Why vacations should be banned…

We are, generally speaking, creatures of habit. Or at least, so "they" say. I have no idea who coined that phrase originally, and personally, I have always rebelled against it. "Creature of habit" sounds to me like a great description of a cow or a chicken, but not me. Habits are boring, confining, stifling, routine.

And I don’t want routines.

I try to avoid getting stuck in a rut, doing the same thing day in, day out. Over and over. That’s for hamsters in habitrails.

And yet…

For some reason vacations throw me off completely. Maybe it’s a sign of getting older. Maybe this never used to be the case, I don’t remember. (Another disturbing reminder of my ever-increasing age).

All I know is that my wife’s parents, in an act of amazing generosity, took us to Mexico with them over Spring Break. It was amazing. We stayed on the stunning island of Cozumel, which is near Belize, on the Caribbean coast. Beautiful sun, beautiful sea, delicious food. I think I wore my swimsuit all day long and the coldest it got, even at night, was about 70 degrees. What a place.

But it took me at least 4 days to actually settle down and relax once we got there. I am apparently so used to my little routine-that-is-not-a-routine that going away threw me off completely and it was really hard to adapt. I was so tense and wound-up I didn’t know what to do. Where were my books? My classes? My Greek vocab cards? My daily quizzes? My long commute? My computer? I was flapping around like a fearful flailing flounder on the floor of a foreign French fishing boat.

But, eventually I did adapt…and settled down...and relaxed...and tuned out...just in time to come home and be thrown out of whack all over again. And now I have to suddenly get back into my old routine-that-is-not-a -routine again and my brain is just not functioning. Reading takes longer. Analytical skills are gone. Drive and motivation are way down. Focus has evaporated. What on earth is going on?

No stress.

Stress - my dear friend, my best buddy, the one who sustains me at 2 in the morning as I struggle to pull together random thoughts and quotes into meaningful prose has left me and I don’t know where he is.

If you have any suggestions for where I can find him, please let me know.

In the meantime, I propose that we do away with vacations – they obviously do more harm than good.