Spring Break 2015 - Day 1 - "Belle"

4/4/15

Boynton Beach, Florida (Hunter’s Run)

Okay, so why have I been using the hashtag #Belle in all of my photos today?  In yesterday’s entry I wrote about my newfound obsession with Beauty and the Beast, and I tried to resolve whether I identified more with Belle or the Beast.  I made some progress on that question, but to make more progress I will need to start from the beginning.  The title of today’s entry refers to the song “Belle,” not the character.  It is my favorite song thematically from the whole movie, and I will include a more thematic analysis of the song against other similar Disney songs, but I need to first explain why I so love the song.  It is the main reason I love the movie.

As soon as the opening narration ends, we find Belle running through the streets of this French Provencal town as people sing about her.  She then starts singing about how she wants more.  Each of the Disney princesses sings about how they want more and Simba, too.  It is only Hercules who sings about how he wants less.  In this metaphor, I am Hercules.  “I would go most anywhere to feel like I belong.”  I am not Ariel wanting to leave the sea.  I am not Belle wanting to leave that French Provencal town.  I am not Pocahontas wondering what lies just around the riverbend.  I am not Mulan wondering when her reflection will show who she is inside (or am I?).  I am Tarzan wanting to know if there are strangers like him.

As for that French Provencal town, every time I see it, and I have watched the movie five times this week, even rewinding the scene a few extra times, I could imagine myself living there.  I live in the big city.  I can see the Empire State Building from my apartment block, the Chrysler Building from my office window.  I often write about how I could never live anywhere else, but whenever I watch the song “Belle,” I change my mind.  Transport me back a few centuries, and I would love to be living there.  There’s even a tobacco shop in town.  It’s a simple life, and, as I explained in the entries from my previous trip, all I have ever wanted is to live that simple life.  Belle wants to get out of that French Provencal town because she wants something more out of life, something grander.

I want to go to that French Provencal town because I want something less out of life, something more ordinary.  I am anything but ordinary.  I have never been modest, but my intelligence rivals Hercules’s strength.  It has been quantitatively measured as one in ten thousand.  That is not an exaggeration.  What has that gotten me in life?  Other than the ability to do pretty much whatever I want with minimal effort, my raw intelligence has served me almost no useful purpose in life.  “There’s nothing worse than wasted talent.”

Hercules would give it all up just to live an ordinary life, and so would I.  Belle on the other hand she does not want an ordinary life.  She does not want what every other girl in town wants. “Madame, Gaston, his little wife, no sir, not me, I guarantee it.  I want more than this Provencal life.  I want adventure in the great wide somewhere.”  I’ve had my adventure.  I’ve been everywhere.  I want the Provencal life, and I have mentioned how much I would have loved to live in that exact French Provencal town.

Okay, this is a Travelogue, but I haven’t really done any travelling today.  I haven’t even left Boynton all day.  The highlight of the day was finding Hercules on Blu-ray with the cardboard sleeve.  I woke up a little past 9 AM to an empty house or, more accurately, a house sound asleep.  I lounged around for about half an hour, and I was absolutely starving.  I did not think that it would be go over too well if I cooked some eggs for myself.  It is funny, my grandmother watches me (and my parents) like a hawk when we are here, even if we’re just getting a soda or something.  She likes everything to be just where it belongs, and a cabinet door that is left open is a major cause for concern.  In contrast, one of my friends has keys to my apartment, and he is more than welcome to spend as much time there while I’m away.  I don’t care what he does, and I told him as much, as long as they clean up after themselves and don’t rearrange any furniture.  I guess it’s just a matter of different personalities.

What did I do?  I put on Hercules and headed to Denny’s.  The meal was delicious, enough food to feed that French Provencal town, as my coworker might joke.  I took a picture of the food when it came, and it took me more time to post the pictures to social media than it did to eat the food.  I then went to the Walmart in the same shopping center, looking for Disney.  No dice.  Target was next.  I walked to the movie section.

There it was.  One copy of Hercules in a cardboard sleeve.  All of my Disney movies are in cardboard sleeves, and that is how they are shipped for the first release, but finding one that came out a year ago still with the cardboard sleeve is almost impossible.  Add that to that fact that I had been listening to Hercules all morning.  I was ecstatic.  I also picked up some socks and underwear, since I was running low.  Next was Best Buy.  No luck there.  It was slightly past noon by the time I got back.

Then there was some issue with my ID card, so that was another hour, and the four of them had a tee time at 1:45 PM, so I went to the pool.  I was already hungry again, so I got a burger.  It was quite good.  I had brought with me two pipes, three cigars, my laptop, and two Disney movies.  I did not expect to make it through all of them.  I just wanted options.  I wound up lighting up a Winston Churchill, playing my RPG for about an hour, and then booked my Barbados hotel.  They were supposed to be two hours, done before 4 PM, and my electronics were dying.

I have two friends who live in Florida, both of whom I love like sisters.  One, the girl I mentioned in the previous entry, whom I think of the adorable little sister I would have wanted, who reminds me of my little cousin in so many ways.  She lives in Orlando.  I had asked if I could see her while I was in state.  It’s three hours away, but she’s “worth the drive.”  (Bonus Taylor Swift quote.)  She was spending the day with her Prince Charming, so that was a no go, but my mom, when she heard that I wanted to consider doing that gave me a bunch of crap, saying that I was coming her to see my grandmother, not to visit friends.

Reader, it was almost 5 PM before I spent more than five minutes with my grandmother for the day.  If I had met my friend for lunch, I certainly would have been back here by 5 PM.  Hell, I could have spent half a day at Epcot and still been back by 5 PM.  I could have spent the day at the cigar store on Congress Ave and still been back by 5 PM.  The other friend in Florida?  Well, I met her on the Antarctica trip, and I came to think of her the big sister that I always wanted.  With all the meals I shared with her family,  her father I came to see as a favorite uncle.  She’s in Switzerland.  That was a no go, too.

Anyway, back in the air conditioned house and having some matzah with various toppings, I literally cooled off, and my mom suggested that I play Scrabble with my grandmother.  In 27 years, I do not think I have ever beaten her.  Correction, I may have beaten her during a game or two, but only when we played more than one game during the visit and she won the other games.  This year, I finally beat her, and I did so handedly.  It was the first time either of us had played Scrabble since this time last year when she beat me.  Granted, I got all the good letters, while she was stuck with one-pointers mostly.  That said, my 27-year-old mind was just sharper than her 83-year-old mind.

Meanwhile, my lighter needed fuel, so my mom agreed to go to the cigar store to refill and pick up some cigars while she was there.  I gave her my debit card, and off she went.  When she got back, she was quick to mention that every guy there looked at her like they had never seen a woman before.  She turned 60 two months ago.  I’m quite sure she enjoyed that.  “It was like Penny at the comic book store.”  She caught the reference and agreed.  I went out to the porch, where I lit up an Ardor and proceeded to write this entry.

Then, there was another hubabaloo.  Dinner.  My mom asked me when I’d be ready for dinner.  8 PM, I told her, so long as she didn’t distract me, as I needed to finish my pipe and this entry.  Well, of course, that did not happen, nor did my steak get cooked.  It is now 8:11 PM, and due to her constant distractions of telling me when dinner would be ready, I have not yet finished the entry.  She just came out to tell me that my steak was not cooked yet.  Wait!  Wasn’t that the whole point of why she kept coming out?  So that she could rush me along?  So that I could finish in time for dinner.  Well, now I’m pissed again.  Alright, it is dark out, and I guess I’m done with this entry, so I will close so that I can sit down for dinner and hope that it will be ready by now and that everyone else hasn’t started eating without me.

If my reader thought that the dinner drama had ended when I closed, they do not know my family.  After I closed, yes, the steak was not cooked.  I like my steak almost raw, so it would just need a couple of minutes on each side, five minutes top.  I was still confused as to why my mom kept rushing me, only for her to then tell me that my steak was uncooked.  It made no sense.  Well, here’s the catch.  The stove doesn’t work right, and the only way to turn it on is to supply with a short burst of gas from the garage, which needed to be timed perfectly.  Okay, still confused at this point.  I said that I would be ready at 8 PM.  Everyone else’s food was ready at 8 PM.  Everyone else started eating at 8 PM.  Why then did my dad come out at 8:15 PM, saying that I needed to cook my steak?  Wasn’t my steak being prepared as part of the whole dinner process?  Wasn’t that why my mom kept rushing me?  Because she was afraid that if I waited until 8 PM to eat my steak would either be overcooked or cold?

Tempers flared all around, the five of us being uniquely suited to get on each other’s nerves, even after 27 years or maybe especially after 27 years.  My dad, ever the diplomat, did not have much of an appetite, gave me some of his meat while mine was being prepared.  It was like a Brazillian steakhouse, every time I finished a piece of meat, he put a new piece of meat on my plate, the pork chop and the steak being too much for him.  After dinner, we sat down while my grandmother cleaned up before we had dessert.  That is something that I don’t understand either, and it’s something my mom does that she surely got from her mother.  Why do you need to clean up between dinner and dessert?  Wouldn’t it make more sense to serve dessert immediately afterwards and then clean up everything, including the necessarily dirty plates from dessert?

After dessert, I asked what the plan was.  I wanted to watch Hercules.  No one else wanted to.  In the end, it was decided that they would play bridge, and I could watch Hercules on my laptop and smoke my cigar while I watched outside.  That is exactly what I’m going to do, light up a Flor del Antilles, publish this entry, and watch Hercules.

Oh, so the cigars my mom went to buy.  I realized that I had made a fatal mistake.  I had asked her to get me two Padron cigars as part of the package and four similar cigars.  Well, there are two lines of Padron cigars, the regular Padron is pure crap.  The one called Padron Aniversario is one of the best cigars in the world.  At the cigar shop back in New York, the Padron Aniversario is the favorite cigar of the workers there, and they all just call it “Padron” because no one smokes the regular line.  I didn’t even think to include the word Aniversario.  What happened?  Well, my mom, since she did exactly what I asked her to do, brought me back two Padron cigars and four similar cigars that were just as crappy as the original Padron.  Completely my fault, and they are not cigars I would consider smoking.  I asked her to bring them back to Scarsdale as an emergency stash in case I ever got desperate.

Anyway, I headed outside to the porch, where I proceeded to write this entry, which I will now close so that I can get on with my evening.  I’ll have to save the thematic analysis of the “I want more” songs for tomorrow.