I went to Mexico a couple of weeks ago--it was awesome. I've never been on the sort of vacation like this one; I spend all of my time laying by the pool, swimming in the ocean harassing cabana boys, and getting ripped off by the locals. We went clubbing and did nothing that would threaten to increase our cultural awareness or knowledge. All of my previous vacations usually focused on going to museums and walking around. Relentlessly walking. A vacation isn't truly a vacation unless one emerges with blisters, I had thought.
This time, though, I didn't stay in a tiny, dirty shithole where I would feel intellectually superior to my lower-class fellow men staying in resorts. This time, I stayed in a hotel with air conditioning and three pools. I got my version of a tan--a large number of freckles on my shoulders that began to blend together and a burnt nose. My legs, luckily, remain pasty white.
I met a sweet Mexican boy in a club, seven years my junior, who claimed to be on hallucinogenics. He pulled out a cigarette and started flicking drops of water onto it until it was nearly soaked. I asked him what he was doing.
"It lasts longer this way," he explained. "I learned it in jail." I asked what he was in jail for. Stealing a truck, it turned out. And having marijuana on him at the time. The final blow was, he told me, when he beat up a police officer.
"Why did you do that?" I asked.
"He was kicking my..." The boy struggled for the correct word. "He kicked my puppy. My dog? No, he kicked my puppy." He smiled, glad to have properly conveyed his love for his puppy.
A few days after getting back from Mexico, I went on a business trip to LA. This was very exciting as I got a rental car with power windows and locks, and got to hit the LA freeways ala Clueless. I also got to see some old friends and talk smack about other old friends. I stayed at a loud hipster hotel that is notable only for the fact that they have a naked model lounging in a glass box behind the reception desk. When I checked in, she was listening to her ipod. If I wanted to see a chick in her underwear lazing around looking disaffected, I'd check out a mirror on any given weekend.
The hotel was filled with overly tan hipsters of all ages, clearly abusers of both children and cocaine. Bleached teeth (and probably assholes) were everywhere. Not long after checking in, I lay in bed, cursing youth. The pounding music in the club downstairs was shaking my room, and penetrating my earplugs. My hatred for hipsters grew by the second. By midnight, I became the woman that called the front desk begging that the bass be turned down. I had to wake up early, after all. It's official now, I've gotten old.
