Landed

I am off the ship and life is weird.

• Driving is strange.

• People asking me what of 8000 things I want on a sandwich is disorienting.

• Everyone seems rude compared to life on the ship where it is our job and lifestyle to be accommodating.

• Everywhere is cold and various in temperature instead of being a nice, steady 68 degrees.

• I have to make a decision as to what I want to eat rather than having it all laid out for me to put on a plate.

• In the Officer’s Mess, there is a bus woman named Melinda. She always takes you plate before you are finished and some how when you are distracted by conversation or something. You find yourself, surprised, looking down, fork mid-air. As a result, I eat convict style. I guard my plate. When you are eating where no one is going to take your plate and you are expected to bus your own, this is really silly.

• I am expected to pick out my own clothes everyday.

• I don’t have a big group of friends to have breakfast, lunch and dinner with.

• There are five hundred channels chock full of mostly commercials, and still there is nothing on. (There is something fairly comforting about six channels of movies you have seen bits and pieces of before all without commercials.)

• Everything seems dirty. Apparently the rest of the world does not have two full time cleaners allocated per 75 sq. ft.

• I walk around town and don’t recognize anyone. On the ship, in every port, you always run into fellow crew.

• It occurred to me as I drove yesterday, I was supposed to have a drivers license with me. This is something I completely forgot about.

• I can take a shower and straighten my arms without touching a wall.

• I cannot touch every wall of the bathroom while standing at every point of the bathroom.

• No one takes my dry-cleaning from my bedroom every morning and returns it the next day.

• I have no pager resting against my spine, clipped to my skirt and I am not supposed to.

• The walls are not magnetic, which makes hanging things with magnets much harder.

• No one here makes friendly jests at my expense from long standing jokes.

• Amazingly I still have difficult users. (I am staying at my mom’s house.)

I am going to try and catch up on back stupid cools.

Stay tuned.