What I Learned About Cruising

I took a lovely cruise with my beautiful wife this past weekend. We were originally supposed to have gone to Ensenada, but, without a real explanation, we instead went to Catalina Island. The assumption is that this was due to the global pandemic that is the swine flu (remember the swine flu? You might remember it as the disease that CNN was apparently terrified of as it was the only thing they seemed to talk about for weeks). Here are the lessons that I learned.

1) You are limited only by your modesty and natural body limits as to the total amount of food you may consume. My modesty is not great as we shall see shortly.
2) If you win second place in the blackjack tournament, as opposed to the $500 you would have received for first place, you will receive an extra-small polo shirt and a change purse. Though the thought of yourself in an XS polo shirt is something pretty hilarious to the lay-person, as I am an XXL male who already has his own preferred change purse, thankyouverymuch, these items will be useless to you, and you will leave them behind.
3) If you win other contests on board, you will receive a small trophy that has a likeness of the ship you were on. The judges of these contests will refer to these trophies as "ships on a stick," in an effort to pull you into their crude double entendre.
4) You will think it would be funny to compete in the "Men's Hairy Chest Contest," as you assume you will only be shirtless briefly. When the contest starts and you realize that you have to parade shirtless down a flight of stairs by the pool, around the pool, up the stairs to the water slide, down the water slide, out of the pool, and in front of the female judges, all to the song "She's a Brick House," the humor of the activity will be severely lessened.
5) If you are one of the two finalists in this contest, you will be advised to "Shake what your mother gave you" while Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" plays over the PA system. As you are contestant number 2, you will feel obligated to out-do finalist number 1 in this endeavor, which will result in shaking equal to Beyonce's "All the Single Ladies" style proportions.
6) When you win this contest, you will realize that all of your dreams in life have come true, until you are told, as a condition of your victory, that if anybody for the rest of the cruise says to you "Hey, aren't you the hairy chest guy?" that you required to rip off your shirt and yell, "Oh yeah!"
7) People will come up to you for the rest of the cruise and get you to take your shirt off. This will be perplexing to you, because you would think that if people knew how to get you to take your shirt off, they would go out of their way to avoid doing so.
8) With little to no modesty left, let's just say that the buffet will cry after you are done with it.