My Musings

PS-Ashley Rocks!

Saturday, February 01, 2003

A Fateful Cruise

Cruises are fun, but they have one major problem. Teenagers, who can neither drink nor gamble, and who probably didn’t think to bring along somebody of the opposite gender with whom they can have sex when all other forms of entertainment have been exhausted, get bored easily on them. There you are, stuck on a ship with 2999 other people, all of whom are either eating, sunbathing, gambling, drinking, or having sex, and of those five activities you can only do two: eating, and going around trying to find hot women sunbathing topless. Eating, actually, isn’t all that bad of a choice because the food is free and absolutely delicious, a development that must have broken at least four laws of physics that I can think of. But eventually you can’t eat any more, and the topless sunbathers go away when the sun does. In the evening there are shows, but you’re still gonna have a lot more free time than you know what to do with. And if you’re an antisocial hermit like me—look, here I am on a Friday night, typing up a new blog entry—then going around and meeting people isn’t an option. How to pass the time?

Fortunately, I was saved from a lonely, lonely 12 days by a teen center that Princess (the company that runs the cruise) thoughtfully installed aboard the ship. This was basically a place that had a jukebox and cards and a bunch of board games and some N64’s and stuff where kids aged 13-17 could meet and hang out. It was staffed by two hosts, a guy and a girl, who periodically ran some planned group activities so that we could have fun and not necessarily play Super Mario Smash Brothers on the Nintendo for almost the entire duration of the cruise (which I ended up doing anyway, but at least they tried). The host guy’s name was Alan, and the girl was—well, I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember the girl’s name, which is extremely odd considering she was way cooler than Alan and also kind of hot. Actually, not even “kind of.” She was just hot. She was also fun and seemed to like hanging out with the teens, as opposed to Alan, who got flustered easily and was definitely not a kid person, and who, now that I think about it, may or may not have had two L’s in his name, and perhaps an E and not an A. I did, however, like Allan, though not perhaps as much as the girl—was Debbie her name?—yes, let’s call her Debbie for the time being—and generally I liked the planned activities. I am in fact perpetually grateful to Allen, because one night he taught as all how to play President, a very fun card game that I apparently am the only person on the planet who enjoys, so I practically never get to play it anymore. But whenever I do, I think of Alen. The time we played President was something of an exception, though, because although Alin and Barbara had the entire cruise packed with pre-planned activities, most of the time we ignored the schedule and—yup—played Super Mario Smash Brothers.

Another exception to the “we’re all a bunch of losers who spend every waking moment playing Super Mario Smash Brothers despite the fact that YOU’RE ON A FREAKING CRUISE SHIP GO DO SOMETHING FUN YOU MORON” rule occurred on I think the second night of the cruise, which was, of course, way before we discovered Super Mario Smash Brothers. Allon and Joanne gathered up all the teens who came and had us play The Toilet Paper Game. I’m not sure if that’s what Allin and Meredith called it, but it’s a fitting name regardless, so I’ll leave it. Basically the way you play The Toilet Paper Game is this: everybody sits around in a rough circle and with your right hand you grab the left hand of the person sitting to your right, and with your left hand you grab the right hand of the person sitting to your left, and then one person says “penis” really quietly and then the person to his right says “penis!” a little louder and then the person to their right says “PEnis” and then the next person says “PENIS” and so on until you’re all screaming “PEEEEEEEEEENIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS!!!!!!!” and the old people who walk by the teen center get really scared and—wait, my bad, we played THAT on the third night. So, The Toilet Paper Game—okay, that’s when you pass around a roll of toilet paper and everybody tears off some squares, at least two or three, and then everybody gets a turn to say one fact about themselves for each square of toilet paper that they ripped off. In other words, if Andy, to pick a random friend, were there, he could have torn off four squares of toilet paper, and then when it was his turn he could have been like, “(1) I play the violin, (2) I’m really awesome at math, (3) I used to grow my hair out a whole lot when I was little and it would get all curly and funny-looking and I would never cut it or comb it, and (4) I have a big fat friendly orange cat named Mouse.” The catch is this: when Alun and Shaniqua passed around the roll and told us to rip off squares, they didn’t tell us what the squares were for. Thus, nobody knew if they were good or bad; maybe the rules of the game went, “for every square you take, you get a dollar,” but they also could have gone, “for every square you take, you must listen to one entire Britney Spears CD.” This made the game exciting. A lot of people only took the bare minimum; others, like me, took off four or five just to be cool and daring. After we had all gotten our TP and it was quickly established that this was just another lame-o “meet everybody” type of game, play began.

Allllllllllllllllen and Mariah got things going by telling us a little about themselves, and then the game continued randomly, with each player picking the next person to go after them. Eventually the spotlight fell upon a 16 year-old girl named Ashley who was from Coppell, Texas. I don’t remember all of how she described herself, but one of her squares was used for something like, “I play the trumpet, but I’m not like a band dork or anything. Band is huge at our school—there are over 300 people in it, we practice a lot, and it’s a pretty big deal. At our school it’s considered cool to be in the band.” (Okay, I probably misquoted Ashley so badly here that I deserve to be shot in the eye with a BB gun, but you get the idea.) Later, when it was my turn to use the toilet paper, you can imagine the impression I made on everybody with: “Well, I play the saxophone in the band, and I’ll be honest with you: I am a band dork…” and so on. It’s too painful to try to type the rest.

But apparently I made a good impression on Ashley, because later that night—or perhaps it was the following night, or the night after that; I really have no idea, to be perfectly honest with you—when the action at the teen center got a bit stale, Ashley struck up a conversation with me and at her suggestion we snuck off to the arcade, where the lights were dim and there was nobody around. This, as you would expect, made the atmosphere absolutely perfect for two young kids, a boy and a girl, who wanted an evening of simple, naughty fun, and Ashley and I were just too weak to resist the urges that drove us almost immediately to play several furious games of air hockey. Over the course of the cruise I imagine we spent collectively at least 37 million dollars on that air hockey table, and though in the end I think I had a better win/lose record than did Ashley, in those initial games she pasted me with graceful ease. These games were all paid for by Ashley, by the way, because to play the games you had to have an arcade card, and to buy an arcade card you had to use your cruise card, which for some reason I couldn’t do at the time, so after several games I began to feel really guilty that Ashley was paying all the time, and I imagine Ashley got somewhat sick of it herself, so we took a break from air hockey and chatted for a while, with Ashley sitting upon a motorcycle or some such vehicle from one of the arcade games. (For some reason, my memory only seems to capture pointless, utterly irrelevant details of events, like for example “Ashley sat on a motorcycle while we talked,” or “Biff was wearing a green pair of cargo pants,” but not important things like “The hosts’ names were Allen and Denise,” or “the side pocket of Biff’s green cargo pants got caught on the side-view mirror of a passing minivan and Biff soon found himself unconscious atop a telephone pole minus his left leg.”)

A lot of you are probably starting to put 73 and 73 together (146) and realizing that the Ashley I’m talking about here is the very same Ashley whose name appears all over this blog—in the links, in the description box, in the blog entries themselves. In making this blog I figured I could stick the name “Ashley” all over the place and nobody would notice, but I was quickly proven wrong by the multitude of times I’ve had to answer the question, “Boris, who’s Ashley?!” This has turned out to be a tricky question to answer, because when I tell people that I met Ashley on a cruise, and that Ashley is a girl, they automatically assume that we fell hopelessly in love and had a secret fling in the lifeboats. Which, need I say it, didn’t happen. In actuality, we spent most of our time in the company of 13 year-olds playing air hockey, cards, and board games, and also eating (but not having sex, though one time a few of us did go without Ashley to gawk at topless sunbathers). I tell people this but nobody believes me. Look:

bassgirl237: boris!!!!
bassgirl237: is ashley ur girlfriend???!!!!!
bassgirl237: ahhh thats so great!!

And then there’s Chris, who thinks that I have schizophrenia and made Ashley up, not to mention the whole cruise:

C2daizzo54: ok Boris....who's Ashley?
Chessmen15: [a] girl from Texas who I met on the cruise
C2daizzo54: oh..."the cruise"
C2daizzo54: so where did you go on this "cruise"?
Chessmen15: [the] Mediterranean
Chessmen15: last June!
Chessmen15: what, you don't believe me?
C2daizzo54: I believe you
C2daizzo54: this "cruise" of yours sounds like it was real fun
Chessmen15: okay, it's making me nervous how you keep putting that in quotation marks
Chessmen15: do you think I'm nuts and made up the whole thing?
C2daizzo54: nope
Chessmen15: and fabricated a whole new blog to make you guys think some imaginary "Ashley" wrote it?
Chessmen15: and made links to other blogs, all of which I fabricated and made up?
C2daizzo54: never thought of it that way
C2daizzo54: looks like Boris made up a girl from Texas
C2daizzo54: and wrote some fabricated blogs
C2daizzo54: I should tell everyone else this secret

Hopefully this blog entry will clear up these rumors and misconceptions. After the cruise ended I stayed in touch with Ashley, whom I haven’t seen and might even never see again since she returned to Coppell, Texas and I returned to Theresalotofcornherebutthatsaboutit, Ohio. We don’t talk much on AIM anymore—I think this has something to do with the fact that I’ve temporarily sworn off AIM—but we still read each other’s blogs and even carry on a little conversation via the little message board Ashley has in hers. Now, it’s funny that I should mention blogs, because that’s precisely what I wanted to talk about. In August, after the cruise was long over, Ashley started up a blog. I’m not entirely sure who gave her the idea, but apparently blogging is a big thing down in Texas, because if you link off of Ashley’s blog to, say, Becky’s blog, you can then find a link to a whole BUNCH of other blogs. In that sense, Ashley was something of a follower, which she admits in her first entry. But in a very, very important way, Ashley was a true innovator. I’ve browsed around the Texans’ blogs and they are all mostly like diaries, places where people type up their feelings and what happened to them that day and whatnot. That’s not to say that sort of thing isn’t interesting, but Ashley pioneered the idea that a blog can be used for the amusement of others, and filled hers with funny essays and other interesting things. Her blog was initially a secret, so by the time she let me in on the secret there was a lot there for me to read. I thoroughly enjoyed her stuff and thought this “blog” thing was so cool that I decided to make one. It wasn’t until much later that I realized just how unique Ashley’s blog was, and how fortunate I am that I had the concept introduced to me by Ashley and not by somebody else.

For those of you who are a bit on the slow side, I will point out that this very blog that you’re reading right now exists solely as a direct result of my having met Ashley. The links section and the titles to the entries are also there thanks only to Ashley’s guidance and, in the case of the links, direct intervention. Pardon me for getting a bit sentimental here, but I owe Ashley bigtime for this blog’s existence. That, hopefully, explains why Ashley’s blog heads my list of links, and why “Ashley Rocks!” sits eternally at the bottom of my description box, and in general where Ashley came from and why she’s in my blog all the time. If you like my blog but haven’t looked at Ashley’s yet, bear in mind that I blatantly stole the idea in its entirety from her—scroll up to my list of links and take a look at the original! Her newest entry—well, it might not be new by the time you’re reading this, but whatever—The Birds—is hilarious. Best of all, Ashley’s blogs are not only funny, but also short , in sharp contrast to this four page monstrosity that I’m guessing fully half of you got to the third paragraph of before giving up and hurling yourselves off a cliff.

Thanks, Ashley! You rock. By the way, Chris says hi.

.: posted by Boris 1:53 PM

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