And we're off to Disneyland!

[elfs]

We're Going To Disneyland!

Now came the part I thought was fairly controversial: two days at Disneyland. No excuses, no particular purpose. We could have gone back to Fullerton and listened to the other bands, but that would have been an overdose of education, I suppose. Instead, we hung out in the Happiest Place on Earth.

And really, the staff are astonishingly cheerful. I guess it's a requirement to work there, but they pull it off. Most of them must love working there, in one way or another. Despite the occasional labor troubles.

Somewhere in the basement of Walt Disney Laboratories must be a copy of The Eldritch Master's Guide to Color, because Disney almost never, ever gets color wrong. I couldn't think of a clash anywhere in the place. There's something amazing about the integrative quality of color used on the buildings, costumes, fixtures, and vehicles.

At one point, while I was taking pictures of things, I noticed a guy right next to me more or less doing the same thing. He was photographing things, not people, in a methodical and deliberate way. A lot of where he aimed his camera was at the plant life, but not all. I said to him, "You must be either a graphic designer, or a gardener."

"Umm... both. How did you know?"

I waved my camera at him. "Only one of those would pay so much attention."

I didn't do many rides. It was fun just to walk around, people-watch, run into different groups of kids from our school and make sure they're all having a good time. I did ride the steamboat exhibit, the Mark Twain. The voice-over still has the "Friendly Injun" language left over from the 1960s, the romanticized frontier of Walt Disney's youth. The steam whistle will spray droplets on you if you're too close when it blows, and the steam chimneys are quite warm to the touch, but not dangerously so.

It occurs to me that in Disneyland, you are here to be entertained by machinery, anthropomorphics, and animatronics. The humans are there to commit commerce.

As I got off the boat, a passed a group of high schoolers. This weekend Disney is packed with graduating classes, along with two music competitions. A young woman said, "Oh, my god. It's a kilt! Okay, my day just got a lot better. That is awesome." I'm glad I made someone's day.

Did I mention I wore the kilt? I pointed out to my three charges, Storm, and a few other people that my job on the trip was to do three things: one, tell them what was expected of them, two, help them solve those problems they could not solve themselves, and three, show them that being an adult does not necessarily have to suck. A few of those who heard me later confided that they thought that their parents had succumbed to being adults. They weren't bad parents, they'd just given up trying to have fun. I said that it wasn't being an adult that was the problem, it was choosing to be mundane, ordinary, just get it over with. "I have no intention of 'just getting over with' my life," I told one young man.

At noon, I had to walk two girls back to the hotel; one had grabbed the wrong shirt and was quite in trouble. A six-block walk, and Anaheim has long blocks. I grabbed the sunscreen.

Did you know a Utilikilt Mocker can carry two 750ml bottles of wine in the front pockets and not show? That is awesome.

Had lunch with Stormy and her crowd. She looks tired but exhausted. We ate at "The French Market," a fairly decent place with a really good salad with blackened salmon and avocado. I was "kilt man" to many of the kids. Stormy got a lot of "Your dad is pretty cool, after all."

The coffee here is terrible. I feel so sorry for the rest of the country.

The Jungle Cruise voice-over is by Steve Martin. And the Disneyland Train is by Dick Van Dyke. That is very cool.