The very best thing I expected from my vacation was the endless hours of basking underneath an unadulterated ocean sky. I had no qualms with land, mind you; it just couldn’t hold a candle to water. When my parents whisked my sisters and me off to foreign delicacies aboard a cruise ship, sans Kathie Lee Gifford, I was expecting a life changing event. Well, in the way that a week-long dinner can be life changing. It never occurred to me that I could be affected by the veritable caste system economy that would be my home for the week. Oppression seems almost fancy when it comes with a shuffleboard deck.

My slap in the face came when I met my room steward, Dijan. He was Philippino and tragically decent. In my ridiculous obsession with learning as many pieces of foreign language as possible, I pumped him for his culture’s buzz words and phrases. That, and he showed me how to make an elephant out of towels. He told me that his job was envied by his friends back home. He began describing the rice paddies near Bali. He painted a picture of squinting into the sun with the water up to your neck. He made me want to visit. Not bad for a manservant. And that’s just what he was. I looked at his cleanly worn uniform and his telltale scuffed shoes. I was painfully aware that I didn’t want him to show me everything about his life. I wanted to be blissfully ignorant of what it was that had scuffed his shoes. There were parts of his life that were harder to swallow than any pill I’ve ever been offered. This kid, as he was, was no older than I and with countless fewer opportunities for greatness. His job was to cater to the masses. The ungrateful untanned. He had been born into this role. His choices had been working or starvation.

It gave me my fair dosage of middle-class suburban rage. Everybody should be rich! Let them eat cake! And while you’re at it, fetch me a lemonade. You see, the truth is that I’m spoiled rotten. I’ve been catered to my whole life by people I can’t seem to realize are below me. Their life is a complete unknown to my little world. My biggest problem is that I can’t afford another year at this affluently brilliant institution.

In Philadelphia right now, there’s an old man curled up on the sidewalk. Next to him is the doorway of a restaurant wherein the dinners cost $100 a plate.

What is it that I’m doing in my life? Why am I wasting my time bettering myself when there are drowning masses all around me? I feel called to live a life after Christ. I think I keep fooling myself into believing I don’t know what it is yet that he would have me do. I think I’m lying.

Hm. I began this journal with the intent to write about culture. I’m not sure I’ve done that. But perhaps I have. Maybe the life of a Christian is harder to live in a privileged worldview. Maybe my biggest asset is the fact that I can’t afford another year at this affluently brilliant institution. I think I’ve been fooled into thinking life is easy. The culture in which I was reared has pulled a velveteen cover over my eyes. My life is a centerfold. How is it that I got this way? I’ve no right to lead the posh life I do. Why am I struggling through FAFSA forms while a girl in Djibouti can’t bring herself to lift her head? I will not believe that I’ve been placed on this Earth to sweep the masses under my feet as I climb to the top. I want dirt under my fingernails. I want to be blistered with effort. I want to know that some life breathes easier because I have existed.

Will I? I hope so.