Yim, Xiaoxia and Spencer

Xiaoxia was spending the night on the ship because she was very tired, and I was too because I realized that I just really hate going out. I ate a second dinner with her in the cafeteria because she woke up late from a nap, and then later I met her upstairs at the bar. I forget if I ate something or not, but I know that I definitely at least got a snack of M&Ms at some point and gave Spencer about half of them. I gave Xiaoxia some too; she said they were too sweet. I told her that she could make wishes on the blue ones and the green ones were magic. She said she didn’t believe me, and I told her to try it. She made a wish on a blue one and turned away when she ate it. I took all the green ones and when she turned back I said, “They’re gone! It’s magic!” She said, “You took them! I’m not a kid!” She said it in the way that only she could. You have to hear her voice or you’d never understand. Sometimes it gets very low, like a saxophone, in a good way, and kind of sultry, which is surprising because she weighs 95 pounds.

I showed Spencer how to get to the public folder and how to get to the stalkerboard. He had never done it on his laptop before. I forget who he stalkerboarded.

Yim works behind the bar. She looks young but I never talked to her before really. She’s 25 and from Thailand. Her contract was finished when we showed up in Fort Lauderdale and she got to spend the whole summer at home there. She came on the ship first as an internship with her college ‘cuz she was a hotel and tourism major (something close to that). I asked her if she liked working on the ship, and she said yeah, it was fine, and if she didn’t like it she’d just leave at the end of her contract, but she was hoping to come back (and probably would). She said that the crew lives on the 1^st floor and that they’re almost always underwater on cruise ships. That surprised me a little. She said that they hang out a lot and that sometimes she wishes for more privacy, but if your roommates have different shifts than you then you can usually figure out a time to be alone if you need it. She said that they weren’t allowed to do anything other than work behind the desk, and they’d be in huge trouble if they brought a magazine or anything with them and an officer walked by and saw it.

There were two Indian guys behind the bar that came eventually. They seemed kind of familiar with me even though I didn’t know them too well, although I’d seen them around all the time of course. When I was asking Yim about privacy they were there. I told her that I liked the ship and the people on it but after a while, I really just want a place where I can scream at the top of my lungs and make noise and not have anyone care about it. One of them, the taller & thinner one, said he could tell. He said he was starting to see me with my guitar all over the ship, alone, fifth deck sixth deck seventh deck. I thought that was really interesting, that he took note of it.

It was a really nice conversation and I wished I had talked to more of the crew earlier. I didn’t really talk to her again until we got off the ship, and I felt bad about it. I saw her at the dock – the crew got off last – getting ready to go home to Thailand. She was wearing jeans and a pink polo shirt and looked like anyone else walking around. I wished I’d taken another night to hang out with them.