leave, you've left. So it was particularly crowded one afternoon, and Paul and I happened upon two chairs that were in the shade (an important consideration given that we both burst into flames upon exposure to the sun.) But there was a towel and a bottle of Banana Boat on one of the chairs. So we kind of waited around for a while (a half an hour to be exact) and when no one came back, we went for them. Of course it was at this exact moment that Melanoma McDouchebag and his buddy Topol Von Reeky show up. And instead of just saying, Oh, you know what, these are actually ours - which would have been fine - he says really aggressively, "Do you mind?"

I have never understood this expression. Mind? No, I don't mind at all. I don't even know what you're talking about, actually. And this is the kind of thing that, upon reflection, you can't help but wonder what you could have done differently. Suppose I had said, "Nope, don't mind a bit!" and plopped myself down in the chair. Or suppose I had started speaking in Spanish or French and smiling broadly and kissed him on both cheeks (before plopping myself down in the chair.) I could have just started whooping and slapping myself in the face and singing Beach Boys songs. What's he going to do? Hit me? I suppose he might have hit Paul, being that Paul is the man and everything, and we didn't exactly have time to get our strategy worked out because the guy was trying to be all intimidating and secondhand smoky and everything. I mean, we knew he was in the wrong: It said so right on the sign. But he won and he got the chairs, and why? Because we're nice. Too nice, obviously. But I don't really want to become a different person over something like this, so I don't know what else there really is to do. Other than hope he gets hemorrhoids. Which I do.

The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. I lost a karaoke contest to a musical theatre major who sang "Wind Beneath My Wings" and was a little bitter about that. We did a walking tour of St. Thomas with a very strange woman who kept shifting accents. It was really weird, it was like taking a walking tour with Joe Piscopo on meth or something. And the walking tour didn't really go that many places, it was more like a "get within a certain distance of historic stuff and point at it" tour. Paul took some photos of wayward chickens, we got back on the boat. Most of the time we spent reading and doing crossword puzzles and playing Scrabble. The irony was not lost on us that those are the things we do all the time at home for free. But this way we got to do them on a big boat with a gorgeous view of the Caribbean! Not too shabs.

Anyway, the really important part of the adventure had already happened.

And it was blissfully happy.