inauspicio.us

in general i would contend that i am about as luck…

in general i would contend that i am about as lucky as a person could reasonably expect to be. for instance, i had the egregious good fortune to spend this christmas in barbados with a large proportion of my immediate family. lucky doesn’t even begin to describe it. i was particularly pleased to watch my two baby nephews learn to bodysurf, and to find a unique souvenir t-shirt in twenty-five feet of water while snorkeling with my older sister. my luck, however, ran out when i assembled the margaritaville vacation strikeout and had to be sent home early saturday morning, two-plus days before the rest of the family.

i blew out my flip flop. walking back from dinner one night, the flip flops that i’d bought on a trip to provincetown in 1999 for $3.95 (because i somehow managed to forget to bring footwear of any kind with me. how does that happen?) finally gave up the ghost. The rubber covering strap went first, a day or two earlier, and it seemed for a while that the inner kevlar strap would hold up, but it was not to be. In addition to the guilt I carried around due to owning them in the first place (oh, its the forgot-your-shoes shoes. did you remember shoes this time, shoes-forgetter?) they had their own baggage. So it was without the slightest sense of foreboding that I pitched them into a hotel trash can that night. I would come to regret it later, but of course hindsight is 20/20.

i searched for my lost shaker of salt. we ate dinner one night in an exceptionally posh but extremely poorly lit restaurant. pants and button down shirts were the order of the evening, as was a side dish of steamed vegetables somewhat in need of seasoning. so i took the shaker and shook a white substance that appeard to be salt into my hand, then poured it on the vegetables. this notably failed to altertheir taste. so i tried again. it was only after several minutes of this that i realized i was dealing with a new, trendy, ash-hued pepper with a flavor that could charitably be called ‘subtle’. i tried to warn my brother dan. “it didn’t taste saltier, so i just put more on.”

“right,” he piped in, “emphasis on moron.”

so before i could complete the trifecta by stepping on a pop-top, the family packed me up and sent me home. some people would claim that there’s a woman to blame; i know it’s my own damn fault. it was actually a great vacation, and i learned two important new lessons. first, if everyone else exclaims over how light you managed to pack, it means you have forgotten something important. second, if you see a queue in an airport, it is almost always a good idea to go stand in it. this applies all the more strenuously if you suspect there may be a starbucks at the front of the queue.