A Supposedly Fun Thing I Would Do Again in a Second
Right off the bat, I’ve done a dumb thing. By calling this um…blog…entry what I have, it looks like I’ve set up a comparison between myself, a joke writer (to be generous), and David Foster Wallace, a guy who was a really real writer to the realest real degree. A hyper-literate person reading this might even be moved to ask, “Who in Abaddon does she think she is?” to which my answer would be, “Definitely not David Foster Wallace. Nope. Nuh uh.” I’m just a chick with a Tumblr who wants to talk about some stuff.
My title, of course, is a respectful nod to DFW’s 1997 collection of essays, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again” which contains the piece “Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise” which originally and famously appeared in Harper’s, a magazine for “smarts.” In it, he describes his adventures aboard the MV Zenith, and he describes himself too, by his habit of doing things like nicknaming the ship the “Nadir” and explaining how all of the forced pampering and relaxation ultimately led him to feel despair. Indeed, he uses the word ‘despair’ no fewer than eight times throughout the article, and although he is painfully funny, knowing what we now know about what would occur in his future, it is also merely painful.
I’d been on two cruises before. One, in my twenties, was paid for by the generous father of a friend whose family went on bi-yearly cruises and believed that massive ocean liners were really the only way to get anywhere worth getting to. The second, many years later, was a Nickelodeon Family Cruise, which me and my now-husband and now-children were able to take at a discounted rate because of my long-time employment at Viacom. Even with the discount, to sail the seas with the cast of iCarly still cost a year’s worth of mortgage payments. Put that in your despair-pipe and try to smoke it.
If you haven’t read the essay, you really should, even though if you’re anything like me, it will require you to sometimes stop and look up what words like “thanatopic” and “peripeteia” mean. (Don’t worry! I won’t spoil the definitions for you here!)
I cannot disagree with any of what David Foster Wallace says about cruising. For me, it all inelegantly came down to a morbid fascination with how much intricately carved fruit people seemed to be ingesting versus a mounting, and unfortunately quite rational, fear of shipboard toilet unreliability. The pools were like big bowls of human soup. The ice shows (ICE SHOWS!) contained much falling. On both trips, I came to see the vessel not so much as an unfathomably massive ship, but rather more like a floating small town I couldn’t pack up and run away from. Not for seven days, at least.
So, I can honestly say that I hadn’t really ever planned on taking another cruise. Until April, when after a difficult day of fifth grade, which a different kid might have dealt with by eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes while watching cartoons he usually says he’s too old for, my son tried to end his life.
It was a surreal day. I got a call at my desk from my literary agent saying I’d sold a young adult novel, a completely unexpected surprise! Then minutes later, I got a call from my husband, telling me what had happened, a completely unexpected surprise.
That’s not true. If I’m being honest, I must have known somewhere in my amygdalae that something was wrong. The little boy who, as a toddler, would emit a deep belly laugh at the sight of a brick wall (Don’t. Ask. Me.) had become sullen and withdrawn. Nothing was fun. Nothing was funny. Nothing was good. Sweatpants were worn continually. But, I told myself that all pre-teens sulk. I told myself that his teacher was kind of a bitch who didn’t “get” him. I told myself that while I understood that up to thirty percent of kids who are diagnosed with conditions like ADD* also suffer from depression, that we had dodged a bullet. I told myself until I couldn’t tell myself anymore.
By the time I got to E., he was in a hospital bed with a professional watcher sitting outside his door paging through a fucking gossip magazine like the world was still right side-up. A nurse came in and quietly reprimanded her for not removing his wastebasket. He looked hollow and humiliated and small. People always say someone looks small in a hospital bed, because they’ve been somehow reduced by their sickness. My boy looked small because he was ten years old.
I spent at least one hundred and eighty minutes holding his nail-bitten hand and staring at him through unbidden lenses of tears, not speaking. I imagine everyone who’s ever been through something like this does similarly, because it feels like if you utter any words about what has happened, that you are making it more real and more true and more likely to visit your house again. But depression is not a vampire awaiting a verbal invitation. It will come in when it damn well pleases.
When I finally found my words, I settled on just one question. “When was the last time you remember feeling happy?” E. fiddled with his ID band and cleared his raspy, bruised throat.
“It wasn’t Christmas. I always love Christmas, but not this year. It wasn’t Halloween either.” My kid is a holiday-holic of Martha Stewartian proportions and his admission that his two favorites had passed without being thrilling to him was like a punch in the guts. “I guess the last time? The last time I was happy was when we all took that Nickelodeon cruise together. I remember it. That was when.”
I fell asleep that night with my head on his thin cotton blanket knowing what I was going to do. I was going to take that damn book advance and bring that kid on another cruise to make him remember what happy felt like.
Now, don’t misunderstand. I didn’t and don’t harbor any illusions that a Caribbean cruise is a cure for childhood clinical depression. There is no cure. There are just websites containing lists of warning signs and phone numbers for doctors that will not take your case and varying arguments about how best to treat a child in this position and papers on whether treatment is really ever very effective at all.
When I was pregnant, I always kidded that the book “What to Expect When You Are Expecting” should be called, “Every Single Thing That Could Possibly Go Wrong In the Next Nine Months, But Probably Won’t, But You Will Still Worry to the Point of Almost Vomiting Daily”. Well, imagine if books on childhood depression were accurately titled. How would you choose between “Everybody Is So Relieved He’s Your Kid and Not Theirs” and “You and Your Child May Be Doomed”?
So, while I probably should have taken that little windfall and socked it away for exorbitant insurance premiums (Did you know that a suicide attempt is considered a pre-existing condition for five years after it happens? I do now!) I decided that since there is no Make-A-Wish fund for sad kids, we’d shoot just about the whole wad on a cruise. And I don’t regret it.
Since April, E. had been hard at work on a program of cognitive behavioral therapy and swallowing Omega-3 capsules like Liza Minelli used to swallow anything pill-shaped in the Studio 54 days. He had no idea about this trip and, in fact, we never revealed it to him (or his long-suffering baby brother) until we were en route to the aging-but-spotless Explorer of the Seas docked in beautiful Bayonne New Jersey.** On July 22nd, we set sail for Bermuda, St. Marten, St. Thomas and Puerto Rico then back again. And though thirteen years had gone by since DFW journaled his trip, not much had changed. There were pitiful talent shows and bacchanalian buffets. There were sunburned couples in tacky formalwear posing for photos in front of a fabric sunset backdrop when a real sunset was ten feet away. And there was E., a serious camera he’d scrubbed toilets to buy around his neck, hanging over the railing to get a great photo of that sunset, scaring the shit out of me the way a kid is supposed to.
He took about two thousand photos over the course of nine days. Really good photos, in my humble parental opinion. When he’s holding that camera, there is a confidence that doesn’t exist when he is trying to divide fifteen by ten and express the remainder in a reduced fraction. His focus, which too often betrays him, is his ally for once. He sees everything. He captures everything.
He feeds lettuce from his sandwich to an iguana on Sapphire Bay Beach in St. Thomas. On finding a snorkeling mask floating unclaimed in the waves at Horseshoe Bay in Bermuda, he declares, “This is a gift from Poseidon!” and swims off in pursuit of a Parrot Fish who is, incomprehensibly, bluer than the ocean. And as we walk across the sand that is really pink, just as the brochures promised, he says to me, “When I grow up, I want to live in a place like this.” And while a different mother might have heard, “I cannot wait to get away from you in eight years,” what I heard was, “Blah blah blah blah…I want to live…blah blah blah blah blah.” A bargain at seventy-jillion times the price.
I am no David Foster Wallace. But you can understand why I think of him.***
*ADD is a condition that people doubt is real. They say, “In my day, we called that being a daydreamer!” I usually smile and say “Yeah.” But right now I’d like to say to nobody in particular, “In your day you probably also thought cigarettes were healthy so zip it, because you have no idea.” I’ve got a kid who can read Dickens like the Dickens, but can’t follow the directions on a box of Duncan Hines brownies because when he moves his eyes from the ingredients to the steps, he’s become forever and hopelessly lost. I’ve got a kid who can draw with a surprising command of perspective, but cannot retain the multiplication tables no matter how many tips and tricks and drills he submits to. It exhausts me and I’m not even the one it is happening to, so is it any wonder that he feels beaten? ADD is real and the ONLY time it’s anything short of awful is when a kid is finally pushed to his limit but can’t figure out precisely how to hang himself successfully. Then it’s handy.
**Okay, a second miniscule advantage to ADD is that if you’re trying to surprise an ADD kid with a big trip, he will not notice that all of his shorts are missing from his drawers and that you’re loading an entire suite of orange luggage into the minivan.
***I hope that if you have not yet had children and you are on the fence about it, that I have not convinced you to sterilize yourself.**** I’m not gonna lie, my kid’s road is going to be long, and we plan to walk it with him no matter where it goes. But for every single thing that makes being his parent a challenge, there are nine things that make being his parent a delight. I wouldn’t trade him for anything, which is great, because I think trading your kids is frowned upon.
****If I DID convince you to sterilize yourself, I’d like to suggest that you head to the drugstore and buy a tub of baby wipes anyway. There is no reason that people who’ve decided not to procreate should be kept in the dark about how useful those things are. They’re not just for poop!
lulusf liked this tesslynch liked this
soulproprietorship liked this
schwarzfeder liked this
kayarenwick liked this
mandyelizabeth liked this
bramblefae liked this
laughing-baubo liked this
eyeseeyouarein liked this
naimhe-jeanne liked this
d0ntberuude liked this
thetomlynn reblogged this from lafix
thetomlynn liked this
cloudyasometimes liked this
nanceinmypance liked this
stepfordlife liked this
imabtastic reblogged this from pocketcuntents
imabtastic liked this
iamjustcara liked this squibble liked this
stilljewelss liked this
notactuallyme liked this
do-over liked this
pocketcuntents reblogged this from lafix and added: Perfection, whether you’ve sat in that chair or been in that bed.
purplebullfinch liked this
pocketcuntents liked this redcloud liked this
lafix reblogged this from thebosha and added:
“… depression is not a vampire awaiting a verbal invitation. It will come in when it damn well pleases.” READ THIS
insouciantpower liked this
thebosha reblogged this from caissiesthing and added:
Damn, Cassie. Just… Wow.
the2000yearoldman reblogged this from caissiesthing
notthatkindofbeaver reblogged this from caissiesthing thebosha liked this
gkelley-blog liked this
venusianhag liked this southey liked this
papersquared reblogged this from caissiesthing
twohundredgeckosinatrenchcoat liked this
smellyhipster reblogged this from caissiesthing
smellyhipster liked this
stefwith1f liked this
judesdickey reblogged this from caissiesthing
caissiesthing posted this
- Show more notes