My not so close friend Celine Dion once sang "My heart will go on", and so it was on a ship in the middle of the Caribbean.
Ship life never ceases to amaze me. As much as the scenery changes for the guests... bigger ships, brighter lights, better amenities, the crew always are dealing with the same concerns and the entertainment department, the same drama.
One of my fellow colleagues, My team mate Don has his girlfriend sailing on board. She is in a guest cabin and he has not gotten her a pass to go into crew quarters. This means one thing... he is just not that into her, but Sue Ellen our team mate is and I think that the feeling is mutual. In baking terms this is what my sister Tammy calls Spaghetti Surprise.
On the other end of the ship we have a lead singer with the showband, a beautiful gal of 38 who goes by auntie M. She is having drama with the back lounge tech who suffers from low self esteem by suggesting that he is best at everything everyone else does.
The question is: When is a boundary crossed? The answer is not easily come by. We live and work in the same place. Our collegues are also who we break bread with every single day. There are no bathroom stalls to hide in, nor is there a place where we can escape to for longer then a few hours that people can't find us. We literally take our work home with us and our personal life to work.
But admist all this, I have found Edi. Edi is our crew bartender who comes from the Philipines. He is a general practitioner back home with a wife and three children: a son and two daughters. Finding work is out of the question back home so he is here slinging the drunk crew redbull/vodka's and countless bottles of wine and vitamin water.
I had a chance to talk to him and ask him about his wife of five years. He becomes sullen and teary. He has been with the cruise lines for eight years and is waiting for his ten year bonus in order to send it home from private schools.
In a split second, he is gone to sling another beer over to a casino work mate who has no idea what drives edi to be so committed to the company and I realize how relative our lives truely are. How our priorities are so different.
Auntie M and I have polished off a chilled bottle of red wine feeding each other our own concerns and they all seem so small compared to Edi. In Auntie M's cabin though, our issues hold such great weight.
At the end of the day, I am in the entertainment department and need to embrace the trials and tribualtions that come with it. I have to push aside Edi's concerns and realize that I have to take on each trivial matter of the dancers and musicians as seriously as I want to tackle Edi's.
I just can't help feeling as if i am Bobby Ewing fighting J.R. for a barrel of oil: at the end of the day it's still just a barrel, but at the moment of conflict it is so much more.
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