That's seriously what a fortune cookie I once got at Runk read. Well howdy, time-travelers! My name's Erik Silk, and I'm not going to be anywhere near any of you for the next three and a half months. The program is called Semester at Sea: I go to the Bahamas, get on a boat and travel the world while taking 12 credits of classes questionable in their academic difficulty. The celebrated Archbishop (or something like that) Desmond Tutu will be on board throughout, and you can bet that I'll be both interviewing and pranking him to no end. We steam along from port to port, traveling west to east from the Caribbean, in what everyone and their grandma has been telling me will be "the voyage of a lifetime." ® I'm a bit skeptical, though. I always figured that the voyage of a lifetime was, you know, life in general. But what do I know? Anyway, join me as we travel the seven seas in search of a good mixed drink and struggling third-world economies!
So, you thought I was going to jump right into the whole Semester at Sea thing, didn't you? WRONG, NANNY MCPHEE. The ship doesn't head out until Super Bowl Sunday, and by my count, this column runs Thursday. Therefore, I'm going to talk about air travel.
I departed from Dulles International Airport on Tuesday afternoon, and let me tell you, it was fantastic. The line for security was practically non-existent, and they didn't even confiscate my nail clippers like usual! Not that I can possibly fathom how you could harm someone with those things, unless that someone was blind and/or paper-thin.
I flew JetBlue on this particular outing, which took me to lovely Fort Lauderdale, Fla. I have a lot of things to say about JetBlue, but I'm not sure that I'm allowed to do so in a respected publication without overt corporate ties such as this one, so I will just say this -- no, on second thought I won't. I do, however, have to mention that JetBlue has televisions in the headrests for any flight, regardless of the passenger class. And these aren't recorded programs we're talking about, this is an actual satellite feed. What beautiful nonsense, I say! Yet, I really didn't feel like watching TV. After stagnating the bejeezus out of my mind with the latest MAD Magazine (no offense whatsoever intended to the wonderful, timeless publication), I wanted to put some slightly more civilized material into my head, so I opened up a fresh Vonnegut novel.
I was weak, though. That little headrest monitor called to me, and I answered before we hit 35,000 feet. And perhaps it's just cognitive dissonance, but I'm starting to believe that I got more culture out of that two-hour DirecTV experience than I would have with 150 pages of "Breakfast of Champions." Allow me to expound, dear reader: have you ever, too lazy in your passenger mindset to take out your headphones and plug them into the armrest, watched 20 minutes of "The Fairly OddParents" without any sound at all? Your mind fills in the dialogue in the otherwise silent, madcap, faster-paced-than-even-SpongeBob antics of little Timmy and his fairy friends. It's not simply creatively enriching -- it's invigorating. Next, I changed channels to see what BBC America had to offer. It was a pre-James Bond Roger Moore program previously unknown to me, called "The Saint." It provided valuable insight into the wit and quirks of the criminal underworld of 1966 London, and taught me that the prisons of 40 years ago involved friendly handshakes and sparring over who gets which bunk, quite unlike the uncouth inmate practices of today. I continued on to the Game Show Network, which taught me that contestants of the '70s were substantially more intelligent than those of today, and that Pat Sajak might be Canadian. Don't quote me on that, though. My last stop was the Weather Channel, where I watched the cold fronts moving into the Eastern Seaboard and laughed maniacally. That's right, I'll be dancing around the tropical warmth of the equator until May, when it'll be warm here anyway. But I won't get to savor the great things of Charlottesville -- Bodo's, Harris Teeter, being incredibly drunk and thus not able to feel the single-digit temperatures, etc. Before this starts sounding like some kind of Life column, let me finish up.
So I walked off of that plane feeling like a new man, refreshed by the wonders of television. Now begins my true journey: living on a cruise ship where the ratio of girls to guys is four to one. Please don't hate me. Join me next time, when I objectively test the lavatories of the MV Explorer against my decidedly rigid standards. Seriously.
Erik Silk's columns run whenever they wash up in a bottle. He cannot be reached because he is lost at sea
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