Vacation, All I Ever Wanted...

There are certain phrases that just seem to strike terror in the heart. Tax return always makes my blood run cold; anything including remodel or redecorate makes me queasy; and we need to talk is a perennial leader in this category. All of these pale, however, beside the pure existential dread associated with... family vacation trip.

I know -- a surprisingly negative approach to fun, family togetherness, relaxation. And really, I enjoyed being with my family and all of our various activities.

What makes me crazy is the vacation as an entity. I've been frank in the past about my difficulty adjusting (even at age 45) to the idea of being The Adult: the competent, authoritative one. The one with all the answers. However, when you talk about "going on a trip", all I can think about is the hundreds of logistical details: the non-stop responsibility.

See, I'm the one mainly responsible for finding where we're going, how to get there, where to stay, what to do. And I do the majority of the driving. Really, there are so many ways that I personally can screw it up that I can't help but think of "vacation" as synonymous with "disaster" -- or "series of disasters" -- waiting to happen.

As I warned in my previous post, we were away for two weeks of that very entity. And in the end, plenty went wrong, including getting very lost 3 times in 2 days, and a motel that was about a step-and-a-half above a homeless shelter... and you know what? We made it home in one piece. All-in-all, we had a great time; the kids will be talking about some of their fun experiences for months. Maybe the "point" of the trip for me (besides fun & relaxation) was to let go just a little and realize that the earth will keep turning even if we take the wrong exit now and then.

Since I've missed almost 3 weeks, I'm going to include a little "bonus" -- our vacation in numbers:

• 13 days, 2029.4 miles -- 919.1 down, 918.6 back, even though we took completely different routes.
• 7 states plus the District of Columbia; 9 pages of directions printed from Yahoo Maps, 11 different interstates.
• 92.417 gallons of gas (21.96 mpg, with a LOT of A/C) for a total of $265.93.
• 4 nights with 4 people in one motel room, followed by 4 continental breakfasts -- 2 of which made me glad I didn't live on that continent.
• 2 nights the kids "went to bed" in the van before we arrived at our destination; 2 nights my daughter woke up screaming that her legs hurt.
• 5 different fast-food chains (in order): McDonald's, Wendy's, Subway, Burger King, Roy Rogers; 2 lunches packed in the van. Actually I would be reluctant to repeat any of our "road meals", although the ribs were tasty at the Texas Steakhouse.
• 1.5 oz. in the package of Kissables they give you for completing the tour at Hershey's Chocolate World. OK, it's free... still, I think maybe they did it differently in the old days.
• Several hundred gallons of water dumped on us in The Boardwalk waterpark at Hersheypark -- who knew you could get wetter than "drenched"?
• $2000 estimated retail value of a week at the beach cottage we stayed in at Sunset Beach, NC... proving that it quite literally pays to have family connections.
• 77 years' difference in ages of youngest and oldest family members at the beach house.
• 7 consecutive days at the beach, bookended by 4 motel pools, and The Boardwalk: 12 in a row, if you're scoring along at home... leaving my body at a much higher percentage of water than normally (the remaining % is fast-food fries).
• 5 other people in the theater with my wife and me for the 9:40 pm showing of Ratatouille.
• 7 and 5 -- ages of children you probably shouldn't take to any of the Smithsonian museums.
• 2 hours spent circling DC after the museum in the vain hope of a parking space, or even figuring out exactly where we are. My congressman (OK, person) will be hearing about this!
• 4 train rides to get in & out of Manhattan in the quest for the Central Park Zoo. I'm grateful to my niece for tipping me off to the PATH train from NJ... otherwise we'd still be circling Manhattan looking for a place to park.

Maybe this positive mention will make up for my inexcusable failure to write a blog about my trip to her high school graduation, how I remember her as a baby, graduations as rites of passage, and how ancient I must be to have an 18-year-old niece, blah blah blah. :-Q

The Opposite of A

First, a little housekeeping... as of Sunday we will be taking off on The Annual Family Vacation. Though I'm sure there will be something sidesplitting about spending a significant portion of the summer shuttling from van to rest area to motel room to fast-food place with two small children, I may very well be out of touch for a couple of weeks and unable to share with you my usual assemblage of wry observations. However, I promise I won't come home till I find something worthy to write about.

Anyway, before I go, I just wanted to point out what People Have Been Saying lately: it turns out I'm cool after all.

I have mentioned in the past (and if I hadn't, anyone who's paying attention would have figured it out anyway) that in high school I was voted Least Likely to Ever Be Described As Cool. And in the classic beat 'em/join 'em dichotomy, I basically decided to embrace my noncool (after all, it was good enough for Huey Lewis). But I may have to upend my worldview -- again -- as a result of a recent Newsweek article.

I have fun putting in the links, but I know you don't follow them, so let me summarize: recent movies/TV have made heroes, or at least leading men, out of guys the article calls Beta Males -- otherwise described as decidedly not Type-A.

I still remember many years back when the original round of articles came out in Newsweek and elsewhere about the "Type-A" personality: driven, perfectionist, success-oriented, workaholic. It didn't take me very many paragraphs to conclude they weren't talking about me.
I don't want to come off like a total goober; I'm certainly not the perpetually stoned, terminally lazy Slacker character favored in so many movies and TV shows in recent years. I was pretty successful in school and I've had a job of some sort for my entire adult life. I even do really have a few odd, almost random pockets of perfectionism that surface when even I least expect it. But under oath, I would be hard-pressed to declare myself a go-getter.

I have to admit that I ended up as a math major, and subsequently a math teacher, in large part because no more compelling idea came along. Then I spent a lot of years working part-time and filling in around the edges of my alleged career with a number of rather unglamorous "professions": meter reader, waiter, janitor, tax processing clerk. I understood intellectually that I probably had the ability to do something beyond stamping numbers on tax forms (hey, it's plenty complex: you do have to get the same number on the check as the form) but at the end of the day, we had money enough to live on and I didn't really know how to assemble a "career" out of the puzzle pieces I had in hand.

And I continued to muddle along -- for about eleven years -- until I decided to make a break for a new profession. And now I'm semi-established as a software engineer (OK, a programmer) but I'm still a little fuzzy on this whole career thing.

I work with people who are driven & focused, who can't wait for the next big assignment and opportunity to prove themselves. Many of them are smart and capable in ways that make me feel like I'm back in junior high, but that may be a subject for another day. They are concerned with Career Development and what they can do to snag that next promotion.

Me, on the other hand, I'm just happy to have a job. Some of that comes from all the years of not really having a job, or at least a consistent one... but for most of my life when the question came up, "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" my answer has been, "Doing what I'm doing now." Is that a virtue -- the ability to be comfortable wherever I am? Or is it a fault -- a complete lack of vision/ambition?

I have ended up getting some promotions and even raises, more or less in spite of myself, but I still find myself somewhat amazed that I'm actually getting paid a respectable amount, and that people ask me questions expecting me to be an authority. I like to be able to answer (at least some of) the questions, and although I never asked for it I'm certainly not going to say no to the increasing dollars, but the money definitely doesn't drive me. Of course, being a... um... "Not-Type-A", I'm not sure "drive" is the right word anyway.