Dispatches From The Caribbean, Pt. 6 – The Thrilling Conclusion Of Nassau (Or: I Have Seen Evil, And It Has Its Own Private Marina)

(self-ed. note: I’m actually posting this right now in front of the tarmac at Miami International Airport right now – given that most of the day’s consisted of me and the family ending the trip, etc, this is as appropriate of an ending as I’ll likely be able to muster for this series. But for now, thanks for the comments and feel free to check out the rest of this series/overblown writing exercise (now, with photos!)

Day 5 – Nassau Pt. 2

I’m sitting under a massive seahorse sculpture outside the casino at the Atlantis, a massive, four-building hotel/resort/casino and I’ve discovered the Gomorrah to the Carnival Destiny’s Sodom.

Dispatches From The Caribbean, Pt. 5 – Nassau: Primary Exports Include Wealth, Off-Shore Tax Evasion, And The Last Vestiges of British Colonialism

8/28 12:24 p.m.

Day 5, Pt. 1 – Nassau: Primary Exports Include Wealth, Off-Shore Tax Evasion, And The Last Vestiges of British Colonialism

Sitting in the back of this tourist taxi, driving through downtown Nassau, there’s a certain small town charm that’s hard to ignore. The downtown, from the roads to the buildings, is cozily snug (only barely veering on claustrophobic), the view across the bay is spectacular, massive trees and Victorian-style streetlights line the road and the temperature’s only a step or two past comfortably warm. Switch out the palm trees for oak trees, add some snow, and it’d be hard to tell Nassau from any tiny New England bay town.

It’s the tiny touches though, from the $6.30 USD it costs for a gallon of gasoline or the European and American cars (of various ages and conditions) intermingling on the road to the fact that most of said bay’s view consists of hotels and casinos, which remind you that things work slightly differently down in the Caribbean.

Dispatches From The Caribbean, Pt. 4 – Deep Thoughts At 90 Feet Midair

8/28 9:47 a.m.

Day 4 – Deep Thoughts At 90 Feet Midair

Parasailing at 90 feet in the air with the wind whistling past your ears, and suspended by only a harness and two, increasingly insecure feeling metal hooks, it’s hard not to ponder your own mortality and, more importantly, how easily things could go horribly awry. Maybe a hook could come loose, sending you plunging headfirst into the mid-Atlantic, or a particularly vindictive driver could fray the main cable loose, dooming you to an existence of aimlessly floating continually over the Bahamas.

Dispatches From The Caribbean, Pt. 3: Cheeseburgers in Grand Turk (or: Jimmy Buffet Ruins Everything He Touches)

8/26 12:19 p.m.

Day 3 – Cheeseburgers in Grand Turk (or: Jimmy Buffet Ruins Everything He Touches)

Like author David Foster Wallace once opined, there’s something inherently flawed about the concept of tourism. The drive to experience the new, whether it’s hunting for a change in scenery or looking for a new experience, is hard wired into our heads, but from the start, the tourist is still an outsider – someone’s who’s not from the area, and who’ll only get, at most, a rudimentary understanding of the area they visit.

Dispatches from the Caribbean, Pt. 2: Carnival Cruise Lines: The Gestapo of Caribbean Fun

8/24 – 4:02 p.m.

Day 1 & 2 – Carnival Cruise Lines: The Gestapo of Caribbean Fun

Outside of all-you-can-eat buffets and the occasional strip bar, it’s one of the fortunate niceties of modern life that blatant demonstrations of rampant hedonism are looked down upon. After all, the pursuit of pleasure and stuff’s nothing less than a requirement by most standards, but everyone probably appreciates a vomitorium-free existence.

This tends to accentuate, though, those with enough gall to openly flaunt this status quo – who’d be willing to spend days upon days indulging themselves in pleasures of the fermented, gastronomical [and sometimes, carnal] variety? Quite a few people, it turns out.

Dispatches From The Caribbean, Pt. 1 – Miami: Hotels, Sushi, And Strippers

8/25 – 11:53 p.m.

Day 0 – Miami: Hotels, Sushi and Stripping

The first thing that strikes you about Miami’s the heat. It’s not the kind of heat that people up north or out west are used to, the kind of heat where things simply get warmer and get cooler. It’s the muggy, dank kind of heat that hits you in the face the second you walk outside, the kind of heat that pervades every single pore from head to toe, gluing your clothes to your body with sweat before you realize it, weighing you down and making the stray bursts of air conditioning coming from passing stores feel like manna, shaking you back into consciousness before you have to continue through the humid mess that is the Miami afternoon.

Proper Budgeting on $0 a Month

(Like the blog shows, it’s been a while since I’ve written something non-work related - something I blame on flagrant Twitter abuse (twitter.com/eric_chiu!) - but I’m forcing myself to actually write something for once – this kind of dovetails into a long-gestating post about my employment situation this summer, but I’m going to try and pace getting back into writing something, lest I sprain a muscle)

It only took three months, multiple blood draws and a semi-inflated right arm, but I’m finally a part of the workforce again – since the last week of July, I’ve been working as a help desk assistant at the Med School and I had a month long job working for the English Language Institute.

There’s a few pluses to getting reemployed (having a daily agenda longer than “1) Put on pants”), but besides that, the biggest benefit is actually having money coming in, something that hasn’t happened for a while. Since coming to Ann Arbor, the little money that I’ve actually had has come from either doing research experiments (at $10 a pop periodically) or the stipend from the paper (about the same).

The problem is, after being broke for so long, I’m not yet used to being able to actually purchase the things I’ve eying after 8 months of forced financial prudence – whether or not that’s a good thing is still up in the air, though.

When it comes to the few nice things I’ve owned (MacBook, getting car insurance, guitar stuff), there’s always been an appropriately shitty job behind each of them (pushing carts outside at Wal-Mart for the summer, selling off the Xbox 360, assorted menial labor). Like what Calvin’s dad was often fond of espousing, all of those jobs, if nothing else, demonstrated the value of hard work (and in the case of the Wal-Mart job, probably increased my chances of developing skin cancer exponentially after spending all that time outdoors).

Still, as enjoyable as indulging my inner hedonist might be…

(Digression: As someone who’s disdainful of both business majors and pompous liberal arts majors, it’s never been easy to reconcile an awareness of the evils of accumulating stuff with the amount of crap I actually own. (As of this writing, I’m going to have two plastic drumkits, 2 microphones, and three plastic guitars in my room, as good of a sign as needing an intervention as anything I can guess)

As much as your atypical freshman English major would love to expose the sins of American materialism after reading Vonnegut for the first time, it’s hard to argue against the inherent pleasure that comes from getting stuff. Be it buying that brand new flatscreen TV, or Jefferson finagling the Louisiana Purchase, the act of accumulating stuff’s as intertwined to the American idea as tightly as freedom, liberty and apple pie.

Actually acknowledging this is a bit more difficult, though – the brohaha over the bonuses at firms like AIG and Goldman Sachs (a company, it’s worth noting, that paid back its bailout loans with 23% interest) showed that Americans are more than ready to pull out the pitchforks for a company that (at least, in the case of the latter group) can do business, but it’d be hard to find anyone who wouldn’t readily take that much cash with open arms.

edit: At the same time, is this really a good thing, though? The person of today certainly has more pressure on their mind than their predecessors might’ve, which certainly romanticizes the notion of unabashed hedonism. But Zach Braff movies be damned, there’s something to be said for hedonism’s general unpopularity (mostly regardless of position).

Indulging our collective base desires certainly feels nice, but the days when I read the front-page news notwithstanding, it’d be nice to think that people are capable of working for something more than general self-interest.)

…it’s getting harder to justify emptying out my bank account on a regular basis. The list of things I’d like to buy tends to increase at a pretty steady rate (Epiphone Riviera P-93 Limited Edition, Beatles: Rock Band, 13.3 inch MacBook Pro!), but, now being a partially financially-independent adult, the stuff I’ve got to pay for (rent, books, more books, work expenses), tends to cancel the other stuff out.

Plus, like walking the elderly across crosswalks and cotton candy, spending money on large-scale stuff tends to get more depressing the older you get. Taking a summer to save up for something’s still cute when you’re 12, but spending that much time for something when you’re in your 30s is usually the first sign of a midlife crisis.

Still, when push comes to shove, precedent isn’t exactly encouraging for me, at least. Given how many Beatles t-shirts I’ve got, Beatles: Rock Band is nothing less than a guaranteed purchase, I’ve been using the same guitar for the past 8 years, and my Macbook’s not liable to last for much longer with the abuse that being a student journalist/burgeoning alcoholic entails. I could definitely use the new stuff. But do I need it? Who knows.

Pop culture desk blotter: Sledgehammer/LTTP edition

(Twitter abuse hasn’t been kind to my blogging lately, but can I still write something that’s not for work that’s more than 140 characters? Let’s find out!)

OSHA Visits Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory

Mr. Wonka,

As an OSHA inspector, I am often witness to a variety of reprehensible acts by negligent employers, but in my 22 years on duty, our recent inspection of your facilities ranks among the worst I’ve ever seen.

Firstly, among your facilities’ numerous infractions, a random sampling of your candy products revealed a litany of foreign contaminants, ranging from gasoline to wooden splinters. Our inspectors are still investigating, but we suspect that your use of a giant chocolate river as both a delivery mechanism and for transportation may play some role in this. Mr. Wonka, this is the 21st century – there are countless (not to mention, more sanitary) ways to both move your employees from one area to another and transport ingredients throughout your production facilities, but your use of such an archaic device is suspect at best.

(Additionally, traces of human flesh were also found in the delivery tubes running through said river. Rest assured, the proper authorities are looking into the matter.)

Additionally, are you aware of the work being done in your research departments? In the course of our investigations, research subjects have reported symptoms ranging from discoloration of the skin, massive swelling, and in one case, a reorganization of their molecular structure. Such results would already be reprehensible in most cases, but the fact that your products are being marketed to children, Mr. Wonka, suggests that you need to take a serious look into the work that these departments are doing.

Lastly, our colleagues from Immigration and Customs Enforcement informed us of further concerns regarding your employment practices. During a recent visit, ICE officials allege that, upon asking for proof of citizenship from a group of your “Oompa-Loompa” workers, they proceeded to perform a choreographed musical number in unison before physically assaulting the agents and throwing them down a nearby trash chute. The agents are currently recovering from their injuries, but assault of a federal official is a serious matter, and we hope that you will treat the issue in an appropriate fashion.

These are all serious concerns, Mr. Wonka, and by our next visit, I hope that, for your sake, that your facilities are brought up to standard.

Regards,

Michael Z. Burton

OSHA Inspector

Inside The Cartridge: Super Mario Brothers 3

Scene: Flat stretch in level 1-1
-Is he gone?
-…It looks like it’s all clear.
-Jesus… they’re all dead.
-Mario – he just kept on hovering and jumping… and hovering and jumping… and jumping, and jumping…
-But why, why’s he doing this?
-Greed, son – he’s motivated for nothing else besides those damned gold coins. Whatever gets in between him and the coins, he kills – he’s sick. I heard that he can even make fire with his hands.
-You’re kidding.
-No, I saw him using it once – a deathly look comes over him, and the fireballs… he throws them everywhere.
-That’s messed up.
-What are we going to do if he comes back?
-I’ve talked it over with the other Goombas and I think we’ve figured out what to do if Mario comes back. We’re going to move left for a bit, then go back to the right and… wait for it… we’ll go back to the left again.
-My god… you are a genius walking among philistines, sir.
-I do what I can.
-…My god, he’s coming back!
-Waddle! Waddle away!

With apologies to Simon Rich