I suppose, technically, I was the one who was gone, but who's keeping score? All of you? Ah. Right.
Well, as promised, I did, in fact, take a vacation. To Cozumel, Mexico. Cozumel was everything that home was not. Warm, sunny, and lacking in snow. I was pretty ok with that. We (my wife sized unit and I) enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. There were some friends down there with us which made it even more fun shaped.
There was a lot of time spent in the actual sun. No surprise there. Tans and burns did abound. As did food and tiny lizards.
One day we all went and took a "class". It was called "Salsa Salsa." The purpose of this class was "salsa". We learned how to make different kinds of a salsa and, in the process, ate a LOT of salsa. We also learned how to Salsa dance. I am pretty confident that what we were being taught was "Salsa" dancing in the most loose definition of "Salsa" dancing. It was similar to salsa dancing in the same way that "blueberries" and "steak" are similar foods.
We didn't care. We all had fun.
We also wandered through the touristy downtown of Cozumel. That was... well, let's just say that there are many wonderful reasons to go to Cozumel. This was not one of them. But if you are looking to take home some souvenirs for friends, family, and co-workers, that's where you need to go.
Completely unrelated. Am I the only one who is always tempted to say the word "co-workers" as though it is spelled "cow-orkers"?
Every. Time. I have no idea why. But it amuses me to know end. I've always wanted to walk into the office and, with my best knight-of-the-round-table voice greet them with, "Hello, my fellow cow-orkers! It does warm my heart to see you well and refreshed for the days battle!"
There is literally no scenario in my life where that would be appropriate, or make any actual sense to anyone.
And thus my sadness.
Hmm...
Where was I...
Oh yes. Cozumel.
One thing I got to do was go scuba diving. I was able to make four dives over two days. Scuba diving is a ton of fun. It's like flying. Except, you know, you are under water. And there are fish. Which makes sense because of the underwater part.
The water is super clear there, and it turns out the bottom of the ocean (as if I was down miles and miles...) is quite beautiful. We spent most of our time at depths between 40-60 feet, but did spend a little time as deep as 90 or so.
There is a lot of white sand down there. In that white sand is coral. Some of it purple. Some of it brown. Some of it yellow. The fish down there where colors like blue, and yellow, and black, and orange.
On one dive, we dropped into the water right in the middle of a... school?... of jelly fish. I know what you are thinking. "Isn't that bad?" I hear you say. Well, usually it is to be avoided. These particular jellies were pretty harmless. They didn't bother you and they didn't have the long "stinger tentacles" that you usually think of with jelly fish. Although one brave little jelly (they were all about the size of a nickel) tried to eat my friends finger. And by "eat", I mean it basically enveloped the tip of one finger, wiggled a little, than swam away.
Not very ferocious.
They were pretty cool.
That said, I was definitely wary. We all know the legends of jelly fish. The ones that sting you in horrible ways. There are jelly fish off the coast of Australia, I think, that are pretty small, but have super long trailing "stingers". If one even touches you, it sends so much pain into you that if you don't die before they get you out of the water, you wish you had. The pain is so bad if you survive that no amount of pain meds even scratch the surface of it. Unless they do a spinal block, you basically suffer in incalculable agony for days or weeks till it goes away on it's own.
Most jelly fish aren't that dangerous. But if you get stung, you know it.
So, I was pretty wary at first. Later on a different dive I kept seeing this... stuff, floating by. At first I thought it was those "floaties" you get in your eyes. But as I looked closely, they were these completely transparent... somethings. Something akin to jelly fish. Long and thin with long trailing "stinger tentacles."
I tried to avoid those.
I did not succeed.
Being that they were mostly invisible, I inevitably had one graze my hand right between two fingers.
Those two fingers immediately burst into flame under water. At least, that's what it felt like. Both fingers felt like they had been zapped by large amounts of electricity that did not immediately stop flowing.
If you shout profanity underwater through a breather and no one can hear you, does it still count?
Probably.
It subsided after a few minutes (both the pain and profanity). But holy electrocution, Batman! That stuff smarts.
Scuba is fun and the wild life is beautiful, but it is not without it's dangers. But, you know that going in and you try to be careful. There is a lot of open space, so, you know, it's not hard to be safe.
Which brings me to the shark.
When you are floating along and look down and see a seven foot shark, should you swim over and take a look? Or keep on floating and admire it from afar?
Well, it wasn't the super aggressive kind of shark. It was a Nurf shark, or Nerf shark, or some word that is pronounced like that but spelled completely different.
They leave you alone. But I suspect that if one felt you were stalking it, it might decide it needed to let you know that's not allowed.
This one played nice.
I also saw some barracuda. They tended to travel in pairs. I also left them alone.
The giant turtles were the coolest things for me. HUGE lazy turtles, just swimming by slowly. They aren't afraid of you at all. I had one float by within an arms-length of my head. I turned around, and bam, there he was.
No, he didn't run into me.
They are amazingly graceful creatures. You just want to hug them. They seem so friendly. They might even BE friendly. But, there is a no touching rule, so, we didn't.
We also saw some pretty huge crab and lobster down there. One lobster we saw running around down there was astonishingly fast as he run across the ocean floor. Fast enough I would not have gotten away had it been chasing me. It was like this huge spider/scorpion thing going after something. It was the only truly creepy thing I saw down there.
When you are underwater with nothing but a tank of air on your back keeping you breathing, you try to be hyper aware of danger and attempt to be super careful. And, as I said, for the most part, it's really easy to be safe.
One thing did happen though. And it's not what you may be thinking.
We were swimming through some coral arches. No caves or anything like that. Big, giant openings. As we were swimming around the coral, I need to dive down farther to go under one part. Nothing tight, just deeper in the water than I was. As I dove deeper, one ear started to build pressure. This is normal. You are constantly intentionally clearing (popping) your ears to relieve pressure. However, for some reason, my one ear didn't want to clear that particular moment. So, as I dove, it would start to hurt, then I would go back up. I would try to clear it, dive and clear as I go, and it just wouldn't clear. I thought maybe I could just live with it and go, but I couldn't. It just hurt too much.
So, I turned around to head back up. As I did, I was a little closer to the wall than I thought and bumped my head just a little. Not hard at all. Just hard enough to know I'd done it.
The walls are covered with plants and stuff, much of which is soft. You aren't suppose to touch it, and this was clearly accidental.
I moved away, rubbed my head to make sure I wasn't bleeding or anything, which I wasn't, and after doing a self check, declared myself fine and went on.
I had a small sore spot on the side of my head, but it didn't even bruise. No worries.
Once we got into the boat after that dive, I had my dive buddy/doctor friend check the side of my head just to make sure I hadn't "done anything bad" that would leave me not alive soon.
He declared me fine and then we helped each other get our gear off.
As I as bending forward to help him, he saw the top of my head (I'm taller than he) and he said "Whoa, you have a cut across the top of your head."
I had no idea.
Turns out it was just a scratch. Didn't even leave a scar. I'm not sure it ever truly "bled".
The thing is, I don't really know for sure when it happened. It could have happened when I bumped the wall. That's the most likely time. But I never felt it. I never felt anything touch the top of my head. Was it one of the wall creatures I bumped into? Was it from coral I don't remember hitting? Was it some alien jelly fish tentacle trying to bore its way into my brain and take over my mind?
I have no idea.
For all our care and careful diving, for the things I avoided and the things I knew I hadn't, the thing that did the most damage to me was the one thing I never knew that happened.
I'm pretty sure our lives are like that. We can try so hard to control everything around us and make sure nothing touches us or hurts us. But we never succeed. It's always the thing we didn't see coming. And there is ALWAYS something we don't see coming. And there always will be.
We can make ourselves mad trying to avoid the things of life. We can not succeed. Our control and safety is largely illusory.
As are most things of life.
So, take heart my fellow cow-orkers!! (I seriously have no idea what a cow-orker is.) If you feel you are losing control, it's ok. It's simply not true.
You never had any control to begin with.
And that's ok.
Night.
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