Vacation Tips

The wife and I are recently returned from semi-sunny Santa Barbara and, because you demand it, here are the answers to your questions.

1. Lots of fun.
2. The fires were never close to us.
3. Only once, but it was hot.
4. Shitty.

That last one, as if you didn't know, is the answer to "How does it feel to be back?" Because vacations are only fun while you're on them. When you're done, you don't get to be on "kind-of vacation."

So, I'm at work today and it's the usual bullshit. Woo. The morning, from my alarm to the moment I walked into the office, has been a steady decline and now -- an hour and a half in -- I am back at pre-vacation level funk.

There is a solution, of course, and it's one I think we should all embrace -- Torture Vacations.

Why do we spend a ton of money to go interesting places and do fun things when all we're going to do is come back and suffer through our real lives? Why not take a vacation that will make work seem better?

How many weeks of vacation do we get? I only had two this year. Two weeks of fun, surrounded by 50 weeks of mindless drudgery. It doesn't make any sense.

Rather, I propose we spend two weeks a year in a really awful place. The weather is too cold or too hot, the food is bland and bad for you, beds are uncomfortable, the TV only shows Fox News and your alarm goes off at 4 a.m. All your days would be spent doing data entry or waiting in line at the DMV or serving cheese fries to assholes at T.G.I.Fridays.

Coming home would be a vacation. Work would seem like a Godsend. I would have popped out of bed at 6 a.m. this morning energized and excited that for 50 weeks out of the year, I'd get to enjoy mindless drudgery.