[Quote][indent][color=gray]I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.

Not so on the lush and spotless m.v. [i]Nadir[/i]. On a 7NC Luxury Cruise, I pay for the privilege of handing over to trained professionals responsibility not just for my experience but for my [i]interpretation[/i] of that experience—i.e. my pleasure. My pleasure is for 7 nights and 6.5 days wisely and efficiently managed... just as promised in the cruise line’s advertising—nay, just as somehow already [i]accomplished[/i] in the ads, with their 2nd-person imperatives, which make them not promises but predictions. Aboard the [i]Nadir[/i], just as ringingly foretold in the brochure’s climactic p. 23, I get to do (in gold): “... something you haven’t done in a long, long time: [i]Absolutely Nothing[/i].”

How long has it been since you did Absolutely Nothing? I know exactly how long it’s been for me. I know how long it’s been  since I had every need met choicelessly from someplace outside me, without my having to ask or even acknowledge that I needed. And that time I was floating, too, and the fluid was salty, and warm but not too-, and if I was conscious at all I’m sure I felt dreadless, and was having a really good time, and would have sent postcards to everyone wishing they were here.[/color][/indent][/quote]
[indent][indent]— David Foster Wallace, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"[/indent][/indent]