Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise

"I am suffering here from a delusion, and I
know it's a delusion, this envy of another ship,
but still it's painful. It's also representative of a
psychological syndrome that I notice has gotten
steadily worse as my' Luxury Cruise wears
on, a mental list of dissatisfactions that started
off picayune but has quickly become despairgrade.
I know that the syndrome's cause is not
simply the contempt bred of a week's familiarity
with the poor old Nadir,
and that the source of all
the dissatisfactions isn't the
Nadir at all but rather that
ur-Arnerican part of me
that craves pampering and
passive pleasure: the dissatisfied-
infant part of
me, the part that always
and indiscriminately
WANTS. Hence this
syndrome by which, for
example, just four days ago I experienced
such embarrassment over the perceived self-indulgence
of ordering even more gratis food
from cabin service that I littered the bed with
fake evidence of hard work and missed meals,
whereas by last night I find myself looking at
my watch in real annoyance after fifteen minutes
and wondering where the fuck is that cabin
service guy with the tray already. And by
now I notice how the tray's sandwiches are
kind of small, and how the wedge of dill pickle
always soaks into the starboard crust of the
bread, and how the port hallway is too narrow
to really let me put the used cabin service tray
outside 1009's door at night when I'm done
eating, so that the tray sits in the cabin all
night and in the morning adulterates the olfactory
sterility of 1009 with a smell of rancid
horseradish, and how this seems, by the Luxury
Cruise's fifth day, deeply dissatisfying.
Death and Conroy notwithstanding, we're
maybe now in a position to appreciate [he
falsehood at the dark hearr of Celebrity's
brochure. For this-the promise to sate the
part of me that always and only WANTS-is
the central fantasy the brochure is selling. The
thing to notice is that the real fantasy here
isn't that this promise will be kept but that
such a promise is keepable at all. This is a big
one, this lie.28 And of course I want to believe
it; I want to believe that maybe this ultimate
fantasy vacation will be enough pampering,
that this time the luxury and pleasure will be
so completely and faultlessly administered
that my infantile part will be sated at last. But
the infantile part of me is, by its very nature
and essence, insatiable. In fact, its whole raison
consists of its insatiability. In response to
any environment of extraordinary gratification
and pampering, the insatiable-infant part
of me will simply adjust its desires upward until
it once again levels out at its homeostasis
of terrible dissatisfaction. And sure enough,
after a few days of delight and then adjustment
on the Nadir, the Pamper-swaddled part
of me that WANTS is now back, and with a
vengeance. By Wednesday, I'm acutely conscious
of the fact that the A.C. vent in my
cabin hisses (loudly), and
that although I can turn off
the reggae Muzak coming
out of the speaker in the
cabin I cannot turn off
the even louder ceilingspeaker
out in the 10-
Port hall. Now I notice
that when Table 64's
towering busboy uses his
crumb-scoop to clear off
the tablecloth between
courses he never seems to get quite all the
crumbs. When Petra makes my bed, not all
the hospital corners are at exactly the same
angle. Most of the nightly stage entertainment
in the Celebrity Show Lounge is so bad
it's embarrassing, and the ice sculptures at the
Midnight Buffet often look hurriedly carved,
and the vegetable that comes with my entree
is continually overcooked, and it's impossible
to get really numbingly cold water out of
1009's bathroom tap.
I'm standing here on Deck 12 looking at the
Dreamward, which I bet has cold water that'd
turn your knuckles blue, and, like Frank Conroy,
part of me realizes that I haven't washed a
dish or tapped my foot in line behind somebody
with multiple coupons at a supermarket
checkout in a week; and yet instead of feeling
refreshed and renewed I'm anticipating how totally
stressful and demanding and unpleasurable
a return to regular landlocked adult life is
going to be now that even just the premature
removal of a towel by a sepulchral crewman
seems like an assault on my basic rights, and
the sluggishness of the Aft elevator is an outrage.
And as I'm getting ready togo down to
lunch I'm mentally drafting a really mordant
footnote on my single biggest peeve about the
Nadir: they don't even have Mr. Pibb; they
foist Dr. Pepper on you with a maddeningly unapologetic
shrug when any fool knows that Dr.
Pepper is no substitute for Mr. Pibb, and it's an
absolute goddamned travesty, or-at best--ex- .
tremely dissatisfying indeed."

http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557