I often tell people, I don’t watch television to learn anything new. You can find me watching couples fight over their first house purchase, obnoxious chef-celebrities eat foot high cheeseburgers and reality TV families travel the world to appear at various clubs. I’m sure it makes me sound dumb, but I stand by it and I feel secure enough intellectually to not let the reaction I get from people when I say that faze me. To me TV is a time to let other voices besides my own fill my head. My brain is constantly going 90 miles per hour. Thought after thought after overanalytical thought crowding itself in my head that makes me question everything, all the time. It’s exhausting. And it’s something I’m fighting to manage as I near 30.

Going to Vegas for me is like watching TV but it’s engaging all my senses. It gives me a colorful, noisy and obnoxious world to fill my sight, ears and brain with that is way louder than my thoughts. It’s not something that comes intuitively but it’s a healthy exercise in self-control to enjoy a place like Las Vegas.

It had been about seven years since I last went to Las Vegas and some of the things I remember from that first trip were: wearing heels that I couldn’t quite handle, being ogled by a nightclub nightman that was sizing girls up to see if they were attractive enough to pay for overpriced drinks, and the muggy weather. All that said, it was still fun. The novelty of being 22 in Vegas with my best friend made it all worth it. There’s a sort of freedom that Vegas gives you and thankfully I was with someone that was just as cautious as I was to fully partake in the Vegas experience.

So this time, I tried to mentally prepare myself.  There’s a pre-desensitisation that you have to go through before driving in or landing in Las Vegas for a person like me to fully enjoy it. A cloak of ignorance to everything around you. You have to make a pact with yourself to ignore the smoke, ignore the offensive and sexist comments that are hurled at you, ignore the prostitutes giving sad men a reason to smile and ignore the debauchery.

…and that’s what I did. I turned off the part of me that’s rightfully offended for and by many things. I felt like I was just floating past Vegas not a permanent resident that needed to correct all the wrong I saw. I was a passerby enjoying it for what it’s worth and then going back to my life where I can proudly say I voice my opinion readily and often to the things I don’t find just. It’s a technique that’s well-suited for a short weekend.

Here’s hoping I can continue to live in the present and postpone the over analyzation until a little later when the urge to write kicks in.

-Sandi