I nicked off this past week for a dirty weekend with my companion. I hadn’t realized that, true to the tradition of the d.w., I had sort of snuck away. I thought I had covered all my bases: I threw up a special voicemail and had told Frannie’s dad where I was going and who with. However, when I got back, my inbox was bursting with urgent emails from my thesis advisor, whom I had neglected to tell I was going away. Well, she knows now. Oops.

Trying to feel guilty…aaaand…FAILING. Bad Student. I am becoming incapable of turning the guilt whip on myself anymore. I am starting to see studenting as a job I can choose to clock out on. You say lazy, I say coping mechanism.

This was probably the most necessary vacation I have ever taken. We stayed in a coastal town that had that cute/quirky/romantic feeling in spades…the type of town that you have to remind yourself that people actually live and work in. The locals and their fucking adorable shops and restaurants are not just put there for my vacationing pleasure. We did nothing but eat and goggle at tchotchkes and “fight crime.”

Ever since I was nineteen or twenty, I would go off on excursions to small towns and pick up the local classifieds, mooning over the possibilities of cheaper rents and being part of the adorable scenery. Reality always comes back to haunt me eventually, though. We took what could have been a romantic walk on a romantic jetty, but the March wind almost blew the top of my head off. On the first day the wind wasn’t blowing, so we enjoyed a walk around in the still air�with the inescapable smell of a mill following us around. If you’ve never smelled a mill before, let me say that it smells like a paper bag that had a bunch of crap in it, like old vegetables. And then someone dumps out the old vegetables and makes the bag all wet and leaves it at the bottom of that bucket behind the shed. Finally, just add ass. That is the smell of a mill.

But the hotel was fantastic, in that very old and crazy-quilt way. It was a reproduction castle (meaning that some crazy rich lumber baron guy wanted to outdo all the other crazy rich guys in town) that is more than one hundred years old, and had suffered the wrath of several different tastes during a series of remodels. My companion expressed disappointment that there were no suits of armor in evidence, which never would have occurred to me. I thought about this a little and looked around at all the foo-foo Louis XIV style furniture and flowers and crap, and realized this was a lady castle. I had taken him on a lady vacation but he was a very good sport about the whole thing�who can complain about something as ridiculous as a Jacuzzi suite?

And then on the second day I got abducted up to Man Land. I discovered something way out in the Olympic National Forest that smells worse than a mill town: hot springs. We drove as far as we could into the forest, parked, and then walked for an hour over logs and streams and on crumbling ledges with alarming dropoffs that I am told used to be a drivable road. On the way out my companion told me we might run across some naked people.

“What?” I said. “These hot springs are private, right? Like, hidden?”

“Well,” he said, “not all of them are.”

“And I am supposed to get naked in one of these not-so-private hot springs?”

I dropped the subject when my companion gave me the “duh” look.

Generally I think nudity is a good idea, but this was ten o’clock in the morning and I wasn’t sure if I’d shaven correctly or not. I mean, I know how to shave for bathing suits, but how do you shave for a potentially illegal activity? I felt myself balking internally as the elevation rose and we walked past increasingly larger patches of snow.

Finally, we arrived, and the first springs I saw were beautiful and very enticing after an hour of cold hiking butt had set in. My companion, an admitted nudist, stripped down to nothing in half a minute.

“Don’t forget to put all your clothes inside your raincoat,” he said.

For those who have never been, a hot spring smells like rotten eggs. They let off steam and this smell like they are tiny portals to hell and are full of silt and rocks and some crap and look like something you should not put your naughty bits into EVER. However, once I wrestled my internal Puritan to the ground, I had a fine time and didn’t want to get out. The unholy nature of the sulfur-laden water turned my silver ring straight-up blue, which was pretty cool. We quickly dried off on gaffled hotel towels and my spine felt like butter for the rest of the day.

My companion and I decided that if our master’s degrees don’t lead to any promising job offers, we will head back up there and buy a fishing boat. He said he would be very pleased to be first mate on the FV Assmitten.