Sunday, January 31, 2010, Orlando, Fla. – I fear I’m becoming a curmudgeon. Or maybe I’ve always been a curmudgeon and am just now realizing it. I’m not sure.

I’m writing this from DisneyWorld. The Happiest Place on Earth. Where You Wish Upon a Star and Dreams Come True. Where Magic Happens. I’m here with Dave and the kids (I hope that goes without saying) and my parents, who very generously bankrolled this trip. It’s our fourth and final night here and, I have to say, we’ve had a really great time. We’ve ridden the rides. We’ve seen the shows. We’ve eaten cotton candy. (Okay, I’ve eaten cotton candy.) We got to enjoy 70 degrees and sun while it as 20 degrees and snowing in DC. All in all, a really great trip.

And yet, when it comes down to it, I don’t like it. I don’t like Disney.

I’m sure writing that sentence just put me on a terrorist watch list somewhere. After all, how un-American can I be? That’s like saying I don’t like football or beer or apple pie (incidentally, I don’t really like those things either). But the truth is, something about Disney gives me the creeps…something beyond the ubiquitous animatronics and mouse ears. It’s the singularity of it all—both commercially (Disney owns virtually all of Orlando) and metaphorically. As metaphor, Disney represents the small world. The belief that we’re all ultimately the same. One nation (nay—one world) united under Mickey. It feels suspiciously like groupthink. Walking around DisneyWorld, I feel like the only one who hasn’t drank the Kool-Aid and that it’s only a matter of time before I’m found out and put in the fake stocks in Frontierland for the rest of my life.

DisneyWorld to me feels eerily similar to the 1960s British TV series “The Prisoner,” of which my high school boyfriend was a huge fan. It only ran for 17 episodes but, as luck would have it, Blockbuster Video carried every single one. So on Friday night, my boyfriend and I would rent them and go back to his apartment (although he was in high school, he lived alone in his own apartment—my parents were thrilled about this fact) to watch it. The series chronicled the life of a British secret agent who resigns from service only to wake up and find himself held captive in an unknown village on an unknown coast, where everyone is happy and pleasant and the weather is always sunny and 75 degrees. No one in the village has names, just numbers (our hero is “Number Six”). Number One is the leader, but no one has seen him (her?) or knows who it is. Everyone in the village seems content with their happy, perfect little life, and Number Six distrusts all of it.

Needless to say, it was the perfect TV show for a couple of high school kids who lived in a picture-perfect suburb of Houston and fancied themselves rebels who raged against the machine on a daily basis. As it turns out, it was also a business model for DisneyWorld (which, suspiciously, opened just three years after the finale of “The Prisoner.”) In Disney, all the little girls are referred to “princesses” (not quite numbers, but close). All cast members (not employees, but “cast members”) smile pretty much constantly. “Dreams come true” is the inescapable theme of everything—every song, every ride, every show, every piece of merchandise…even sections of the park closed for renovation are plastered with signs that say “dream builders.”

Then there’s just the fact that everything is a façade. The buildings aren’t real. Most of the plants are fake. Even the “mud” that the safari trucks drive through in Animal Kingdom (where, to Disney’s credit, the animals are real) is actually plastic molded to look like mud.

Now I realize this is the whole point of a theme park. It’s intended to be a world of pretend into which you escape for a brief period of time. You shouldn’t go there expecting reality. If you want to go on a real safari, take a trip to Kenya, right? I get that. And I have to say, as a patron, I appreciate that the parks are well run and well maintained and the staff is courteous and helpful. But I just can’t lose myself in the fantasy. I don’t trust it. Instead, I spend my time walking around the park looking for glimpses of reality. I try to glance through open doors that say “cast members only” to see if I can spot the scaffolding propping up the saloon wall, or Snow White taking a smoke break, or, hell, even the bathroom attendant scowling and muttering under her breath, “Damn tourists.”

I was talking to my parents about this, and remembering how, as a child, I never liked books or movies that were set in fantasy worlds. I loathed Wizard of Oz and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The book James and the Giant Peach freaked me out. Even now, I rarely read or watch anything that would qualify as sci-fi (thus why I have no desire to see Avatar and haven’t read any of the Twilight series). My dad said he’s the same way. He tried to read the Harry Potter books but couldn’t because the whole time he kept thinking, “If they have all this magic, why don’t they just use it to stop the villain?”

My mom shook her head. “But if that’s your approach to life, you never enjoy anything. If you’re always skeptical, you can’t lose yourself in a book or movie.”

Both my dad and I protested that we could, but only if the book or movie had an element of realism.

Yet I can’t help but wonder if my mom is right. I’ve often wished I could suspend disbelief long enough to read and enjoy a really cheesy romance novel, or spend three hours watching a self-indulgent James Cameron film, or believe in God. Am I missing out by being so hell-bent on what’s real?

I once read about how, when Captain Cook’s ships first arrived off the coast of Australia in the 1700s, the aborigines didn’t see them. Or, rather, they could see them, but they couldn’t perceive them. Because they had never seen these huge sailing ships before, their minds were unable to create an image of them. It wasn’t until they saw the rippling wake of the ships on the water that they could then perceive what they were.

The veracity of this story is widely debated. New Agers like to use it as proof that we are, indeed, surrounded by all sorts of things—spirits, energies, auras—that most people don’t have the mental vocabulary to see. Scientists say the story is apocryphal and that the mind has no problem perceiving things it doesn’t understand.

While I want to believe the New Agers are right, I tend to side with the scientists. It’s kind of sad. I’ve always loved Hamlet’s words to Horatio, who doubts the events that are transpiring: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” But even if I love the sentiment, God knows (if He exists) that I don’t live it.

And what’s worse, I’m passing this way-too-healthy dose of skepticism on to my children. Noah lost his first tooth a couple months ago, and already he doubts the existence of the tooth fairy. He’s not too sure about this whole Santa thing, either. Gwyneth told Dave today that the only princess she likes is Pocahantas “because she was a real person; the others are made up.” Dave blamed this on his genetic contribution (his side of the family is lousy with scientists), but I know I’m responsible, too. Not just my genes (which are weighted heavily in favor of engineers), but my very outlook on life, which seems to be slowly sucking the magic and wonder of childhood out of my children.

Last night, we were at the Magic Kingdom for the fireworks. And I have to admit, it was, for lack of a better word, magical. We arrived just as the first firework made its arc through the air. Amazingly, we even managed to find our own private little spot from which to watch the display burst in all its pyrotechnic glory above Cinderella’s castle. For a few moments, I forgot that the castle was nothing more than plywood and plastic. I forgot that the music being piped through the loudspeakers wasn’t a live orchestra, and that the fireworks were specifically designed for Disney using a reduced-smoke chemical (which Dave informed us). For a few moments, I completely lost myself in the beauty of the show. I looked down at my kids and could see the wonder of childhood seemingly steeled against escape and locked deep within them…until about half-way through when Noah and Gwyneth turned to us and said, “Can we go now?”…reminding me that magic, even in its truest form, is always short-lived.