Fun Day at Sea, Part 1

Today was our first sea day. We slept in a little bit, but not as much as we really wanted to. When we got up we made our way to the dining room for sea day brunch. Alison has an omelet and I enjoyed steak and eggs. Our main goals for this sea day were to relax and eat good food. We were on our way to both goals.

After breakfast, we explored more of the ship and attended a presentation about our ports of call and other offerings of the ship. We then changed into our swimwear and headed to the Lido deck, where we would spend the bulk of our day. We found a couple of deck chairs and lounged. We both read our books. Alison is reading: My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman and I am reading Futureface: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging by Alex Wagner. It is a phenomenal book about family history, DNA, and cultural identity. Many parts of this book really resonated with me. Here is a smattering of passages that caught my attention:

"In reality, immigration isn't just outside versus inside, the lawful versus the illegal. It's a story about the messy, sad, terrifying, and occasionally beautiful experience of leaving one place and starting over in another. I realized my interest in the subject wasn't simply about politics, but in immigration as an interior act - becoming something new - and as the social act of losing one home and making another. Immigration raises into relief some of our most basic existential questions. Who am I? Where do I belong? And in that way, it's inextricably tied to an exploration of American identity. Here we are, in a nation of immigrants, exiles, captives, refugees, and displaced natives, staring together into that existential void."

"This was evidence of the powerful narcotic of identity: how quickly, and easily, one could go from pride to superiority, from celebration to dismissal of others. Even as I recognized this, even as I grew older and more acutely aware of how vigilant one needed to be in pushing back against the dark impulse to separate Us from Them, there is still something in me that clutched at supremacy, however subconsciously, as I thought about Burma's miseries. The distinction was a refuge - and who didn't want a refuge?"

"It was sickening, the rage and destruction, hell-bent nationalism run amok - but also familiar to anyone raised in the twentieth-century West. Why did we keep doing this to ourselves, over and over again? I'd thought, or hoped, that Burma before its fall had somehow been different, exempt from the cruelties of the masses, free from the bloody entitlements of power. It was not."

"Henry Wager and his white descendants were allowed to lay claim to the title of "American" because somewhere along the way, the country had decided that white American outsiders, if residents for a sufficient amount of time, were not outsiders, they became, simply, Americans. But brown American outsiders were - and would always be - brown American outsiders. They could (eventually) be ennobled with the "American" title, but only in hyphenation: African-American, Burmese-American, Mexican-American, as if the hyphenation clarified that these people were not exactly full Americans."

"When I looked at the map of the world - found on each company's website - highlighting the countries where my DNA could be found, I was awash in pride. I had no claim to Australia, Greenland, the Middle East, most of East and West Africa, or Russia - but other than those places the entire world was highlighted, based on full color by my DNA. This was visual confirmation about ole future face - numbers that reflected a certain global reach: I was quite literally a citizen of the world!... I had a third-party assessment showing my universality, my mutability - and that seemed a reason for hope. So much has been made about our borders, and how effectively we might close them off and secure the entry points to "protect" our national identity. But here was a body that bled across the world - from sea to shining sea. My map was a refutation of xenophobia, a double-down bet on the world as a place of commingling and communication, rather than a series of tightly drawn political boundaries and passport checkpoints."

"My people were in the hordes - masses who fell asleep on the subway because they were working too hard or maybe too drunk, who honked incessantly and inappropriately because dammit, Don't block the box! In taxicabs. In crowds. Swarming, moving, chaotic throngs of people who were white and black and brown and soon-to-become brown and just lately brown...All these people, pushing toward one another but also toward something else - something unseen but still bigger, better, and undeniably ours. I had been looking in all the wrong places for the string that connected us - in family lore and foreign cities and dusty files and sampled spit. I had asked dead men and dead women for the answers to my questions, but of course, they couldn't give them to me, couldn't tell me who I was and where I belonged. The people who knew (even without knowing they knew) were alive. They'd been with me from the beginning." 

We took breaks from reading to eat ice cream, visit the taco bar where we got delicious tacos and burritos, and every once in a while we jumped in the pool or a hot tube. It was a perfectly relaxing and delightful afternoon.

We retired to our room to refresh. Then we got dressed up for a formal night. We love formal nights and we’re excited to wear some new clothes. We went to the early show. It was a magic show accompanied by carnival dancers. We took a few photos and ate dinner in the dining room. We also visited the comedy club for another very funny show before calling it a night. We loved our ship day and we are excited to wake up in Cozumel, Mexico tomorrow.