I need a vacation from my vacation has to be a peculiarly first world problem. Just typing it makes me feel fat, lazy and spoiled.
Of course, I am fat, though this isn’t always obvious thanks to the counterbalancing optical illusion of my height. When you are taller than most people, they don’t always realize how big around you are. If they do note my considerable girth, a sort of mental calculus happens in the viewer’s head that usually works out in my favor. Tall and fat equates to husky or bulky. Short and fat is not calculated so forgivingly. There’s less acreage to spread out the weight.
I am also if not lazy then a great lover of ease, which is no bad thing as far as I am concerned. I work hard when I need to, but would rather not, especially if a touch of brain power can spare me a little back agony. If you want to know the easiest way to do some-thing, ask a lazy man.
As for being spoiled? Well, I probably am a little bit. I do believe in spoiling oneself from time to time. Thankfully, I am a creature of simple pleasures. Good food to maintain my svelte figure and a good book or good movie with which to laze the afternoon away are usually enough to keep me content. Honestly, even a bad book or a bad movie will do if the alternative is yard work. Just the other weekend I was picking up sticks in the yard prior to mowing and a merciful, procrastinatory rainstorm chased me from the yard into the air-conditioned comfort of the house.
Why then do vacations feel like so much work? The question is purely rhetorical. Vacations are full of running to and fro, carrying bags and luggage like the family pack mule, checking off lists, buying everything you forgot to pack, driving for hours, gas stops, bathroom breaks, lots of punishing direct sunlight, breaking up squabbles among the youngsters, terse discussions with one’s spouse about whether we are going the right way and so on. The list is almost literally endless.
Being bone weary and a bundle of frazzled nerves before the whole thing begins doesn’t help either. It is an unwritten law of the universe that by the time you take a vacation it is usually at least two months overdue. Still, that is just a matter of self-awareness and timing. I’m self-aware enough to know I’m fat, lazy and spoiled. I also have curiously good timing, usually pulling out a win at the last possible minute— usually.
Promising to help move a bunch of furniture (see, I told you I wasn’t scared of hard work!) a few days before leaving was probably an error. And who could have foreseen the HVAC system in the attic suddenly gushing water from the ceiling onto my precious books in the middle of moving said furniture? Putting off cleaning the back porch and replacing our rattletrap washer and dryer until our return was also not very wise.
Monday morning, back at work, I realize I need another vacation. I’m just not sure I could survive it.
