I Went to Walt Disney World. Here Are My Notes.

I am back from vacation, which means I finally have some time to relax. We went on a very overkill trip to Walt Disney World. WDW was delightful, and spending over a week with my family without being interrupted by work was double delightful.

That said, during the trip, I recorded some observations, and I would like to share them with you now:

  1. If I ever am made to ride Small World again, it will become my Heart of Darkness. I will become like the Colonel Kurtz of these little haunted dolls-- their warlord and their god-king.

  2. American middle-to-upper-class boys are a menace. No one bothers to teach them any consideration for other people. Perhaps no one even explains to them that other people are, in fact, people. So, they run everywhere at full tilt until they stop suddenly and fling their limbs about randomly, whacking whoever happens to be there at the time. It occurs to me that these boys grow up to be CEOs and judges. And then those CEOs and judges have little boys of their own to whom they teach these same non-lessons. I wonder if this means anything for society.

  3. There are three archetypes of shirts that middle-age men wear to theme parks:

    1. I think of myself as merely my family's wallet and I am disgruntled about that.
    2. The condom broke :(
    3. I want you to know that I have a barely suppressed urge to do mass violence, but we're going to treat it as a joke.

  4. I've realized that Suburban Americans love Disney World because it is a model of a functioning society (i.e. exactly the opposite of their normal living conditions). It has walkable mixed-used development. It has public transit. It has well-maintained functioning infrastructure. It has high-quality diverse cuisine. Oh, and time for leisure.

  5. On the other hand, I'm sure none of the proceeds from the $9 Coronas flow to the vast largely young and/or immigrant working class that makes the whole thing work. So in that way, it's exactly like the rest of America.

  6. Everywhere you look at WDW, you see the work of the busy hands of an army of theatre techies. The whole things works on par lights, scrim curtains, pipework, and rear projection. I was sitting in a Star Wars themed restaurant and noticed that someone had hand-painted a weathering effect of the screws holding the counter together. As a former theatre tech, I'm just glad some of us got jobs.

  7. It's fun. It's kind of a lot of fun actually.