Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals by Wendy Dale

layover at the Phoenix airport, sitting at the gate waiting for my flight that I began to feel the effect of travel on my outlook. In my own time zone for the first time in weeks, I was having a hard time. It wasn’t the fact that my neck ached, my head hurt, my feet were sore, or that my body clock was set ten hours ahead. It was that after Beirut, everything around me seemed so trivial. The conversation going on across from me went something like this:
    â€œHave you had those new lattes?” an overweight woman with feathered and frosted hair asked her friend, pronouncing the word “latte” to rhyme with “batty.”
    â€œYou like lattes? Cappuccinos are better. Or you can have them with chocolate. That’s called a mocha.”
    â€œHow about café au laits? You like those?”
    â€œI don’t know. I never had one.”
    I was tempted to walk up to them and tell them it was coffee for God’s sake—it was some grounds, some water, and some milk, and it really didn’t matter. What mattered was the fact that their houses weren’t being bombed, that half the people they knew hadn’t been killed, that they could sleep at night, not worried that the roof above their heads would soon be lying on their chests.
    But I kept it to myself. I sat in my chair, watching the planes take off and land, quietly smiling, thinking that my friends truly did have something to be jealous of, after all.

Chapter Three
    Cuba Libre, Muy Libre
    All of the boring people I knew—the ones who led lives I didn’t want mine to turn out like—they had one thing in common: they all had jobs. I realized this on an especially dreary Monday morning at Hughes Aircraft. Days earlier, I had been fleeing bombs and sniper fire in Beirut, sipping
arrack,
and inhaling the smoke from a
nargeileh,
but now I was back where I had started, looking out at the world through the window in my office. The change I’d undergone in Beirut had been fleeting thanks to a little fun damperer called work.
    The monotony was worse than it had been before because now I had a different frame of reference. I had memories of warm flatbread topped with oregano and other spices, dribbled with olive oil and oozing melted cheese. The engineers around me had never tasted freshly heated
mankoushi,
which is why they were able to sit there day after day leading productive, fulfilled, flatbread-free lives—because they had no idea what they were missing out on.
    The work itself wasn’t what bothered me, rather, it was the predictability of it all. Every day at 8 A.M., the same freeway, the same office, the same boring business attire. The days of my life stretched out in front of me, one after the other, no surprises in store. I wanted my life to matter, to mean something, not just to get used up and discarded like a roll of disposable towels.
    Quitting my job would have been easy if it weren’t for the simple matter of supporting myself. I had no idea how to get out of working and still earn a living. Had I had some sage guidance from, say, an eloquent and wise mentor or, lacking that, a really good Magic 8 Ball, I might have been able to get some valuable insight into what was soon to occur, a conversation such as the following:
    WENDY: Will I have the same job in three months?
    MAGIC 8 BALL: No.
    WENDY: Will I be broke in three months?
    MAGIC 8 BALL: No.
    WENDY: What is to become of my life?
    MAGIC 8 BALL: Your future is inexplicably intertwined with that of Wink Martindale. 7
    Since I never did get my hands on that Magic 8 Ball (meaning that the preceding conversation never actually took place) when I met Wink Martindale three months later, needless to say, it came as a complete surprise to me.
    My life changed with a phone call. When I received it, I had been at my wit’s end, wondering how I was going to pay my rent and the stack of bills that kept piling up while I survived on Top Ramen and adrenaline.