E-Dribble

I remember as a child hearing during church sermons that God will never burden you with more than you can handle. It seems comforting, doesn’t it? I mean, hey, if things get too bad, God will lighten the load. Right? Before we answer, we need to address something first.

The mind is incredible. History has proven that people are an incredibly adaptable species, overcoming great obstacles and tragedies only to triumph in spite of things that were previously thought to be insurmountable.

So, what’s the problem? My point here is only this: We are all capable of handling horrific things our minds can not fathom, and if you can handle a lot, then the above statement is not nearly as comforting as it was when I was eight years old.

The latest item added to my list of things that I can handle, but wished I couldn’t:

Walt Disney World in Orlando Florida

My wife and daughter have been planning this trip for over a year now. Well, that’s not completely true. My wife has been planning it, then sharing the excitement with my daughter in hopes of creating a stronger alliance just in case I find where she hid my testicles and decide to cast my vote concerning whether we should go or not. Luckily for everyone involved, she’s great at hide-and-seek, and I don’t think I’ll ever see my party nuggets again.

We have tried this before. When my daughter was younger, we went to Disney a couple of times and it ended poorly. Really poorly. I can’t impress upon you how poorly it went without pictures and graphs. The last trip ended in my tossing our car keys into a crowd and planning to walk back to southwest Florida. Luckily, my wife was fueled by an intense hatred for me and was able to find them through sheer willpower. Our drive home was a very uncomfortable and understandably quiet one.

I don’t blame my wife for any of this. I know that the reason that these trips go the way they do is because I handle them so poorly. I handle them poorly because:

1) I really don’t handle crowds well
2) I hate Disney World

Number one isn’t something that I’m easily able to control, so I concentrated on number two. During the planning phase of this trip, nobody was allowed to mention anything pertaining to Disney while I was present. Phone conversations between my wife and other family members sounded like secret meetings between undercover agents, all in an attempt to keep me from dwelling on the trip. In spite of this, as the date of departure loomed ever closer, everyone could tell that the chances of a repeat performance were good. My wife tried everything, from telling me that Disney World was practically deserted in October(a bald faced lie) to slipping “extra” medicine into my coffee. I can’t prove this last one, but it’s the only possible explanation for why I ended up in Florida.

I didn’t always hate Disney. I began to hate Disney both as a corporation and as an amusement park when they jumped the shark. They did that when they began worrying less about children having fun and more about promoting their next movie release or important product tie-in. Everything having to do with Disney has been molded to have the largest commercial impact possible. Everything is provided by Coca-Cola, sponsored by Visa or courtesy of Rolaids. Nothing is simply there for your enjoyment. You should still be able to have fun there, but the personal affront I feel is so great, I find myself grinding my teeth during what is seemingly the most innocuous moments at the park. “Mommy, why is that man crushing his mouse ears and crying while waiting in line for a 5 dollar water?”

There I was in the middle of it all. We had put the planning stage to bed and we were now executing that plan. We met my wife’s parents in Florida and commenced to having a great time in earnest. We had to leave the hotel fairly early each day to beat the crowds. Unfortunately, the crowds also left their hotels very early in the morning, and we all met each other at the parking lots in Disney. We then began standing in line. This line would continue in one form or another until we got back to our hotel. Let me explain:

Line 1 – In our cars, waiting to get into the parking area.
Line 2 – We’ve parked our cars and are now waiting for the tram to take us to the welcoming gate
Line 3 – We’ve arrived at the welcoming gate and are now in line to have our bags searched
Line 4 – We now wait in line for the monorail or ferry to take us to the real welcoming gate. The previous gate was obviously just for practice.
Line 5 – Second gate, and we show our ticket. We’re in!

You can now choose any line you would like to stand in. The freedom is mind boggling. If I want, I can stand in two lines at once with something called a FastPass. This allows me to create a facsimile-me by inserting my ticket into a machine at a ride entrance. That will issue me a new ticket telling me when to return to board the ride. During that period of time, I am free to stand in any other line in the park that I choose. I could even stand in the same line if I wanted, essentially placing two of me in the same line.

I saw your eyebrows arch on the mention of the FastPass. Why am I bitching if I can bypass the line with it? Well, you do bypass the line to get onto the ride, foregoing it for a new and improved line of people that chose not to wait in the first line, instead using their FastPass for exclusive access into the new and improved line. We only used this once, but even with that limited amount of use, I can say with surety that I like the first line better. The second line mostly consists of people that feel they’re better than their non-FastPass brethren, and are too good to stand in a line. The sense of entitlement trickles down to their children as well, who take the time alloted to them while standing in line to use your backpack straps as handholds for climbing. I found myself wishing I was one of the unwashed masses as it was obvious that they had accepted their place in life and didn’t try to buck the system.

What happens when you’re done for the day? Well, you simply reverse the order in which you will stand in lines. That’s right, you get to do them all over again, only now in the reverse order. If you stay until the park closes, you will enter a whole new dimension of line standing, creating groups of people that defy the laws of physics.

So, what do you get for all of that lost time? You may think I am exaggerating, but if you plan on spending a normal length day at any one of the parks, and you would like to ride any of the more popular rides, you can count on having time to ride two to three attractions and have one meal. This is in a 7-9 hour day. After you have parked, made it into the park, have traveled to and fro and have stood in line for the attraction, that is what you’re left with. Time for two or three 10-20 minute rides and a lunch. The park is jam packed with people that think this is a great deal. It also holds a lot of people like me that don’t think it is a great deal but weren’t allowed to vote when the family made it’s decision.

Why do we do this? Well, everyone has different reasons. I saw some adults with their significant others with no children that were there to witness the magic for themselves. Some really sick individuals(a lot, actually) got married there and just stayed for the honeymoon. The majority though are there for their children. You know going into it that you are going to spend hours being miserable. Even the people who love this type of thing know it. You can’t pack that many people into that tight of a spot for that long in that amount of heat and humidity and not have it negatively impact their disposition. I saw people screaming at each other, dragging children by their clothing, crying and on the precipice of heat stroke. If you don’t have children, it’s incomprehensible as to why you would do something like this. For parents, it’s very simple:

The smile. It doesn’t happen often, as even children are miserable for most of the time there, but when it happens, it’s usually of a magnitude you don’t see elsewhere. When they see Peter Pan fly, or Mickey perform his magic, their eyes light up in a way that you don’t often see. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that we do it for the kids… that would be silly. We’re like smile junkies. We need to know that we made our children smile like that. It’s the ultimate approval rating. When I saw my daughter smile, I felt like I single-handedly constructed the park. I knew that in 7 1/2 minutes, someone dressed like an elf would whisk us through the exit because the next batch of 100 people were coming into the theater directly behind us, but for a brief period of time, my daughter was having a blast and she thought it was because of me.

Did that really make all the crap worth it? Even if it didn’t, that sounds like a question that I wouldn’t be allowed to vote on.