Starting Tomorrow Early

Saturday, March 17, 2007

I just awoke from a dream. It was a dream lost and deep, as within an ocean, in the early morning hours when even reality is quiet and shifting. In my dream I’d ended my Peace Corps service. I had arrived for a time in Nowhere, U.S.A. and I was placed in a high-rise hotel, in an apartment-esque suite. The giant room was top quality, with food overflowing from the shelves and welcome gifts along the counter. The glimmering floors and metal refrigerator threw me fake smiles in a gooey-sweet, grotesque manner. My mother called, and then my father, to congratulate me. Then I stepped out into the world I had left behind for two long years; long not because they represented a weary, unknowable journey, but rather because I had become a different person. I knew that in my dream.

As I made my way down the enormous hall, I explored the new territory. People were bustling about, no doubt on vacation, but their getaways appeared to resemble more of a preoccupied state of frenzy. They HAD to get down to Activity A immediately in order to squeeze in that massage, and be to dinner in time to make it to the matinee, etc. I made a wrong turn down the hall and found myself in a video/book store. All the DVD’s had the same up-and-coming actress advertised across the front, in a variety of sentimental or death-defying scenarios, depending on the film’s budget. In one scene she was the elf in a Christmas film, maternally cradling a child star – in the other she was leaping over a burning building, sex-goddess meets tae kwon do instructor. The room was dizzying and full of bodies that clearly understood the new system. It did not involve waiting in a line at a cash register, but rather a flip of a card across the front of an intended purchase. So I made my way to what was more familiar – the book section. Like a shiny, new age pattern of a quilt, the books gleamed so brightly that they hurt my unaccustomed eyes. Once my sight had adjusted, I made out the titles, many of which had been arranged in a Magic Eye technique, so that the words pop out at you and dance across your irises seductively. “How to Lose Weight by Consuming Only Chocolate” was one of them. “A Quick Fix-It Guide to Slowing Down Your Life … In Only 5 Minutes a Day!” was another. Feeling a bit nauseated, I left the store.

The bellhop I met along the way was not a normal bellhop. Apparently, bell hops were no longer people you could trust, well-intended individuals in funny little hats who could direct you to the nearest anywhere, with a small tip required. Against my prior knowledge, I found myself in the midst of negotiating a high-cost escape route that required bribe sums of money. He pulled me into a corner of the hall as people passed and stole suspicious glances with a shrewd sideways glare. He had a twitch that must have been acquired due to the stress of his job, and there was a film of sweat along the baby hair of his upper lip. People no longer get something for nothing, he told me. If I was unfamiliar with the area, I was a particularly rare find. I politely thanked him but said I was not in need of help today, slowly walked backward a few steps, and then bolted around the corner.

I burst through the front doors of the seven-star hotel and screeched to a halt as this new world unfolded before me. I had spent the last two years on a tiny island in a community of less than 2,000 dispersed along the upward slanting crater of a volcano. Now, thousands of quickly moving bodies running from Activity A to Activity B spread before me. At this early hour, a few were congratulating themselves because they were already on Activity C! Having sprinted through the first two, of course. Yet they wore beaming, hurried faces. They had had their fun faster than everyone else. The thousands of squirming, bickering, laughing, arguing, rushing bodies shuffled against an idyllic backdrop: an enormous fountain, perfectly spaced planted trees, color-coordinated flowers arranged in shades and areas that were psychologically intended to make people hungry, happy, make them spend more money. The fountain bubbled intoxicatingly, trees swayed and ushered the preoccupied humans along plumes of flowers that whispered the latest PR advertisements.

I found myself caught up in the current of this well-orchestrated tide of confusion that led me to yet another hotel. There I ran into a girl I recognized from the basketball team in high school. She was polite yet relatively unperturbed by this sudden happenstance. Her life was too busy and she too important to slow her pace at the slightest unforeseen event. She led me into her office within the hotel where she worked. She had a mustache and a small goatee, completely natural, she assured me. All the women lately were choosing to embrace their masculinity, were taking testosterone pills to be like men in order to shun femininity and all that was associated with the gender. Women can be men, she said. I began to wonder what was wrong with women being women, but kept my thoughts to myself. She wasn’t paying attention to me anyway – two of her friends had arrived, each sporting matching goatees, which, by the way are the latest craze on the runways nowadays, they offhandedly remarked to me. Then they launched into a discussion about that night’s party and a variety of other tabloid-related gossip mixed with the necessary comments of the perils of war (no girl could be taken seriously about the latest ab workout without first demonstrating her wealth of knowledge on the topic of world reports).

In dream-like fashion the scene was shifted elsewhere and I found myself warped and shot out into the poolside party. The three manly women were at my side, pressed into cocktail dresses that accentuated their firm, grapefruit breasts. They each stood with their womanly hips jutted out, hairy legs delicately placed into size seven Steve Madden heels. Each took particular care sipping her champagne. The lipstick stays on the mouth, the facial hair in place, they told me. I took my leave of them. The party was a high-class event and an ocean of yuppies was crowded along the stadium seats that overlooked a poolside resort, each flashing wealth and speaking of the dire necessity to cure AIDS, world hunger, poverty, and tan lines. Engulfed in the wining and dining, I realized that years of straining to understand Kriolu in an African crowd was now replaced by dozens of partygoers whom I could understand. “Good God, I would NEVER wear purple past March!” a drunken woman cried as she crashed into me, feathers and diamonds flying.

Just then the lights went out. The drunken woman I was attempting to untangle myself from screamed a momentous scream, along with a chorus of others. Though surrounding lights from the city made it possible to see, the partygoers erupted in a sea of despair. A GQ model grabbed my ass as he fell to the floor. My friend with the goatee was atop a landing, looking particularly panicked, her lipstick smudged and her mascara eyes lined in terror as her gruff voice shouted orders to the fumbling staff. “It’s okay!” I shouted up to her. “It’s no big deal, just a power outage. It happens all the time in Cape Verde!” to no avail, as she was engulfed in waves of tuxedoes and hairpins.

“You were in Africa?!?” An old, disillusioned woman’s voice finds me and pours her words like syrup atop my head. “We are just so fond of those who help the poor, you dear soul!” she exclaimed as I wrestled free from the manicured claws of her grip. Like a traditional rain dance, the bodies around me moved and squirmed, as though they were fighting the gods of nature, searching the polluted skies for escape. The god was found. Someone called the electric company and with the whoosh of a finger the almighty CEO flipped a switch and the god of light sashayed in on artificial rays. The crowd of pearls, cufflinks that said “Save Darfur” and fake fur garments (a woman’s got to save the animals, dammit) bowed down in thanks. There was later a support group session organized for those caught in the moments of darkness to express the terror they had endured that night. It was orchestrated by owners of the hotel in response to concerns of a lawsuit, but the well-intended workshop turned into a drunken debate on the ills of Wal-Mart.

Me? Well, I was lost. I could not find my way back to the hotel and I kept getting attacked by cleavage and suits congratulating me on my fearless escapades in the “darker side of the world.” I had no money with which to bribe the local bellhop and I was concerned that an iPod/TV/cell phone/GPS system would knock me out under the inattentiveness of a distracted owner (note: walking while under the use of iPods was outlawed last year due to some near-deaths). I listened to the latest news from the bubbling of the fountain and the trees kept me company as they urged me along the flower-lined paths. It was the middle of the night, but some goal-oriented families were already up and running to Activity A. Unwavering parents dragging their sleepy children by the hands under a thick night sky as they set out to have their fun first. They wanted to start tomorrow early, and they were determined not to miss it.

I awoke with my own determination: to slow down and live.

“When you let your time become money you cheapen your life. One measure of a culture is its treatment of time. In the United States time is money: we save it, spend it, invest, it, and waste it. Not so in traditional Italy. Here life is rich and savored slowly. In Italy – like in India – time is more like chewing gum. You munch on it an play with it … as if it will be there forever.”

-Rick Steves, Postcards from Europe