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Friday, May 24
Woke up around 4 and couldn’t sleep. Too hot? Perhaps. Stared at my phone for a while, then opened Apple News – what is it there for me? That one recommended to me Gary Shteyngart’s essay in the Atlantic about going alone on a Caribbean cruise for seven days and talking to Ayn Rand fans from New Jersey. Turns out it’s a whole category of essays started by David Foster Wallace – a writer goes on the cruise and then complains about it.
Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace, who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.
I have never been on a cruise, but I feel like if I had to go on one, I would be just fine in my cabin reading books all day and quoting them all over my hypothetical cruise essay.
I went for a run around 7. I thought it would be less hot in the morning, but no, mornings are quite hot too. Sweating like shit.
I cooked a good breakfast (buckwheat fried with mushroom, onion, and egg), then worked from home all morning, moving to a cafe in the afternoon. Figuring out React to Native and back interaction. That turned out tricky. Native is Swift, on iOS, but there is also the Android native. Apple Pay and Android Pay are all processed in native code. That was unexpected work for what I thought would be a simple validation action when clicking on the "Pay" button. So I worked till 7 trying to finish at least the iOS part.
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Hmm. I remember how we take a boat to watch glaciers, from Whittier, and there was a lonely Indian guy on a deck, totally ignored by others. I talked with him about this and that, and it was ok. But of course the while tourists were probably clueless about how one can talk to an Indian.
On the other hand, these other passengers did not have problems talking to me, about their lives on a military base, about there marriage and divorce... not much about Russia, I don't advertise my Russian background (I don't hide it either). I'm 99% sure that Gary could find, on a large cruise boat, someone with whom he could find things to talk about. So (sorry), but I blame him. He found a wrong crowd, I guess.
Ok, I never tried a cruise either, we prefered to criss-cross the US in a car. Will try, though, next spring. We will see.
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Oh. Meaning that they did not listen to him attentively.