Day 21- June 9, 2006 - San Diego

It started out playful, or half playful given that I was genuinely aggravated that he refused to get out of bed after the alarm sounded at nine. And in all fairness, I warned him, several times, that if he did not get up within the designated time, I would pull the covers off of him, which I did after ten minutes of threatening, to prove that he ought to take me seriously when I say such things. He is cranky in the morning, consistently, and I should have calculated this into my attack, but I didn't, and when I crawled over him, cooing with exaggerated early morning enthusiam, he flung me off the bed with one swoop of his arm. I stop just short of the wall, and try to counter, but he is curled up, clutching his shoulder, and I know that the fight is over.

It happens from time to time; his shoulder pops out of place- the result of one of many past injuries that never healed right, a less obvious scar- leaving his arm dangling along his side and I imagine the joints inside trying to find each other, the muscles loose like stretched cotton, and it is at times like this that he seems breakable, he seems real. I sit on the edge of the bed, watching my hands move along themselves, watching him out of the corner of my eye, wanting very badly to stay mad, not knowing what to do.

After what feels like too long, he gets up, and heads past me toward the bathroom. Maybe I ask him if he's okay. Maybe he doesn't answer.

He stays mad the carride over to Sea World, and we skip breakfast because I know better than to talk when he is in these moods. In the parking lot he has a cigarette, and I'm sure that it is only partly because he wants one, and more because he wants to spite me. But either way, he is better off when he's through and will even agree to holding my hand the whole way to the ticket gate, and I have to take these little things as small victories, even when they are not.

We go in, and have to search for a map of the place, since we don't get one on the way in like we should. There's a group of boys, waving the maps at each other and I'm tempted to pick off one of the smaller ones, grab his map and run, certain that his child legs are no match for my grown-up ones, and there's probably some mother nearby, with her head turned, who would certainly notice his getaway and scold him for trying to leave the group, paying no attention to his hysterical pointing, which would only get worse the farther away I get. And maybe when I realize he is no where near me, I will hide behind the safety of a Shamu statue and taunt him with the stolen map, certain that he is still watching me, and will be scolded more when he is too distracted to keep up with his group beginning to move on without him.

Just before I'm about to put my plan into action- and I was this close, really- Doug comes back with a map for us and I narrow my eyes at a freckled five year old to let him know just how narrowly he's escaped.

We plan our day around the shows we want to go to, the first being the Shamu "Believe" show which starts at noon. Anticipating a crowd, we get on the line already forming, and stand there for forty-five minutes, in front of a boy whose kicking range lines up directly with the middle of my calf.

I told Doug about the only other time I'd been to Sea World, the one in Florida, the summer before fifth grade, when my mother's bulging belly demanded that our family of four take a vacation before we became five. It was empty then, and August, and I can only remember the vaguest sorts of memories, the ones that can be confirmed by photographs of me soaked in a woodstock tie-dyed t-shirt and electric blue lycra knee length bike shorts. I do not tell Doug these details, he does not need to know.

We hesitated before sitting down, and the place filled up around us. Doug picked a seat in the soak zone and I swore he wouldn't be happy if we ended up wet, but he was certain that we wouldn't- that the designated area was misleading, mismarked, and as long as we were towards the back of it, we'd be safe. I'd end up drenched before the day was through.

It's not surprising that the show was geared toward a young audience. It started with a video of a kid rowing out to the middle of the water to befriend a whale he'd seen swimming by. The following sequence involve the whale eating the child, to serve as a poignant reminder that these are wild animals and you should not try this at home. The audience of course got hysterical, kids crying, and mothers outraged, clutching their babes to their chests explaining that the whale was only playing with the boy as the screen showed the boy's piecemealed body being savored by the other whales that had come to enjoy the feast.

Okay, so that's not what really happens in the Shamu video. (A girl can dream, right?) What really happens is this little kid befriends the whale because he has a carved whale tail around his neck, and then the trainer comes out. He holds out the very same whale tail necklace, which of course can be purchased in the giftshop for $19.95, for everyone to see to be sure that we, the audience, are following him on this leap. How lucky that he had this studio quality childhood archival footage handy, or else we would never know just how deep his love for his job really goes. Completely ridiculous, completely laughable. My sisters would have loved it.

The show went on with lots of jumps, tricks, and sentimentality. It wasn't all that entertaining, but the kids were eating it up, despite there being hardly any Shamu (or Shamutz, Shamu's West Coast Jew cousin, who exists according to Doug, despite my skepticism about the abundance of Jewish whales in San Diego.)

The highlight of the show, by far, was the audience participation segment. They chose a kid volunteer of course, a blonde ten year old with a forgettable name. When she stood up, there was a ring of wetness along the seat of her jeanshorts, the byproduct of sitting on the still wet soak zone rows, and the little boy sitting directly behind us screamed "Look, she peed her pants!" which of course is absolutely hilarious not only because he really thought she did, but because he expected that by screaming it out, he would somehow be doing something to correct the situation. His mother quickly scolded him, "She did not!" but not loud enough to undo the effect. Doug and I were in stitches, coughing out our laughter through the girl's personal introduction to Shamu. I wonder if she heard it, and if she did, if it's the sort of thing that could cause a lifetime of trauma, leaving her to compulsively tie sweatshirts around her waist for years to come.

After the show, we wandered around the park, checking out various water life: sharks, piranhas- I like my fish with teeth- and we still had some time to kill before the next show, a dolphin exhibition, so we went over to a section called Wild Arctic and waited on line for the ride to get in, not knowing entirely what we were waiting for.

It ended up being a motion simulated helicopter ride- the kind of things that Doug loves and I hate, reading and rereading the advisory signs before buckling myself in. He made fun of me the entire time, for gripping the armrests at every descent, clenching my teeth in anticipation of the fall. He cheers loud and hyper-excited from the back corner when a voice announces that we've landed safely and I can't help but laugh.

Preshow at the Dolphin Stadium, there was a guy with an acoustic guitar warming up the crowd. He told awful pun-ny jokes between songs, and Doug, hateful as he is, developed a certain sort of intolerance for him and his singing which may have culminated in the flight of blunt objects and an eventual trial had the show not started up.

The girl announcing the show had a voice high and squeaky like small cartoon animals- the kind that grates on my nerves but little kids eat up. In high school, she probably answered the family phone dozens of times to receive an overenthusiastic "hi little girl, is your mommy home?"

Watching the show was like playing Echo the Dolphin for Sega, but without the sound of sonar and without the control. It was by far more interesting than the Shamu show, particularly when the dolphins and porpoises started splashing the spectators in the soak zone rows, which, from the safety of the top section, was hilarious.

Things got even better when a "volunteer" from the audience first tripped when walking up and then proceeded to fall into the tank, screaming as a dolphin jumped around her. Sure it was staged, but it was entertaining, and didn't Jerry Springer prove that's all that really matters?

After the show, we walked across the way to wait for the next one, a 4D scary movie involving 3D glasses and seats rigged to create the sensory effects that would match the onscreen action. We figured out what was for what pretty quick but that didn't stop me from jumping almost every time. It was good, not scary but good for what it was and I would have loved to been able to drag my sisters in there, hyping up the terror so that once they were inside, they were wound tight enough to respond to even the slightest breeze. On the way out, Doug took the 3D glasses as a souvenir. Why he needs a cheap pair of 3D glasses from Sea World is beyond me, but it made him giggly the rest of the afternoon.

The plan was to go on the two free rides and get gifts for my sisters before heading out for food. We stopped at the first ride, a raft rapid ride, and watched the people getting off of it, hoping to evaluate just how wet we'd get. The kids coming off were drenched, so we bypassed the ride, heading for the second, a roller coaster called Atlantis that we'd spotted from the freeway. We wait on line twenty minutes to get on. Every third minute, I remind Doug that I don't particularly like roller coasters, and I don't particularly expect my complaints to change the situation, but I figure they are warranted since I was a good sport about the motion simulated ride earlier in the day. Doug interprets my distaste for rides to be fear instead, and taunts me the whole way up the line. "Oooh, someone's afraid, oooh."

We'd done our homework, watched people get off the ride and estimated that we could escape relatively dry provided we avoided sitting in the front seat where the water splashed over on the impact of evert fall. Guess where they seated us.

Just to clarify, I'm not afraid of roller coasters, though there's no convincing Doug. I just don't like them. I don't like the leave your stomach in the air feeling when you drop, or the floating out when you turn. And it's not that I have visions of falling to a certain death or getting caught between the gears, I just don't like knowing that I am going to feel things that I don't want to feel and being helpless to stop them. Doug delights in my discomfort on the ride and the photograph that captures it. Also amusing to him is that out of everyone in the car, I am the most soaked; my jeans clinging to my skin entirely, my shoes squishing with every step. The girl in the seat behinds leans forward while getting out- "Man, you got drenched." Yeah.

We scower every gift shop for a shirt for my sister, and it's partly hard to find something decent for her, partly that I want to torment Doug with shopping, and partly that I am hoping to dry off in this extra time. After an hour, we leave, still soaked, with a Sea World bag in hand.

We'd wanted to go straight to dinner, but i am dripping water and squeaking so we stop at the hotel to change, and then go out and stuff ourselves with our first and only meal of the day. We stop for coffee on the way back to the hotel and when he get in there, there's a bunch of kids sporting squatter punk fashion and Doug says you lose all your street cred when you go into a Starbucks and it is all I can do to keep from laughing.