Family Vacation

I’m back. Five days and four nights does a lot to a man, I suppose. Well not really, especially when it’s in south Florida. Maybe if I climbed Mount Everest I could call myself a changed man, but I suppose I can call myself slightly altered. I am somewhat tanner.

In terms of blog news, the biggest development occurred at John F. Kennedy airport on the way there. I was sitting at the terminal waiting area with my mom and dad, about 3 hours before takeoff…the drive to the airport and security took all of fifteen minutes. The night before I mentioned to my parents a little life detail at dinner. “Oh, by the way, if you notice I haven’t taken any money out of my ATM lately, that’s because I won $1700 for the Super Bowl. I’m not a drug dealer.” (Note: if you are reading this and happen to be a robber, I spent all of the money…on drugs).

The next day at the airport my mom said: “So is there anything else you would like to tell us? Do you have any kids?” she said laughing hilariously. As far as I knew I didn’t have any kids, but I did have something: “Oh, I have a blog.”

For some strange reason that one statement was equivalent to asserting I won the 275 million dollar mega million jackpot. Apparently, my parents missed my columns from college and what not and this was just the venue to cultivate my writing “talents,” or as I like to call them, “failures.” Rest assured, my entire family knew about the blog the instant our plane landed in Florida, and at this very moment I’m sure my readership has expanded a millionfold from each of my family members clicking on the site hundreds if not hundreds of thousands of times a minute. What this also means is that I get to look forward to phone calls from my mom every night. “I saw your new blog today!” “That’s great, I don’t care, I have one like every other day.” “No, it was great, and really funny.” “Good, stop calling here.”

In other words, in a week’s time this blog will most likely implode.

But in the meantime, here’s how the trip went. I played golf, a lot of golf. I ate food, a lot of food. I got sunburns, a significant number of sunburns. Then for some odd reason I got a massage…a deep tissue massage…on my sunburns. Painful, yes. Worth it, yes.

During the frequent aforementioned meals, we had plenty of family “conversations.” Now, my family has never been afraid to discuss matters openly. But, for some odd reason, conversations during this family vacation veered towards the, well, really really really awkward. There must have been something in the Florida water–like LSD or alligator pheromones. Take for example sex. You’d think such an issue would be off limits. It wasn’t. Let me just say right away that I didn’t participate in these conversations. Sheer mortification would best characterize my demeanor throughout. Don’t worry, though. I’m not going into any details here. There are certain things that should not be said in a blog setting. Or in public for that matter. All I’m going to say is that by the end of each awkward conversation, one of my family members would say, “Now you’ve got something to write about in your blog!”

Awkward sex conversations aside, it was a good trip. Relaxing and far too short. For a week it was 85 degrees, and now I can’t feel my face.

I’m not sure if this blog entry is coherent…no, I’m not drunk, but I’m somewhat in the twilight zone at the moment, probably a result of acute solar withdrawal. And because of the previous sentence, I’m sure the second I publish this post an ambulance will be outside my apartment building in no time, and EMTs will throw me on a stretcher to carry me to the hospital (see the blog post regarding my stomach virus, minute rice and my mom).

Implosion will begin once you finish reading, now.