What day is it?

It's a question that I'm asking less and less. The whole 5 day/5 day/4 day cruise schedule eliminates the whole concept of weekends, the Sabbath, TGIF, bad cases of the Mondays, humps days, and replaces them with a constant state of timelessness. Nobody knows the date or day and once we leave port, cellphones can no longer tell us. Everyone just surrenders to it. It's like that dude who lived in a cave for a year. Not knowing what day it is, what time it is, or where you are can be liberating. The only days that provide any temporal inertia are the 2nd and 4th Sundays of each month when we get paid. The other day that kinda breaks up the monotony is the one which has a formal night attached to it. Formal nights are where the staff members are required (if we're in passenger areas) to wear suits, or tuxedos, or dresses after 5 PM and the staff is magnanimously allowed to hang out at the Electricity Discoteque although we can't sit on the barstools or stand next to them.



Work weeks (I guess they're not really weeks) slowly and rhythmically rock back and forth like the ship at sea. Port days, sea days, Cozumel days, Progresso days all melt into one another seamlessly. It's like Groundhog day without the moral lessons to be learned or the tacked on romantic subplot.