There’s a Poetry in Motion poster on the C train that taunts me every time I ride the subway. It’s a line from an Anne Sexton poem: “Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn!”
If only.
I love to blame New York for my every bad mood, but this doesn’t mean I’ve ever done anything about it. Historically, my approach to depression is to settle in and turn on the TV. When I was a miserable teen, my mother would yell at me to get my ass out of bed and get some exercise. “It’ll make you feel better,” she’d snarl, ripping the duvet off me as early as 2 p.m.
The simplicity of her suggestions offended me. A 5K wasn’t going to make a dent in my dark existential grief. Please; I was a complex being, not plankton.
Years later, I don’t know if the problem is circumstantial (Brooklyn) or if it’s just me. But it’s time to leave the borough and find out. And if any vacation can cure me, it’s the best vacation.
Romantic Getaways 💗
Long ago, my then-boyfriend Xavier planned a vacation for us. But by the time the trip rolled around, we were in a rocky phase, barely speaking. Xavier’s typical approach to conflict resolution was to hide my vibrator and wait me out, but in the spirit of nonrefundable plane tickets, we attempted a legitimate reconciliation.
It didn’t take. Jetlagged and holding a grudge in a French hotel room, I was suspicious of Xavier’s positive attitude; it seemed designed to provoke me. I punished him by making him request things from the hotel’s deadpan concierge, who pretended to not speak English: towels, a room service menu, more towels. In the most agonizing exchange, he had to report a parked car I thought was on fire. I’d seen smoke, but that turned out to be steam from a manhole underneath the vehicle: harmless. The unamused French firefighters scolded the concierge, who scolded Xavier.
Once Xavier recovered, he tried to lure me out to an honest-to-god discothèque. “Want to go out tonight?” he asked, doing a little dance move. My answer was no, in perpetuity. Xavier made a sign that said PAS DRÔLE, SVP, and hung it on the door. I thought it was a homemade DO NOT DISTURB sign until I translated it with my French-English dictionary. It meant ‘no fun, please.’
If golf is a good walk spoiled, a destination wedding is a good vacation spoiled. However, while it isn’t fun to watch golf on TV, it is fun to watch weddings. On Four Weddings, brides attend each other’s weddings and then vote on whose was best. The guest brides are wonderfully fake-polite even when a groom is impatiently chewing gum at the altar or they’re served a blood-soaked cake at a goth reception: “That’s different.” Don’t Tell the Bride is more of a shitshow. The grooms do all the planning, surprising their brides on their wedding day with the (tacky) dress, venue, and decor. The brides are still painted as ’zillas if they react with anything less than ecstasy when faced with a ceremony on a pig farm, but at least the somber Attenborough-esque narration about centerpieces makes watching dunce grooms feel educational.
The trip culminated in him developing an obvious crush on one of the maids. During an interrogation re: crush, I mused aloud that I wouldn’t want to be a maid because, on Law & Order maids were always finding dead bodies, rolling their cleaning carts into surprise crime scenes.
“Oh, is that the only reason?” Xavier asked. He was always hinting that I was spoiled. (Guilty as charged! 💋)
The only good decision we made on our trip was that we didn’t get married. An aggressive twist on the romantic getaway, the destination wedding is a nuptial option for the autocratically-minded couple. Guests must be prepared to pledge fealty by spending down their PTO. I may have tormented Xavier, but I spared my social circle.
Remember, permissible wedding territory is restricted to the metropolitan area in which the engaged couple or their parents hold a mortgage or lease. Otherwise, you’re at a ‘destination,’ and everyone knows you should never go with an engaged couple to a second location.
International 🌍
Many years ago, on a trip to Buenos Aires, I had a celebrity sighting: Haley Joel Osment.
In the 2000s, Haley Joel was following in the teeny steps of the Olsen twins and attending NYU. He did a study-abroad semester in Argentina, where I spotted him housing an empanada while half-listening to a tearful speech by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. He greeted my brother, who was in the same NYU program but chose not to acknowledge me when I said hello, as if I were a deranged fan.
I’m not a deranged fan.
In fact, I’m not a fan at all.
If golf is a good walk spoiled, a destination wedding is a good vacation spoiled. However, while it isn’t fun to watch golf on TV, it is fun to watch weddings. On Four Weddings, brides attend each other’s weddings and then vote on whose was best. The guest brides are wonderfully fake-polite even when a groom is impatiently chewing gum at the altar or they’re served a blood-soaked cake at a goth reception: “That’s different.” Don’t Tell the Bride is more of a shitshow. The grooms do all the planning, surprising their brides on their wedding day with the (tacky) dress, venue, and decor. The brides are still painted as ’zillas if they react with anything less than ecstasy when faced with a ceremony on a pig farm, but at least the somber Attenborough-esque narration about centerpieces makes watching dunce grooms feel educational.
High Maintenance pretends this phenomenon is a manifestation of New York being a quirky Sesame Street wonderland. Please!
The Instagram Destination 🤳
Living in a big city, with so many competing storylines, is rough on the ego. I step outside wearing my finest Coastal Coppola look, only to pass a nurse in scrubs, an Italian grandma in widow’s black, hot athleisure hags, and a Dimes Square hooligan in Ssense-sale scores. The violently disconnected costumes make the world feel artificial, a stage set where it’s clear that I’m not the star.
In contrast, at an Instagram destination everyone’s on the same page, and that’s as beautiful as the Valencia filter (a quaint classic compared to Bold Glamour).
Despite this satisfying synchronicity, there are a thousand headlines about how hordes of selfie-seekers are ruining travel. No one is (publicly) advocating for a return to the days when travel was only for a few rich people, but the underlying tone is sanctimonious disbelief that these flyover hashtag clowns don’t know their place. Personally, I find the hand-wringing gratifying—it seems like people are finally waking up to what I’ve long thought: that there are too many of us.
Pro and cons of an Instagram vacation:
Pro: Sometimes you get more mileage out of a vacation that looks good than one that feels good. Another brick in the wall of your personal brand. (But remember, no ‘dumps’ of your pics please.)
Con: These crowds, like maggots feasting on the corpse of Santorini.
Con: Often, a group Airbnb is in the mix here. Careful hunny. Don’t let the Venmo request hit you on the way out.
Another con: Worn down by paleo levels of hunger, high dewpoints, malfunctioning Bluetooth, disemboweled Away suitcases just out of frame, and a credit card statement in shambles, it’s easy for a travel influencer to lose focus and suffer death by selfie. ᵕ̈
But! As an influencer posting from the Greek Isles urged us: “Reminder: you are part of the bigger plan ✨ surrendering the outcome is the greatest feeling ✨”
🗺⛱⛰🌅🐬🥥🏝🗺⛱⛰🌅🐬🥥🏝 🗺⛱⛰🌅🐬🥥🏝🗺⛱⛰🌅🐬🥥🏝
Family Vacation 👪
There’s a VRBO commercial that depicts families enjoying their rented vacation homes while a narrator intones:
“The thing that’s different about a VRBO vacation home? You always have the whole place to yourself. No strangers at the dinner table making things awkward, or in another room taking up space. It’s just you and your people. Because why would you ever share your vacation home with someone you wouldn’t share your vacation with?“
This is a baffling choice of a marketing differentiator—everyone knows you can also rent entire private houses on Airbnb. On top of that, the tone of the unseen narrator is disturbingly coy, creating loaded undertones on par with the Folgers incest commercial. What is going on with this family that they need to be so private? No strangers at the dinner table making things awkward… after the family orgy? In another room taking up space… that could be better used for cooking meth using Grandpa’s recipe? Get over yourselves.
While I don’t want to be alone with strangers, this makes me question whether I want to be alone with my family either. The commercial somehow makes neither option sound appealing. Even if it is safe to be alone with your relatives, family vacations are rife with challenges. Waking up with a hangover while your mother pointedly vacuums the entire house at dawn. Kompromat-grade photos taken by a boomer who doesn’t know about angles. Ponchos at Disney. And worst of all, the ‘relentless proximity,’ as described in a study of crewmembers trapped together on an Antarctic expedition. They almost murdered each other over one roommate’s “way of breathing, his belief in dreams, and his frequent use of the phrase ‘I’m sorry.’”
That does sound annoying! My own polar rage sets in quickly while staying with my parents. The way my mother handles her iPhone breaks me by the second day or the first time I’m ridiculed for putting almond milk in my Cheerios, whichever comes first. She scrolls using her index finger, with exaggerated sweeping gestures like she’s conducting an orchestra. It’s the carefree nature of her mannerisms that’s the issue—it’s like she’s flippantly dismissing my reality, which is that I’m suffering greatly in an environment where my every bowl of cereal is analyzed and remarked upon.
The journalist Rachel Aviv once interviewed a woman who classified her moods by color, saying “she was afflicted with the worst kind of ‘black spot’ when she visited her parents at their farm... In their presence, she felt aggressive and dangerous. She worried that she had two selves, one ‘empathetic, charming, sensible’ and the other cruel.” Even though a family trip allows me to relax and be my worst self in both appearance and attitude, it doesn’t feel great. They may pay for the beach house, but I pay in guilt afterward.
Off the Grid 📵
On a family vacation (strike one) at a resort where guests stayed in rustic cabins scattered around the property, my mother and I were in our cabin when a bear started poking around the front door. My mother called the main lodge for help, but they suggested we just stay inside until the bear got bored. Bored? With two tasty morsels within reach? At this point, my mother begged for mercy so intensely that it actually moved me; it was very Not Without My Daughter, if the cartoonishly-racist Iranian characters were bears and the US embassy was the front desk. “Can’t you send some people to make sure it’s gone? Please! We’re just two women alone here!” She caught herself. “Not to be sexist.” Setting a feminist example for me even in a crisis! 🫡
They didn’t send anyone, but (spoiler) we survived. That’s a rare positive in this category, which is plagued with leeches, body odor, and muddy feet getting the cozy tent all gross. I’ve only camped once, but I feel like an expert: when my boyfriend and I are arguing and the drama of 90 Day Fiancé becomes uncomfortably relatable, we watch survival shows instead. Contestants on Alone starve in the wilderness to the point where they weep upon catching a fish, kissing its scales and whimpering, “Thank you for your life.” It seems to be bush etiquette to thank your prey. But like, the fish didn’t volunteer. It’s not thinking, “You’re welcome,” as you club it to death. One contestant stooped so low as to stalk a squirrel and steal the squirrel’s winter stash of nuts and mushrooms, which shocked me. Robbing a woodland creature’s snug nest, a tree trunk sanctuary that’s as close to a Disney fairytale as we can get in this harsh world—it’s fucked up. He could have just gone home and shopped at a supermarket, whereas the squirrel had no such option.
As I learned from these shows, the most important survival tip, if you’re lost in the woods, is to stay put. So: stay put at home and don’t do this kind of vacation. Being off-camera on Zoom is as off the grid as anyone should go.
Much like nose-picking, being offscreen feels great when I do it, but it’s gross when someone else does it. Hands where I can see them please, pervs.
Much like nose-picking, being offscreen feels great when I do it, but it’s gross when someone else does it. Hands where I can see them please, pervs.
WITB: 🏆 Staycation 🛋️
Paris Syndrome is a debilitating sense of disappointment experienced by tourists who find that Paris is not what they’d expected. Luckily, science has found that staying home alone is a 100% effective way to prevent Paris Syndrome (and pregnancy).
Staycation is an ugly word for a beautiful thing. I love the sensory deprivation tank of being stationed inside in front of my screens; it’s executive time, and I’m the COO (less pressure than CEO). I would happily join a fringe political group aiming to bring back lockdown.
The world is overwhelming. Everyone is out there. Walking down the block, you could unknowingly pass a serial killer, or the guy who posted butt-hurt comments in response to a meme about corny restaurant signs. (“Yoooo as someone who makes and restores real neon signs for a living, I do feel attacked.”) During an executive retreat, I don’t even scurry out to check the mail. Instead, I text my neighbor and say I’m stuck at work (unheard of)—can she put my packages in the vestibule? Tysm!!!!
A study found that people with daily routines found life more meaningful than those without, “even after the researchers controlled for mindfulness, positivity, and religiousness.” I lack all three of those things—scary!—so routines are the only scaffolding keeping my brain together.
Entering this holy land of low expectations isn’t for everyone. Quarantine exposed legions of self-proclaimed introverts as total frauds. If lockdown isolation were celibacy, we true shut-ins were beatific cloistered nuns, while the posers were incels, flailing in the hostile environment of their own minds. A routine can help. Mine involves flipping the couch cushions daily and consuming any available Anne content—Anne Frank, Anne of Green Gables, Anne Hathaway—until I achieve homeostasis.
There’s no shame in this; retreat is a time-honored military strategy. Find the inner strength to be alone and unobserved, existing as what Kant called the-thing-in-itself. Enjoy a vacation from your public self, by yourself—the best vacation of all.
A study found that people with daily routines found life more meaningful than those without, “even after the researchers controlled for mindfulness, positivity, and religiousness.” I lack all three of those things—scary!—so routines are the only scaffolding keeping my brain together.
