It’s taken me a long time, a lot longer than on most ships, but at long last, I have managed to find the band. You would think it would have been easy, considering that there are twice as many party band members on board now as there used to be thanks to the new program, but this one was hard to crack – and even now, they aren’t “my” band, my band is mostly scattered to the four corners, two of them in Japan last I heard, a few still on my old ship, but none of them here. But these guys are at least someone that I can hang out with in the evenings, and the singer is a sweetheart –though I know she’s leaving at the end of the month.
I still can’t crack the Band Leader here, but having gotten to know him a little bit, I’ve discovered I don’t want to. Some attitudes are simply not becoming to me, and his is one of them. I don’t think he realizes what he has in the rest of his musicians, nor do I think he knows how to treat them. But I could be bias, between my father and my big brother, I’ve been lucky enough to know the best kind of band leaders – that makes me judgemental about the kind that pretty much makes you slam your own credentials on the coffee table before they’ll deign to acknowledge you as an equal.
I think I’ll leave that one alone for now…
Anyway, witness me on the slippery slope to being up too late at night having late-night dinner and rambling conversations. I don’t drink much on ships anymore – it’s true that I used to, but I find I don’t need to anymore – but good conversation? With people who actually accept me as an equal even though I’m not working in my field at the moment? That’s where things get dangerous for me out here.
But it also makes me miss my guys, the band I took care of that I may never see again. At least certainly we’ll never all work together again. That’s the nature of the beast as my current HRM is fond of saying. Sometimes you don’t realize how amazing a time in your life was until you’re looking at it in hind-sight, without rose-coloured glasses at all, I can easily say how perfect my last summer contract was. Makes me wonder sometimes, what’ll happened next to clear that bar.
Something will though, of that I have no doubt at all…