Back to the Future...

Back to the Future…

We cast off from Ensenada Mexico on the evening of January 7^th .  That much we know for sure.  According to my watch, it is now 10:52 in the morning on Sunday January 25^th.  Although that sounds like a very specific time, we must look a little deeper to figure out exactly where, and oddly ‘when’ exactly I am.  Since leaving the safety of Central Standard time (which can be a bit confusing in it’s own right) on January 4^th we have experienced 9 time changes, and one bold leap across the international dateline (We had a cruise ship time machine/ future party to honor the leap into the future), jumping us a ahead a full 24 hours.  I can confidently say that here, 655 miles off the coast of Japan it is 10:52 in the morning on Sunday January 25^th.  I can also confidently say that I have absolutely no idea what time it is, or even what day it is where you are.    It would take math, like a lot of math to figure it out.  And I’m not just talking simple math like : the west coast is 3 hours behind the east coast, 2 hours behind Chicago, and 1 or 2 hours behind the ever stubborn Arizona depending on the time year.  I’m talking - 1 hour - 1 hour - 1 hour -1 hour -1 hour + 24 hours + 1 hour + 1 hour +1 hour +1 hour = whatever the F%&K time it is where you are.  Yah, I don’t get it either.  We were getting further and further away from east coast time, and then, one night, because they said so, we started getting closer and closer.  And so, to summarize, where I am, 10:52 Sunday morning, the 25^th of January, the ground beneath me is constantly moving (and I mean MOVING, I’ll discuss later) and time is a made up fluid thing.  This is confusing….

Now That I have sort of explained where we are, I thought it might be interesting to explain what exactly we have been doing for the last 20 days at sea (20 days at sea!!). 

In Chicago my weekdays consisted of the following:

-          Snoozing 4 times each morning, knowing that this was about as good as it was ganna get during the day

-          Getting up at the very last minute, or well, about 10 minutes after the very last minute I needed to make it to work on time.

-          Zombie walking through my morning ritual of stumbling down the stairs, turning on the light of my aquarium, wondering into the shower, trying to remember if I had already shampooed my hair, hastily putting on my (insert day of the week) work outfit, sort of pack some breakfast and lunch, check to make sure my hat and gloves are in the pocket of my jacket, and finally stumbling out the door into the often cold and dark world.

-          My work day consisted of, well, ill leave this part blank for the sake that I will need to find a job when I get home. So lets just say: My workday was productive! Super productive! World saving productive!

-          Come 5:30 I would spend about 15 minutes trying to sync up leaving my office at just the right second so I could walk right onto a train, but not the first train, cause that one would be too crowded, so I’d wait for 2 perfectly aligned trains coming within 6 minutes of each other so I wouldn’t have to deal with the awful reality that is an incredibly packed train in the middle of winter at rush hour in Chicago.  Exhausting, isn’t it??

-           Arrive at home between 5:57 and 6:03

-          Begin to heat up whatever it was we made for dinner for the week.

-          Eat dinner when Gabby got home (often considerably later than me)

-          Watch three hours of reality T.V.

-          Go to bed between 11:07 and 11:34

-          Wake up repeat

 Gabby’s schedule at home was:

-          get up at 5 am

-          drive 40 minutes in the dark to get to the gym before morning traffic

-          gym from 7 am – 8 am

-          work from 8:30 am until 6:30 pm

-          drive an hour and a half home in evening traffic

-          eat dinner with Jesse

-          watch one or two hours of TV and then go to bed

Now imagine the opposite:

-          Gabby wakes up at 6:30

-          Walks up one flight of stairs to attend a rotating 6:45 work out class taught by a professor or a student (kickboxing, zumba, yoga, or circuit training) out on the main deck, or run on the treadmill (holding on to the railing for dear life to cope with the intense rocking of the ship.  Try running on treadmill with your eyes closed, yah, it’s like that.)

-          Gabby will then leisurely sit at breakfast for about 45 minutes. Not because she is laboriously concocting a makeshift breakfast from the materials currently available after 19 days at sea, but because our breakfast table is perched outside, on the back of ship, overlooking the mouthwash blue wake with the sun shining in our eyes.

-          I join Gabby at some point throughout this leisurely breakfast, making sure to pop in before the hard 8:30 ‘no more food, you slept through breakfast, enjoy your granola bar until lunch time’ time.

-          We return to our cabin to don our work clothes, Gabby: leggings, a sweater and Toms.  Me:  Jeans and a hoodie, on a fancy day.  Shorts and a hoodie on an ‘I’m kinda tired and didn’t feel like showering before work day.

-           Gabby walks down two flights of stairs (her commute is an hour and a half shorter than at home!!) to her office, the happiness dungeon we call it, and I have to labor all the way up one flight upstairs to mine.

-          After a hard morning’s work, we rendezvous around 11:30 in the cafeteria to partake in what is in actuality a stupidly long lunch break, but in the realm of ship-life, a visual, sensory overloading, and culinary extravaganza of people flowing in and out of the dining hall, friends sitting and chatting in the sun, and students, faculty and staff casually grazing on all the mediocre food you could ever ask for. 

-          Gabby goes back to her office if she has clients or meetings scheduled.  If not, she sits out on the deck in a lounge chair reading all the books that she has been telling clients for years are great, but had never actually read.

-          I have an afternoon activity with the ship kids, snack time, open gym, and time for some administrative planning.

-          If the kids haven’t tuckered me out, I go to the gym around 4 and try my best to meet Gabby each night for the sunset. (I say try my best, because while on a ship I understand that this sounds simply like going outside at a certain time each day, but as we have crossed the pacific, and entered god knows how many time zones, the sunset has set at 4:50, 7:25, and just about every time in between.  It’s a true test of your astrophysialogical knowledge to determine when the sun will actually go down each day) 

-           We then start dinner with friends or with our extended family (we are the proud stand in parents for 5 college students, whom we regularly have dinners with and impart the vast wisdom we have acquired in the many a (1) decade since we were their age.

-          Dinner manages to last at least an hour and a half every night.  Some blame the size of the plates for our multiple trips to the buffet each meal, I say its the fact that we are there for so long that we are pretty much eating two separate meals.

-          In the evening not much goes on.  There are lectures some night that we’ve attended, but really by 9:30 p.m. half of the adults(I use the term adults only to separate us and our friends from the students, and the kids I work with, not because I actually identify as a full blown adult) on board have gone to bed.  Mind you that nearly half of the nights we spent at sea, we gained an hour, so this 9:30 p.m. bedtime is really 8:30 p.m.  No one’s quite sure if it’s the gentle rocking of the ship, the sea sickness meds that we are popping like skittles, our bodies constant need to adjustment to the ever moving world around us, or something they put in the endless supply of potatoes, but its something.   

-          From time to time we have activities starting at 9:30, and sadly, we all drink coffee at dinner just to make it…

-          On those night we do drink coffee at dinner, lateish night dance parties tend to break out in the staff bar (which used to be the nightclub onboard before it was converted to a floating university, so, there’s a smoke machine and ridiculous club/ Bar Mitzvah lighting effects).

Wake up and repeat ^¹⁹ .  

-          Sadly, there are no weekends, every day we are sailing is a workday, but well, as you can see, workdays aren’t too bad. 

And that’s what we’ve been up to.  So far the future has been pretty great.

Soon, we’ll see land (we hope).   

p.s. We stopped in Hawaii for 8 hours a few days ago.  It was nice to step off the ship, but we were literally on land for about 4 hours.  Nothing too fun to report.  It’s Hawaii.  It was pretty, we saw bright colored fish, ate some great poki, and got back on the ship.  Something tells me everywhere we stop from now on will be a bit more exciting!