Hypnotise

The following Saturday was a personal growth day. We had to go to a mandatory security meeting for all crew members in the afternoon. The rest of the cast chided me for taking notes but we’ll see who’s laughing when I’m the only one who knows what to do when the ship is attacked by pirates. Plus, I think the Security Manager appreciated the level of attention I was paying to his presentation, and so rewarded us by telling us some of the crazier stories about what had been going on the ship that week. A couple who had intended to get engaged on the ship seemed to have the worst week ever. They had a fight, and later on the man found his girlfriend making out with somebody on the dance floor. Apparently things got ugly from there, and the woman was kept in her room for the rest of the cruise and the man was thrown into the brig (which is called getting upgraded to a suite with a bucket, in ship parlance).

From there we went to the smoking cessation workshop taught by the Hypnotist who had been on the ship that week. But wait, you’re asking yourself, you don’t smoke, Brendan. Exactly, would be my reply, and I intend to keep it that way. He basically outlined what hypnotism was, and I would tell you except my notes are in my room. But he knocked down a lot of hypnotism stereotypes and told us how you could never be made to do anything under hypnosis that you wouldn’t do in real life, which nullified my idea about a movie where a ship hypnotist was hypnotizing passengers to go out and kill all of his rival hypnotists when they got back to port. I was going to call it, “Who Is Killing All The Great Hypnotists of Central Florida?” I imagine being a hypnotist you have to weather a lot of stale jokes about “look into my eyes” and “you are getting sleepy,” so if this blog entry accomplishes anything, it will be for us to all be a bit more sensitive to hypnotists.

His presentation ended by playing his stop smoking cd, where he puts you under hypnosis. I think I was able to be partly hypnotized, but my concentration kept on getting broken by the two elderly Eastern European women who had wandered in a half hour into the presentation, and felt no compunction about carrying on a low-toned conversation while sixty other people were trying to get hypnotized.