too good to be true, and it was

All last month I had one dream, a vision of the one beautiful moment that would mark the end to the Month of Insanity. It was a vision of my butt hitting that airplane seat to fly back to Illinois for Passover, but really it was more about the airplane seat that would take me from Illinois to Montego Bay, Jamaica for six days of friends and sun and incredible blue Caribbean waters (shh, don’t tell my mom).

Well, that moment (both of them) finally came, and Illinois was great (though brief), and Jamaica was… a comedy of errors? It was a fitting end to a month of such mixed feelings that even my vacation couldn’t just be simple. (Maybe the truth is that I make things complicated, rather than complications being thrust upon me.) On one level, it was wonderful – beautiful place, wonderful friends, great food, very relaxed.

On another level, it was so bizarre. Gated community where some of the wealthiest people in Jamaica own homes… private villa with our own housekeeper and swimming pool… what? Is this my life? Where are the real Jamaicans? But who am I to say that people on one side of the gate are any more real than those on the other side?

We did leave the community a couple times, once for a drive up around the hills, and another time for some grocery shopping in Duncans, the nearby town. (It’s not that we were barricading ourselves, just that the point of this vacation was really to sit in the sun by the water, so why do anything else? But more on that in a moment…) I think it’s a very healthy thing for White people to be the visible minority, to feel, if just for a few minutes, what it’s like to completely stick out because of your skin color. But it’s also uncomfortable as hell (at least for me) to stick out like that, especially in a country where Whiteness generally means wealth and many people who are not White are also nowhere near wealthy. It makes me think a lot about the contradictions and tensions inherent in tourism being a huge industry in economically struggling countries. What does it mean to be economically dependent on the completely unnecessary expenditures of people whose privilege derives at least in part from the extreme unbalance of the world economy?

Many people would say that I’m overreacting, taking this way too seriously, etc. What can I say? Blame it on too many Women’s and Gender Studies courses in college. Being a rich tourist in a poor place makes me uncomfortable.

And speaking of discomfort, then there was the slightly pathetic part of the vacation.

I got to Jamaica on Tuesday, and by the end of the day Wednesday I had gotten a bit sunburnt. No big deal, lost track of time and didn’t re-apply sunscreen often enough, whatever. But then I had a massive allergic reaction to the sunburn and got prickly heat (aka heat rash), which proceeded to spread and spread. Prickly heat, in a word, SUCKS. It is what it sounds like – your skin feels very hot and often feels like a thousand tiny stingers are sticking you at once. And, at least in my case, it covers you in tiny purple blistery bumps that all merge together and make you want to get “Not A Leper” tattooed on your forehead. And it itches. Oh, how it itches.

My usual self-treatment method, known generally as “ignore it and it will go away” didn’t seem to do any good, and nothing made it better - not aloe gel, or Claritin, or cortisone cream, or lotion (the latter, in fact, makes it worse). There were moments when it was a good thing I didn’t have any sharp implements, because I could have happily torn off every inch of my skin. There was, yes, a fair amount of self-pity, which I tried to hide (though my friends read this blog, so if they didn’t know before, now they do). Ultimately, I just spent the last couple days of the trip mostly indoors, because that was the only thing that seemed to decrease the incidence of prickly-ness.

If I wanted to read into this far too much, I’d say that it’s karmic feedback that I was overly ambitious with this week of vacation and should have stuck with the original plan to stay a few days with my parents and then come back to Vermont for a few days of R&R instead of rushing off to another country. So let’s not read into it that much. Let’s just say, wear more sunscreen.

Or come to Vermont, where we have a 100% chance of sleet and snow tomorrow.’

Happy Spring!