the sunshine state

The "Happiest Celebration on Earth" comes with a bloody long queue. What exactly am I talking about? Read on..
Since the ol' folks and the younger sibling decided to visit me in this land of liberty and freedom, we decided to take a trip to see Mickey, Donald, and the whole gang and Disney World in Florida.. Now I could say that this was entirely spearheaded by my sister, but who the hell am I kidding? I'm totally into the whole Disney "experience"..
The only drawback, as I briefly alluded to earlier were the damn lines to most of the rides.. It just annoys me when you wait in line for half an hour for a ride that lasts all of two and a half minutes! Space Mountain was a lot of fun, and not nearly as scary as I expected it to be.. The huge big rollercoaster at Universal Studios, on the other hand, scared the crap outta me so much that I decided not to go on it.. On hindsight, I wish I had gone, because I feel like a bit of a wuss (is that how u spell that?) right now..
I bought myself a big Goofy hat, which made me look, well... for lack of a better word, goofy.. but thats not really a suprise.. I think Goofy and I are some sort of kindred spirits.. Mebbe a past life connection, or twins separated at birth, coz I see big similarities in our thought processes and the consequences of many of our actions..

Lets move on to a slightly more surreal aspect of the trip..
I had to take a taxi to the airport coz I was heading back to New York, and my folks were goin somewhere else.. (in case you were wondering, I haven't gotten to the surreal part as yet)
So the taxi driver, much like the majority of the population of this highly sociable country, took all of two minutes to strike up conversation.. As it turns out, the dude had gone to GRAD SCHOOL in NYU.. Now the obvious, but highly inappropriate question would be..
"dude.. if you went to grad school, why on earth are you driving a taxi?"

Needless to say, I didn't ask him this..
But in light of his aforesaid sociable nature, and also pleased to be in the company of a current grad student, he tells me that he did some sort of chemisrty in grad school, went on to some sort of chemical synthesis industry, led a happy and fulfilling life of synthesizing some obscure compound thats probably an essential component of hairspray, and then retired..
sounds pretty normal.. but I'm not done yet..

So like many people in the united states, he moved to good ol' Florida to retire, spent the better part of a year golfing, fishing etc etc.. y'know.. retirement-ish stuff.. and promptly got bored... so much so that he JOINED A TAXI COMPANY and drives around idiotic tourists like myself to the airport at seven in the morning..

Now this honestly scared the living daylights outta me.. Could this be me, fifty odd years from now? I shudder to think.. After a lifetime of working in a lab, wouldn't you wanna do something slightly more interesting than drive a taxi through the "magical kingdom"?

I have taken a vow to do something interesting with my life.. I will not let my blog, fifty years hence, to read..

"I drove a yappy lil grad student to the airport this morning.. He told me wot he intends to do with his life, and I secretly laughed, knowing that there was no way in hell"

So there reads my vacation in Florida. The sunshine state.