Resumé building

Here is what my resumé currently reads under the Seamen's Church Institute subheading:

• Served as a full-time chaplain to merchant seafarers, providing them with spiritual counseling and assisting them with communications, financial matters, transportation/shore leave access, and legal issues

What it should really say:

• Worked full-time to deflect the explosive sexual tension that inevitably builds up when twenty-some virile men are cooped up on a ship for 6-12 months with little to no access to fertile females. Debunked strange, pseud0-theological myths. Sold phone cards and shepherded seafarers to the mall.

I don't know if it's the summer weather or what, but the port has been an absolute testosterone free for all lately. As you may have gathered from the lack of exasperated blog posts on the matter, I've grown much more adept at deflecting, ignoring, and re-directing the odd sexual things that get said on ships. Sure, I still get told I'm beautiful at least once a week (whereupon I either invent some ridiculous diversion, pretend to answer my phone, or start aggressively asking really banal questions of the perpetrators), but I haven't gotten a marriage proposal in over a month! I count this as serious progress.

Alas, my streak of good luck came to an end today. Below is a list of comments I fielded on the two ships I visited:

- From the Filipino chief cook of a container vessel that I've visited several times before: "I want to feed you lots! So you can become big! And have lots of babies!" Despite my stammering protests, he proceeded to feed me a full meal...at 10:45 in the morning. When I finally managed to extricate myself from his clutches, he called down the hallway after me: "Next time we're in port, I hope you will be fatter!"

- From the (also Filipino) crew of the ship I visited immediately thereafter, who were also hell-bent on feeding me (at least it was, by then, legitimately lunchtime): "You must be a fashion model!" And then, each of the 15 times I refused a plate of food, stating very clearly that I had just eaten and was too full to eat anymore: "You don't eat lunch so you can become a sexy?" To which someone else would unfailingly respond, "No, stupid, she's already a sexy!"

If I hadn't needed to stick around so that the chief officer could give me the phone card money he owed me, I would have left after the first offensive volley. It's just such a sticky situation. It seems an awful act of submission to the status quo to say that such comments bother me a lot less than they did 6 months ago, but what else can I do? Much as I wish it weren't so, I am just not of the right demographic to be an effective port chaplain much of the time. I'm younger than most of the people I work with. I don't have the benefit of a habit, or a clerical collar, or some other exterior symbol that sets me apart as a chaplain. And I'm female. No matter how many times I tell them I work for Seamen's Church, they have no reason to suspect that I'm anything besides a friendly young volunteer who comes to sell them phone cards. And thus, I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about what happens to the male sex drive when it's repressed for months on end.

It also appears that weird norms about what it's appropriate to say to a random woman who walks on to your ship and incredibly bizarre eschatologies go hand in hand. While on the second ship, I was helping a seafarer sort out a moneygram transaction that had gone wrong, and was writing down the customer service number for him. As I scribbled down the figures, the seafarer looked at me, aghast, and said "Mum! Is it...all right to call this number?" I assured him that it was perfectly possible to make a 1-800 call from the T-mobile sim card I had just sold him. "No, no," he replied, "I mean, is it all right with God?" Utterly confused as to when and how we had crossed over from tele-communications to theology, I asked for clarification. The even more bewildering response: "Don't you believe in the Bible, mum?" Whereupon he started reciting from Revelation with great enthusiasm. And it finally dawned on me that 1-800-MONEYGRAM translates to 1-800-666-394-726, and that this poor man suffered from the delusion that, if he dialed a satanic number to inquire about his transaction, the Antichrist would come to his ship and the apocalypse would begin. Talk about having no idea what to do. All I really could do was listen as he recounted his strange (and, I might add, not exactly true to what Revelation actually says) eschatological beliefs and repeatedly assure him that God wasn't going to hasten the hour of the second coming based on a customer service call.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of incredibly random ship conversations, let me end with two more perplexing questions that I've gotten in the past week:

1) From no less than 4 different people: "Is your hair real?" (yes.) Or, a slightly different variation: "Who made your hair?" (God.)

2) "You're Puerto Rican, right?" (no.)

Life is wild.