Moose in the Kitchen

I’ve never been to Las Vegas as an adult. The first time I set foot in the City of Sin, my parents (as I recall) dumped my brother and me at Circus Circus while they went out and lost my college tuition. That’s not true. I went to college anyway. They just had to sell my brother to afford it. I assure you he deserved it, after winning the white teddy bear I wanted and then refusing to give it to me, contrary to my very reasonable demands.

My second visit was a mere technicality. My flight had a layover in the Las Vegas airport on my way to start college in New York, but I was too distracted to notice anything besides the glaring slot machine lights. I was moving 3000 miles away from home and I’d befriended a girl on the flight who, oddly, handed me her cell phone because her boyfriend wanted to talk to me. Confused, I took her phone and listened as he shrieked, “I WANT YOU TO STAY AWAY FROM HER!” I’d forgotten all about that until I passed that same row of slot machines 13 years later, and the memory of being afraid for her came rushing back. I wonder if she ever escaped him.

So this weekend was my first real experience of Las Vegas. I was there for, of all things, a personal development workshop. It’s too easy, isn’t it? Like shooting pigeons in a pie. “So you’re going to personally develop your crack habit?” “You’re going to personally develop your pole dancing skills?” “You’re going to personally develop your addiction to margaritas in two-foot tall plastic cups?”

After expecting a tawdry street full of dimly buzzing fluorescent signs and panhandlers busking the twelve dollar hookers, I was entirely charmed by Las Vegas – the bright lights of the Strip, the disarmingly clean Venice, the geographically incorrect New York. And the pole dancers. They were surprisingly graceful, with their improbable tans and unfortunately fuzzy boots.

To Sum Up a Very Eventful Weekend In One Paragraph, Because This Post Is Already Too Voluminously Full of Adverbs

I received a marriage proposal, got more hugs in three days than I have in the past year, and organized a two-man kick line for my own entertainment. Four people said they liked my hair. I saw Ka with my new Australian friend, the one who accidentally wandered through every parking lot on the Strip with me and taught me to call obnoxiously large, gas-guzzling cars “Yank Tanks.” I saw a pirate show featuring more spangled hotpants than pirates, and was asked by an accomplished psychic if I’d started writing my book yet. (My brain blew with an audible pop. I wonder if she knows I lied when I said yes.) I ate the most amazing steak of my life and vowed two days later to cut meat from my diet. I met smart, kind people from Belgium, Denmark, Romania, and Flushing, New York. I marveled at the amount of material one can use to cover one’s loins and still claim to be wearing a skirt. I ate peanut butter fudge ice cream and drooled over patent leather high heels in the shop windows of the Bellagio. I vowed they would be mine and was informed by a dry Australian voice, “If we can’t manifest a penny, we probably can’t manifest Dior.” We didn’t find a penny.

I was happy this weekend. Best of all, I now have some handy tools to transfer said happiness to my everyday life. Here’s what stuck:

1. It’s easy to be friendly and open in a room full of friendly and open people. But I can recreate that ease of interaction anywhere I go – especially if I yank out the earbuds, stow my iPhone, and pay attention to the living, breathing humans in front of me.
2. You can make someone’s day by recognizing their effort or buying them coffee. Yes, kindness can be purchased for three dollars and fifty cents. If you don’t have three dollars and fifty cents, smiling works too.
3. It’s worth taking the time to figure out the truth of my emotions and reactions. It’s astonishingly easy with a little practice.
4. I waste a lot of time on activities that don’t noticeably improve my quality of life. Like, say, aiming my browser toward my email 97 (billion) times a day.
5. I love writing these little notes to you people and I want to do more of it. When I’m writing a blog post, I lose all sense of time and space and resurface only after hitting publish. Then I dive back under to futz with word choice and remove extraneous commas. I do like me some extraneous commas.
6. I’m not quite where I want to be yet, but I can see it from here.
7. Scratch that. I’m precisely where I want to be. Being otherwise is to miss what’s in your lap. And then you just offended a perfectly nice lap dancer.