My family went to Mexico last week. Or, a faction of my family went. The faction that prefers fun and happiness to responsibility. Fortunately for our faction, people who enjoy responsibility stayed home to help finance our fun and happiness.

Our irresponsible-fun-loving faction consisted of myself, my mother, and my younger brother. My older brother joined us for a couple days too, and we tried to reserve most of our non-sitting-on-our-asses-being-lazy activities for when he was present. We went on a boat ride that turned out to be a booze cruise and to make it even more awesome, our captain was drinking too. I, who cannot swim, did lots of things that could have resulted in my drowning like kayaking and banana boat riding. One of the highlights of the trip was definitely watching my mother’s repeated futile attempts to get back on the banana boat after it flipped. This isn’t just me being a terrible daughter; my mother will be the first to tell you it was fucking hilarious. As one would expect, the most fun things were also the things most likely to end in death, like ziplining and parasailing. Shortly before being whipped into the air when I went parasailing a really obnoxious American man felt the need to approach us on the beach to inform me that Mexico did not have any health care and some other stuff that I didn’t really listen to, but I assume translated to “blah-blah-blah-this-might-kill-you-blah-blah-blah.” He started talking as they were finishing up the harness and I was abruptly shot into the air before I had time to acknowledge his presence. Of course, I then analyzed the threat level of my situation for a good portion of my ride and I decided it couldn’t really end more horribly than a couple broken bones and it would be so worth it because oh my fucking god this is amazing and I am so fucking high in the air and I can see the whole city and this is the best day ever and oh shit it’s already time to start pulling my cord thing that brings me down and BOOSH I’m being helped back to the sand and suck on that you pasty douche bag.

A couple days before parasailing, Derrik decided to pick a coconut. Later he would hold the coconut in front of my face and speak Spanish to me and tell me that his name was Señor Coconut and I would have to pay him fifty American dollars to speak to him. This is irrelevant. Derrik decided that Señor Coconut needed to return to the US with us so he packed Señor Coconut in his bag and off to Houston we went. Unfortunately, we were doing this stupid thing where we were honest people and informed the customs officers that we did, in fact, have a coconut. We were then told that instead of going straight to the exit door, we would have to go to the right and through a second customs inspection line. We then decided we should figure out when our flight to St. Louis left. 5:40. It started boarding at 5:15. Oh look, it’s 5:15. And we still had to re-check our bags and go through the TSA check-point. We were behind a large family with approximately 900 bags. We politely asked them if we could go in front of them because we really had to get on our plane and of course the guy was an asshole and said no. Once we got our shit together, we managed to actually get in front of them to re-checking our bags and then to TSA, but while we dicked around trying to get permission to go through the Elite Access line, they managed to get in front of us again and of course the same asshole who said no to us had about a thousand metal articles on him and had to go through the security scanner 928349834 times. We sprinted through the airport (naturally we were in E and needed to get to B) and ran up escalators carrying my stupid heavy bag that I should have just checked and after all of that we narrowly missed our flight and had to get on the 7:something flight. Lessons I learned from this:
1) Honesty is totally overrated.
2) Some people at the airport need to be a little less rude.
3) Anticipate the possibility that I will sprint through the airport since we’re incapable of being on time for anything ever and if I don’t want to run up stairs with it then I really shouldn’t carry it on.

You might say, “Why did Nicole not also learn that bringing back coconuts from foreign countries is a bad idea?” This is because I firmly believe that Señor Coconut was essential to our trip. This is also because I know that we will always be the sort of people that do things like this and resistance is futile.

So now I am back in the United States, waiting to hear about a job, but mostly watching lots and lots of television. My life is really difficult, I know.

*I reserve the right to make up statistics.