End of the First Week

The culture of being on a cruise ship is bizarre. I have never had a job that has made me feel so many things in such a short amount of time.  The past two days have been a battle between my urge to make a life here and my urge to quit. Now that I have a bit of a feel for what this place is like, it is becoming more and more apparent to me that I don’t really see myself staying happy here. Everyone on the ship is two-faced; they have their guest side and their crew side. It seems to me that this two-facedness bleeds into interactions with crew members. To really make it here, I’m going to have to build a wall around myself to avoid letting it all get to me. I don’t want to do that, but I won’t last if I don’t. On the other hand, there is tons of room for making progress both musically and as an individual. So the question I’m struggling with is which do I choose; happiness or growth?

Yesterday was a pretty light day. I woke up and ate lunch. I don’t think any of the musicians eat breakfast here, lunch seems to be the first meal of the day. After that I killed time until 5:30, when we had a sound check. The show started at seven and another at nine. It was the same one that we did the night before. Playing with a click track is lame, but I’m getting a feel for it slowly. This show is New Orleans themed; mostly NO-style jazz a few pop tunes thrown in for good measure. The production singers range from great to mediocre, and the show does a wonderful job of taking good tunes and dumbing them down into collages of seemingly unrelated songs. Despite how cheesy the show is, I played it well.

Afterwards, we played another dance set in one of the lounges. People responded more to this performance one than my first. P loves to segue from song to song rapidly, and it’s tough for me to keep up because he calls songs on the fly. Being a drummer, it’s hard to pull tunes from a folder when you are playing with both arms. The show didn’t feel great to me, but the dance floor was full and I’m starting to get a feel for the songs we play regularly.

I schmoozed with a few guests once the show was over then went back my room. My roommate (I’ll call him E from now on) confronted me when I got back. He basically said I wasn’t up to snuff and the rest of the band was upset about it. The advice he gave me was to play busier and to get my head out of the music. He claimed the rest of the band was talking behind my back (there's that two-facedness I spoke about) about it and that that wasn’t who he was so he told me. I was a little upset about the manner in which he told me, but I’ve never really taken criticism well so I chalked it up to that. I thanked him for being real and settled in for the night. This was when I first started humoring the idea of quitting. I talked to a few friends online about it; the advice I got was to give myself a time frame to get a strong feel for the job before I make a decision. That way, I can either settle into it or really understand why I dislike it, so if I wind up leaving I won’t regret it in the future. Having talked it out with a few people, I went to sleep.

I got up this morning feeling better. The company requires a mandatory Vessel Familiarization Test at the end of everyone’s first week. You have to meet with your supervisor before the test and go over the material, so I went to P’s room and he went over everything pretty briefly. Then we had a rehearsal at noon; it was our final production show of the week, which stars guest singing recognizable tunes. The entertainment department auditions passengers the day before and the winners get to be in the show. This was the only production show we actually rehearse, so I actually got a feel for the tracks before I performed them for the first time.  The rehearsal was mostly the dancers teaching the passengers what they would be doing. During rehearsal, the interactions I had with my fellow musicians were cold, and this put me back into a melancholy mood.

Then I had the test, it was easy. I studied way too hard for this thing; most of the crew was blatantly cheating off of each other and the officers giving the test didn’t seem to mind. I chatted with a British and a Canadian guy after the test, they made fun of Americans and I played along, it was fun. When the test was over I had the farewell dance show, where I tried to do what E suggested. I got my head out of the music, and just wound up losing my place in most of the songs.  Near the end, I heard E talking to the guitarist about how I was terrible. Now, I haven’t been a professional musician for a long time, but I know that to form a musical rapport, the players need to trust each other. Instead of building that trust, his actions upset me and I just checked out of the rest of the show. When the show ended, I was feeling pretty upset so I pulled P aside and told him that I didn’t think this job was for me. He tried to convince me to stick it out and I told him I’d give it a few more weeks, but that quitting was on my mind. P told me to stop by his room and we could talk about it. We chatted for a bit and he’s actually a really nice guy. I felt a bit better about staying another week or so, but I told him he should keep his ear to the ground about finding a replacement.

We ate dinner, and then I had a karaoke set. I didn’t really want to play with the band at this point, so for the first half of the set I wasn’t really trying. Throughout the show, E continued to make comments about my playing to the guitarist; he must either have a lot of distain for me or think I’m oblivious. When we had a short break, I started to get really angry about it. Right before we started back up again, the guitarist said to me that I need to play like I’m an animal, and that if I’m not more aggressive that I will get killed by other animals. I channeled the rage I was feeling into my playing and things just clicked. It was good, but needing to be angry to gel with the other musicians seems unhealthy, and I’m positive that if I have to do that, I won’t be happy on this ship. Once the second half of the karaoke was over we had the production show. It went smoothly and uneventfully but the guests are not very good singers.

I’ve decided that next week I’m going to really try to be present on the ship. I want to really know if I should stay or leave, and I feel like concentrating on being here is the best way to do that. Honestly, this week has not been the best, but everyone tells me that your first week always sucks. I had really romanticized being a musician on a ship, and I sacrificed a lot of things to be here. I don’t really know if that was a good decision. I was legitimately happy for the first time in over a year when I was in New Jersey and it feels like I’ve left that behind for a pipe dream. On the other hand, I know that if I conquer this, it will only make me a stronger and better person.

I guess this post has a pretty negative tone, but I’ve been fighting the urge to quit all day. Not being initially liked by my co-workers is a difficult thing for me to deal with, and not having a support net of friends here is not helping matters. However, I’ve spent my life running away from things I don’t like. I’ve transferred schools three times (and almost did a fourth time), quit jobs and cut social ties all in the pursuit of happiness, but was that really a good idea? Did I ever really find happiness at the places I ran to, or just a different thing I didn’t like? I guess these are things I’ll have to wrestle with over the next week or two.

Stay tuned listeners! Next week’s episode should be a good one…