Shiplife-between Puerto Rico and Brazil
“Hi, what’s your name? Where do you live? Where do you go to school? What’s your major? What classes are you taking? What are you doing in Brazil? Wait, what’s your name again? It was nice to meet you.”
If conversation goes beyond that, it’s often to complain about the amount of reading that everyone has, or to talk about how rocky the ship is at that particular moment.
After so many of these same silly conversations, I wonder, when is this going to end? When will I get to stop meeting all these people that I’ve got nothing in common with other than our being here? I feel like it might be useful to have a button that just says it all for me, and press it when I meet someone new.
“Hi, my name is Jessica. I live in Tennessee. I go to the University of Tennessee. My family now lives on the Eastern shore of Maryland. I’m majoring in journalism. I’m taking Writing About Travel, Perspectives on Peace, and Gender, Class, Race/Ethnicity and Social Change. Again, my name is Jessica. Oh, you are from Colorado, huh? Yeah, it’s Jessica.” I think such a button would be pretty useful. It would save some time.
Don’t get me wrong, here. I’m having a great time. And I have met people that I actually like a lot. But for me to really make friends, it always takes some time. In this more intense version of real life, I feel like I’m not being granted the time it takes for me to make truly good friends. Everyone has already formed their cliques, even me, but I just wonder how separated these groups will end up being, and if they will change throughout this voyage.
This more intense version of real life also forces me to be around the kind of people that I have been able to steer clear of at my own campus. Like girls that brought more clothes on the ship than all of the clothes I own. Sometimes I feel like I have suddenly been thrown back to middle or high school, where I wasn’t so comfortable with myself, and felt like the ridiculous judgments of other people really mattered. Then I have to remind myself that in the last few years, the entire population didn’t change and stop being judgmental. I just mostly stopped caring. So why should I start that up again now?
On another note, it’s overwhelming to think about the amount of privilege we all have in order to be here right now. Street children in Brazil don’t get to think about the enormity of the world, as I did looking out from the deck yesterday. People dying of AIDS in Africa don’t have the time to sit around talking about the struggles of their class and race and gender. Child prostitutes in Cambodia don’t get the opportunity to get an elementary education, let alone a college education on an enormous ship sailing around the world.
It just makes me feel that much more pressure to do something about anything, but all this reality just makes the job look so much harder than I already knew it was. And we aren’t even to our second port yet.
Then I get taken back to the “reality” on the ship although that’s probably a silly term to use, because I’m not entirely sure what it means. Especially here.
“Oh my god, is that going to be, like, drama?” said some girl laying on the 7th deck.
“It already is, because John likes Ashley not Sara,” said the girl’s friend.
“I like need to meet this Ashley character,” she replied.
Hmm. This will be an interesting semester.
*i wrote this for writing about travel, so it’s definitey a different format than the first one. but im sorry its just so exhausting to do an account of every single thing, and i think this gives you a good enough look at life on the ship. by the way, i take back the thing about the food that i said in the puerto rico post. i mean its still good most of the time but the vegetarian options are often “vegetable delight” or “vegetables in cream sauce” which just means vegetables in various types of watery sauces. but its alright most of the time, haha.
of course, i miss you guys. peace out
