Shipboard Life; Up-side

Recall that someone makes my bed, does my laundry, prepares my meals? And, of course, I can't run any errands or do any yard work or clean the house or work on the perennial maintenance list. This means that the kind of time pressure and multi-tasking I am used to just doesn't happen. I have an 8 a.m. class every class day at sea (there are about five sea days throughout the voyage that are free days). I get up early enough to do my email and preparation before I lead a 7 am meditation session on the aft of the 4th deck, then have 'office hours' at breakfast in the 6th deck dining hall before class. We have a few exercise machines and very high demand for them, so we sign up the day before. I typically work-out mid-afternoon. At five pm most days I choose between a drumming group and going upstairs to the faculty lounge, front of the top deck with a view of where we are headed, for a glass of wine and conversation with colleagues. Then we wander off to dinner, or I skip dinner. There are lots of evening activities, many of which I would love to attend: lectures, coffee houses, poetry readings (one of our faculty is Gregory Orr, 28 books of poetry and lots of awards and a lovely man), demos, dance classes, yoga classes. Alas, I don't go to many of these because of my need for sleep and early rising.

Yesterday we had "Sea Olympics" (recall the silver sea of faculty), the kind of event from which I usually run and hide, with events like synchronized swimming, ping-pong, tug-rope, relay race, scrabble, scavenger hunt, and lip-sync as the finale. It is a real marketing event for the ship-shop (yes, we have a campus store on board), since the seas all have colors and the store caries SAS logo clothing in the full range of colors. The day was so much fun, especially the lip-sync, which the students did as full MTV productions, using parts of several songs to tell stories, fully choreographed and often with some projected graphics backdrop. There was lots of gender fun and high camp; there are 70% women and 30% men on the voyage so it makes for interesting social dynamics. I have at long last learned to appreciate hip-hop as tribalism (read: very communal), and I am much less worried about the way young people are immersed in eletronic life--they are in their bodies, too, in a way that my generation was not, and in a way that my parents generation was not.

I am much less busy than in my real life, and I could use the time to study and to write and to develop skills I've long wished I had--music, dance, language---but often I just sit and stare at the ocean, or feel the salt water inside me moving to the dance of the salt water outside. This is 'human being' Deb, one of our two psychologists reminds me. And so it is.