Post-vacation letdown

Coming home from vacation is the pits. You have too much laundry and not enough groceries. Everything you went on vacation to get away from is back with a vengeance -- mail, newspapers, phone messages, piles of stuff at work, dust bunnies. Your computer informs you that you have 963 e-mail messages. And that is just your personal e-mail. You refuse to even look at your work e-mail, afraid that every message you open will automatically trigger eleven other messages to be deposited in your inbox.

You open your suitcase to unpack, and discover that you have fallen victim to a little-researched phenomenon known as the Cleveland Triangle, which causes all clothing in a suitcase on planes flying over Cleveland to multiply, so that instead of having 17 loads of laundry you now have 156. This phenomenon is also responsible for any clean clothing, such as your one remaining pair of underwear, becoming unfit for wearing without first being washed. Such Triangles have also been reported in other locations, so that even if you are not flying over Cleveland, you are not entirely safe from the threat of exploding laundry. If you discover that this has happened to you, you should immediately contact the Department of Homeland Security to report this insidious threat. They will no doubt raise the national threat level to magenta, cutting off all supplies of clean underwear being imported from China.

At some point, probably when your stomach rumbles so loudly that it sounds like a small nuclear explosion, you will realize that you, and you alone, are responsible for cooking something and putting it on the table for you and your spouse to eat. There is no friendly waiter anymore to bring you world-class food from a high-priced chef. There is no free hotel buffet with steaming eggs and waffles to help you welcome a new day. After looking in every one of your cupboards, because you forgot where you keep the pans, you finally retrieve a battered pan and then look blankly at the pan and the stove and say aloud, "What am I supposed to do with these?"

And then you spot the telephone, and happily remember that you have the number of a Chinese restaurant somewhere, and after much searching you find it and eagerly order Moo Goo Gai Pan and Dan Dan noodles. Somewhere at the back of your brain, you realize that you can't keep doing this forever, avoiding your stove and your oven and your refrigerator, but you resolutely push those thoughts from your mind and answer the doorbell when the delivery person comes. You remember too late that you have used up your last few dollars tipping the shuttle guy at the airport, and the delivery guy has to settle for some odd change you find under the couch cushion. If you had planned to order out again tomorrow, you realize it had better be from a different restaurant.

But at first, these things don't bother you too much. You have Vacation Euphoria. You are still basking in the glow of the Tuscan sun, or the glare of Disneyworld. While your body is busy typing, or cooking, or shoving clothes into the dryer, your mind escapes to that land so recently visited, reliving the vastness of the Grand Canyon or the blueness of the Aegean Sea. Until the harsh buzzer of the dryer pulls you rudely back into the present, and you lose a little of the glow.

By about the sixth or seventh day back, Vacation Amnesia sets in. When someone asks you what you did on your trip, you cannot even remember where you went. "Uh, I think Texas. Or Ohio, maybe. Although it could have been Mexico. We've been to Mexico, I think. Just can't remember if it was this trip."

By the time you download your pictures, you can't remember what any of them are. You are sure they are yours because they came from your camera, and because you think you can recognize your spouse in a corner of one of the photos. Although it could also be a tree.

By the following week you are so stressed out again with work, home, etc., that you completely forget that you even went on vacation and begin planning another trip. You say to your spouse, "It's been a long time since we took a vacation. Let's go somewhere! " You are both excited until you check your remaining personal days at work and realize that there are none left, and it is only June. You complain to the Human Resources person at work that someone has been stealing your personal days. "Look for someone who's been on vacation recently," you urge. "I'll bet they took more than they should have." The HR person reminds you that you have been on vacation recently. "Oh, no," you protest. "You must be mistaken. I haven't been anywhere since 1997."

Vacation Amnesia is actually a blessing in disguise, because if you had to relive every day those fantastic memories of your vacation and then be pulled rudely back into reality, no one would ever go on vacation again. The mental anguish would be too great. Not to mention the worry about what is happening to your laundry back in cargo.