I once spent a week at a gorgeous villa in the Dominican Republic. We were given our own butler who served us lavish breakfasts by a private swimming pool. I had a golf cart to use at my disposal. The water I floated in was the kind of blue you only see in one of those deluxe Crayola packages, the ones that come with the extra special hues. And all of it might have been perfect had I not arrived with the kind of raging bladder infection that made me constantly aware of the fact that I am, without fucking question, a woman. The pain was searing and unceasing and it all was made somehow worse when I caught a glimpse of my agony in the rearview mirror of the SUV that was shuttling me from the airport to the place my family was staying, a place they’d already arrived at two days prior. In the reflection I saw physical suffering surrounded by about seven miles of hair that had already succumbed to the ravages of humidity and when I arrived at the front door of a palatial palace I never would have been able to afford on my own, my parents flung open the door with broad smiles that disappeared the second they saw my face. “Give me every pain pill you’ve got,” I croaked at them, and soon my palm was filled with medicine that was yellow and some of it was pink and my mother removed four of the pills so I wouldn’t overdose and I didn’t ask a single question about what I was ingesting; I just swallowed them without water and was blessedly asleep in less than an hour.
On another April vacation, I joined two of my friends in Barbados. All three of us were in desperate need of temporarily leaving our lives behind and we took off for the faraway beach with the hope that, when we returned home, the cosmos would have done their work and our existences would feel easy again. We spent the first few days lolling around on the sand and dancing at dinner and drinking lots of dark rum and all was relatively calm until Thursday when I stopped at an ATM and was unceremoniously informed that there was no money in my account because the rent check I’d post-dated had been pre-cashed and there I was in another nation without any cash. We weren’t leaving for another four days and I fell into a panic next to the counter inside the ATM vestibule and my friend Nicole pulled me out of there by unwinding me from the fetal position I’d curled into out of astonishment and fear and she gave me money to hold me over until we returned home where I could pay her back. (I also got my period two and a half weeks early the very next morning and she graciously walked me uphill to a gas station where she bought me tampons since I’d never considered packing any and I didn’t have the money to pay for them myself. The girl is headed straight to heaven.)
Then there was the time I went to California for a week. We stayed at the Montage in Laguna Beach and I surrendered to the luxury quite easily. I ate salads served to me by the pool and walked the dunes as the sun set majestically behind the horizon in the distance. I rubbed my light sunburn with a lotion I still believe was made by the Gods that smelled of verbena and wealth and not a bit of me ever wanted to leave. But all vacations must end eventually, so we boarded a plane bound for Manhattan and it must have been about two hours into the flight when all of a sudden the plane did a U-turn that everyone on board felt. “We need to turn back around and land in California,” said the pilot. “There’s been a massive power outage across the Eastern seaboard and there’s nowhere there for us to land.” This was not long after 2001; flying already felt scary on some weird primal level and I locked eyes with strangers and they looked as nervous as I felt and the pilot must have sensed the mood because he came back on and announced, “It’s not terrorism that caused the problem. They don’t know what it is, but it’s not terrorism.” Being the cynic, I couldn’t help but immediately think If they don’t know what it is, how can they know what it’s not, but soon we arrived again in the land of sunshine and, since there was nowhere else to really go, we returned to the Montage and I took a surfing lesson the next day. Eventually we found out the cause of the darkness had not actually been terrorism and that made me feel better, even when I discovered that someone who worked at the hotel entered our rooms while we lazily enjoyed the sunshine and stole all of our jewelry.
All of those vacations I took were defined by bursts of joy that were then pissed on by stark reality – and I’d still rather retake every single one of those trips than ever travel anywhere with the cast of Vanderpump Rules. On just Night One in New Orleans, Jax and Stassi cried, Brittany became resentful that Jax has yet to burst into tears over how horribly he’s treated her, Sandoval calmly recommended therapy to the bride-to-be, Kristen crouched behind a shrub so she could get better cell service because she was finding it difficult to track Lala’s movements from across the country, and Schwartz looked like he was torn between arranging for a pedicure prior to his day of drag or using his private time to fake his own death so he wouldn’t have to get married to a woman who publicly decreed that the only reason she and her beloved fight is because of their friends – and then she chose to go on vacation them. Seriously? I’d take the burning pee of a bladder infection any day.