Monthly Archives: November 2013

Let’s go to space

I would totally go on a really long space mission. You know, given the chance, like if they needed volunteers, “Calling all Americans! We’re looking for one patriotic spacefarer to help NASA explore the cosmos!” they’d obviously be making cold-calls because the mission would be too intense, even for trained astronauts. I’m not talking dangerous. Just long. A very time-consuming, extended mission.

But seriously, I’d definitely be up for it. Put me on that spaceship and let’s blastoff. I don’t care about Gravity. Do you think I’m that easily scared off by a George Clooney movie? And it’s not even a George Clooney movie, it’s a Sandra Bullock movie, but I didn’t want to come across as sexist, implying that the most non-scary element of that movie was the lead, Ms. Bullock.

But I’m not scared. Remember that scene where a piece of space debris ripped a hole right through that guy’s head? Come on, that didn’t look that realistic. Start fitting me for a spacesuit already. Can mine be blue? Like midnight. Like space blue. Even though space is black. But like a spacey navy blue, with yellow stripes around the wrists, and a golden-tinted spacesuit helmet.

What’s the hesitation in sending a crew of astronauts to an asteroid, to Mars? What are all of the professional astronauts scared of, cosmic radiation? Space madness? What else could astronauts be worried about? Claustrophobia? A debilitating loss in muscle and bone mass? Actually, that’s probably be the one thing that really creeps me out, that of my own body slowly disappearing right before my eyes, just because I don’t have any gravity to keep everything fresh.

But whatever, I’ll still do it. I’ll just clench my muscles, all of them, constantly. That’s got to be good for something right? And I’ll just make sure to do plenty of space jumping jacks. Even without gravity, that’s still got to be pretty tough, extending your arms and your legs out, it’s got to get tiring eventually. I think I just solved the whole no gravity problem. Someone should get a message to any astronauts currently in space: do some space jumping jacks, like a thousand of them.

Or even better, they could get some sort of a mechanical suit that does the space jumping jacks for them, so they could put it on while they’re asleep. Even better than that, you could just heavily sedate anybody in space and then program that same space jumping jack mechanical suit to do all sorts of crazy exercises, space pull ups, space Insanity.

Or even much, much better, let’s just sedate all of the astronauts, the whole time that they’re in space. Wait, no, while that would work for really long voyages, the idea has already been explored in pretty much every space movie, like Alien, like Event Horizon. By the way, if you’re wondering what I was talking about earlier with space madness, watch Event Horizon, that movie was scary as hell.

Man, I actually think I took this thought experiment a little too far, I’m pretty scared now, not of space, I think I’d still be down for some space, but of Event Horizon, I’m telling you, that movie is terrifying. It’s like, while they’re all asleep, the spaceship passes through some dimensional portal to hell, but you don’t know it, because they’re still in the hell dimension, or something came back with them, and then the captain pulls his eyes out.

Jesus, some things cannot be unseen. I was like twelve years old when I saw that movie, I was alone in my bedroom, it started playing on a movie channel late at night. I was like, oh boy, I love sci-fi, I love Star Trek, this movie should be great. And here I am, a grown man, sitting here writing about how he’d be a great pick for an extended space mission, and I can’t even get through the whole thing because I’m still a little scared, every night before I go to bed I pull the covers up really tight, all the way to my neck, I try not to think about Event Horizon, but I’m telling you, if you haven’t seen the movie, watch the movie, and then you’ll know about the panic that I’m grappling with on a daily basis.

But regular space, come on, this isn’t sci-fi, it’s real life. And I can’t think of a better candidate to be a real life civilian astronaut. So NASA, if you’re reading this, and if you’ve been contemplating a civilian astronaut campaign, but you’re not sure about how you’d get it started, don’t bother. Just pick me. I’m your guy. Let’s go to space.

I’m having such a productive day

Wow, talk about productive. I just had one of the most productive mornings of my life. It started from the moment I woke up, it was so weird, I just opened my eyes and I was awake, no groggy morning sensation, nothing, it went from eyes closed, sound asleep, to eyes open, ready for action. And this happened exactly ten second before my alarm went off. Isn’t that nuts? It’s like, for once in my life, my internal clock was even more on time than my actual clock. I knew right away that this was going to be a super productive day.

But I didn’t realize just how productive. Usually my morning routine consists of dicking around on the computer for a little while, brushing my teeth, taking the dog for a walk, making coffee, pretty much everyday normal stuff. But it always takes so long, sometimes like three or four hours. Today, I barely had time to check what time it was before I found myself downstairs, in the kitchen, I was whisking up a hollandaise sauce totally from scratch, the poached eggs came out perfectly. Man, I can’t believe I made myself a textbook eggs Benedict, not even half an hour after I’d woken up.

Even my dog was surprised. I could tell, usually he’s like scratching at the door, whining to go out, like if I had some sort of a dog-to-English translator, it would probably interpret his yowling as, “Rob, come on man, you’ve been dicking around forever, I really need to go out, come on, hurry up man.” But no, I was still in the very early phase of my already mega productive day, and he was looking at me, like if I had that same imaginary dog-translator, it would have told me, “Wow, Rob, what’s gotten into you? It’s almost like you’ve been more productive in this last half hour alone than you normally are in two full days.” And I just looked at him, I barked back, imagining myself able to speak his language, I was like, “I know, right?”

I thought, let’s see just how productive I can be. It was even more productive than I could’ve imagined. In only like ten or fifteen minutes, I trained my usually wild dog to walk right by my side, with no leash. He was perfectly well behaved, even when we walked by other dogs, and they all started barking. My dog just stared ahead, paying them no mind. It was incredible.

And then I came home, I decided to clean the whole house. Usually it takes me like two hours even to get through one load of dishes. But I got everything done. I cleaned the top floor, the living room, I even tackled the basement, unloading boxes of junk that hadn’t been touched in years. I found some old college textbooks, stuff for a math class that I never really paid much attention to.

Can you believe that I retaught myself calculus? I’m serious, and I didn’t even have my graphing calculator. It was like, I was just flipping through the pages, all of that stuff about derivatives and sines and cosines, none of that stuff ever made sense to me back when I was in school, but now I was reading and writing almost fully in mathematical equations.

I was just in the middle of calculating the surface area of the curved part of my kitchen counter when I looked at the clock. Seriously? I’d only spent another half an hour on cleaning and math? This had to have been the most productive morning that any human being had ever experienced.

I figured, I have some time before lunch, let’s see if I can’t help out around the neighborhood. And I did. I changed the oil in the car that was parked in front of my house. My neighbor’s gutter on the third floor was a little loose, so I managed to shimmy up the side of the house and reattach it back in place without even using any tools.

And while I was up there I thought, I should write all of this down, and the words started forming in my head before I even had time to sit down at the computer. And before I knew it, it was done, this whole piece, entirely written in my head while I was still hanging by one hand from the neighbor’s gutter. All I had to do was sit down in the computer and type it out word for word.

And now here I am. Man, it’s been such an incredibly super productive morning. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the day holds in store for me. Maybe I’ll reupholster the couch, or power-wash the siding on the house, or I’ll redo the wiring inside the walls. I’ve just been really, really productive.

I was a scumbag college senior

One time during my last year of college I got really drunk and stole something off the walls at one of the off-campus bars. This particular venue, Mug-Z’s, while I was there anyway, it was the unofficial senior bar. Trust me, that was about its only noteworthy feature. All of the off-campus bars, there were about three or four of them, they had pretty much an identical layout: an open space and then a long bar. Every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night, the place would get jam packed with students. Looking back, I really don’t get the appeal of standing in a crowded space drinking overpriced cheap beer.

But whatever, everybody went, everybody got drunk, I got really drunk, especially on this night. And I don’t know if it was the impending pressure of knowing that the remainder of my senior year was evaporating before my eyes, but I started going out harder than usual, pregaming earlier, staying out much, much later. With the lack of sleep and excessive alcohol that accompanied these benders, naturally my decision making process started to suffer accordingly.

So at Mug-Zs, every year right before graduation, there was a sort of open class photo in front of the bar. Anybody who wanted to could head over, they’d snap the photo, and not too long after, this shot would be blown up and framed, hanging on the far wall across from the bar. This tradition must have been going back at least a dozen years, because they were starting to run out of room, all of these poster-sized prints, different groups of identical looking twenty-two year olds.

And this one night, I was partying pretty hard, I had just enough alcohol in my system to where I was definitely beginning to lapse in judgment, but I hadn’t yet reached the point where it started to slow me down. In other words, I was acting like a crazy person, pounding beers, singing along obnoxiously to the jukebox. Out of nowhere, I don’t know, maybe there was a lull in the non-action, I looked over at the nearest class photo, I thought, should I? And I did. I grabbed it off the wall, kicked open the side door, and started sprinting toward my apartment.

I honestly have no idea why I did such a thing. The whole time I was running, I kept looking over my shoulder, really expecting somebody to be following me, providing me with some sort of a drunken chase. But there was nobody. Who knows, maybe I was a really fast runner, or maybe nobody saw me. I got inside my off-campus apartment, I was the first one of my roommates back for the night. I must have had enough wits still about me that I was able to put a nail through the drywall to hang this thing up, and then I passed out.

Over the course of the next few days, everybody kind of laughed at my accomplishment. Apparently nobody had seen me bolt out of the bar, and when everybody finally got home later that night, I guess it had the intended effect, a, “What the fuck?” moment as everybody tried to figure out how this thing had wound up on our wall.

But that was it. I was kind of worried that the next time I’d step inside Mug-Z’s, the bouncer might recognize me right away, a, “You!” followed by a severe pummeling. But again, nothing happened. And the photo stayed on the wall for the rest of the year, largely invisible, the way that framed photos and artwork have a way of blending into the background after you get used to seeing them every day.

Graduation came and went, and all of the roommates spent our last twelve hours or so packing up and getting ready to move out. But then it was this question of the photo. What do I do with it now? I thought, I guess I’ll just throw it out, but for some reason now I started to feel bad. Like what kind of person just rips things right off the wall? I thought back to every time I’d been to the bar since, noticing that gaping hole in the wall of photos. Why was I all of the sudden feeling remorse for being such a scumbag?

I hung out around the neighborhood until a little later in the day, and when I was sure the bar would be open, I headed over with the photo in hand. Everybody else had already moved back, so the normally crowded bar had a really dumpy, hollow vibe with only two or three people inside drinking beers. I walked over the bartender, “Hey man, uh, I found this in the dumpster when I was moving my stuff out. I figured someone stole it from you.”

I cringed at my inability to even fully fess up for my misdeed. The guy’s face lit up, “Oh my God! I can’t believe you found that! I’ve been looking everywhere. I’m friends with a lot of the guys in that photo!” and he immediately hung it back on the wall, shaking my hand, thanking me profusely. “Come on,” he gestured to the bar, “Drinks are on me.”

And normally I would have loved some free drinks, but I couldn’t. I had to get out, fast. “No thanks man, I’ve got to be heading home.” This guy was giving me a hero’s welcome, and I was accepting it, while in reality I was the thief, I was the dirtbag who ripped this thing off of the wall in the first place. Whenever I think back upon the incident, I always still feel pretty stupid, like why did I do that in the first place? What made me think that it was OK? What the hell was I thinking?

Latacunga to La Maná

This was right at the end of our two-year stint as Peace Corps volunteers in Ecuador. My wife and I were heading back to site on a bus snaking its way through the Andes.

The voyage was indeed long and painful, more so than usual. Maybe it was because we had been traveling for about a week now, probably spending half that time sitting down on various buses, but the hours were starting to feel like days. Three bus rides out of the Oriente and we made it to Latacunga, one more five-hour trip before we’d be able to hop on the back of a pickup and take it an hour more back to site.

The buses from Latacunga were probably some of the worst in the country. Where I’d classify the majority of Ecuadorean buses as too small, the three or four bus lines that cross the Andes from Latacunga to La Maná were even smaller. And these buses were always packed. They left the Latacunga terminal full, and then after crawling through city traffic for two or three blocks, there would be another stop to let on a couple dozen or so more people. Most of these latecomers would be indígenas who lived throughout the various mountain communities along the route. The aisle would be packed with people standing against the seats, the women’s long, traditional shawls hanging in the faces of all the people sitting down.

The indigenous people lived apart even from other Ecuadoreans. Their fellow countrymen were practically foreigners, so us gringos might as well have been from another planet. On those crowded buses, even though tickets were sold with assigned seating, you needed to board very early and claim your seat as soon as possible. You might hop on the bus only to find an indigenous family of four sitting in your seats.

Thankfully this never happened to us, but I’ve seen confrontations like this play out in a very formulaic way. The person would ask them to get up, showing them the ticket with the seat number. This person would be ignored. The next act would be to request help from the bus driver or his ayudante, who would also try to get them to move. This would also be ignored. Maybe the passengers might say something in Kichwa that nobody else understood. And that was usually as far as these situations went.

On this particular trip, we had our seats and the bus was packed. Half an hour or so out of Latacunga, the bus stopped outside of a bakery. My wife and I had always noticed this exact stop, everyone got off the bus and bought bags of bread. Whenever we took this trip, we were always so exhausted from just settling into our seats, so we never felt compelled to go and check out what the fuss was all about. But we only had a month left to go before our service was over. I was starting to feel nostalgic for all of the things that would soon be nothing but memories. I got off to get some bread.

After two years in country, I knew how the lines worked. Everybody walked right up to the front and shouted out their orders. “Fifty cents worth,” I held out my money. The lady working the counter ignored me and proceeded to help everyone else. I started getting impatient, especially as more people started entering the store long after I did and were served before me. I kept repeating me order, but my presence wasn’t even acknowledged. Finally after everyone in the store was helped, as the bus started honking and revving its engine, the lady handed me my bread without a word and took my money.

I’m not looking for special treatment, but I just hated it when random people acted as if I barely existed. No matter how comfortable I felt in Ecuador, no matter how well I spoke Spanish, no matter how many friends I had back in Pucayacu, as soon as I left the comfort of site I was just another dumb gringo, just another tourist at the mercy of the crowd.

Pissed off, I hopped on the bus just as it was pulling away. And as soon as I got on the bus, I ran straight into a bar running alongside the aisle, slamming my head right above my left eye. I’ve hit my head countless times in Ecuador, but this easily had to be the worst. I was actually stunned. For a second, all I saw was white, my every sense consumed by a liquid fire that ran from my head and spread throughout every nerve ending in my body. I couldn’t breath. I could barely stand up.

The initial agony passed and I regained my senses to see four or five teenagers pointing and laughing at me, not even trying to hide how funny they thought the whole situation was. I was overcome with a rage that I hadn’t felt in a while. I can take the pain, I can take the humiliation, but I was absolutely fed up with being laughed at. Everything I did was under scrutiny. Every time I misspoke, every time I tripped over my own feet, every time I asked the wrong person the wrong question, I was laughed at. Every time I spoke in English, every time I walked by a group of people, every time I took a breath, I felt like people were taunting me. The constant spectacle that was my presence was enough to paralyze me, to make me spend days at a time indoors without showing my face in town. When I even suspected people laughing at me, I withdrew into myself, tried to ignore it, to block it out, to wait for the embarrassment to pass, hoping my face wasn’t red.

But this time was different. Maybe all of those repressed feelings had been bottled in for too long. Maybe the pain from the collision prevented me from swallowing my pride and finding my seat. But I lashed out. I got right in their faces and started cursing at them in a mixture of English and Spanish.

“Motherfucking chuchas,” I screamed through clenched teeth, “you want to laugh at me? I’ll give you something to laugh about!” The teenagers immediately stopped and recoiled in shock. That’s right, I thought to myself, not so tough now. I went on for another thirty seconds or so of rage, holding my head and lecturing them about how you shouldn’t laugh when somebody hurts themselves.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. My wife pulled me back.

“Rob, your head,” she said with a worried look on her face.

I pulled my hand away from where I had hit myself. It was red. There was blood running down the side of my face. My rage turned into shock and I sank meekly back into my seat, feeling suddenly very vulnerable and very hurt. The ayudante gave me a roll of toilet paper and I rolled up a bunch to put pressure on the lump that was beginning to grow. I was starting to shake. Finally coming to my senses somewhat, I looked around the bus to find every single person staring at me, open mouthed, not saying a word. I wanted to die. I wanted to disappear. Even worse, I felt like I wanted to cry. It was probably one of the most humiliating moments of my time in Ecuador. I felt like an asshole gringo who hit his head and took it out on a bunch of kids. As much as I loved my time in Ecuador, this had to be the absolute low point. I was sick of being the foreigner, the real or imagined butt of other people’s jokes, the source of everyone’s entertainment. I spent the next four hours nursing my wound, closing my eyes, and imagining that I was on a plane back to New York.

I’m not scared of anything

I’m not afraid of anything. Except scorpions. I woke up in the middle of the night a few weeks ago, I opened my eyes and I saw this scorpion just inches away from me on the pillow. And I didn’t know what to do, should I move? Do these things react depending on how I react? Should I stay still? I couldn’t do anything, but I couldn’t just sit there and not do anything. The whole time, that growing feeling of dread was overtaking my whole body. What had started out as a pit in my stomach was spreading upwards, through my throat, out across my neck to my arms. Just when I felt like my heart was going to overload, I blinked, and when I opened my eyes, I started to get the sense that there wasn’t really a scorpion there at all, but it was just a weird way in which the fabric of the pillow was bunched up. And yeah, I had been asleep, and that’s happened before, you wake up and you see something across the room and it takes you a minute to get your wits about you.

Still, I’m basically fearless. Unless we’re talking about heights. I wouldn’t call it a fear, exactly. It’s more like an innate terror, something that my body isn’t really in control of. Like, I take a look down, and whatever sort of instincts drive my most basic decision making process, they start sending out panic-induced distress signals, “Rob, abort, get down from wherever you’re at.” If I’m on an airplane, or a Ferris wheel, or even if I’m just watching a movie or a Youtube clip featuring somebody doing something high up off the ground, I get that sweaty palm sensation, which speaks to my empathic abilities, to really put myself in the shoes of anybody. Who knows? Maybe it’s hereditary. Maybe all of my ancestors died horrible deaths after falling from a great height, and through evolution, that fear has been passed down to me, to hopefully prevent me from meeting a similar fate. In which case it’s an advantage.

But no, besides scorpions and heights, I’d have to say that I’m not really scared of anything. Wait, I forgot to mention heartburn. I’m pretty scared of heartburn, not that I suffer from it that often, it’s definitely not a chronic problem. It’s just that, I remember this one time in college, I went to the cafeteria, waited on the line for the omelet station. Usually I’d just grab something premade, but on this day I guess I felt like I deserved something fresh, like it was worth the wait. “Give me everything,” I told the omelet guy, and he said, “OK,” using those mini tongs to pile in a little bit from each container, peppers, onions, cheese, everything. And it was great, but right afterwards, I started getting what I’d later identify as heartburn, that stinging right below the chest. There was no relief, laying down didn’t help, I couldn’t walk it off. Finally I went to the nurse and explained my symptoms. She gave me a bottle of Tums and told me to take four every half hour. And it worked. But still, that feeling, I’m still terrified of that burning, it felt like I was being eaten alive from the inside.

Also, carcinogens, I’m really afraid of carcinogens, all of them, yellow number-five, the stuff that’s in plastic bottles, harmful radiation from the sun, I’m afraid of all of it. One time I read this article about how if you keep your laptop on your lap, then that’s basically a carcinogen, because you’re irradiating your lap. So I threw out that laptop and started only using my phone. And then I read something else about how phones might cause brain abnormalities. So I threw out the phone and I exclusively use my desktop computer.

Wait, I forgot germs, and this ties in, because the desktop computer use is also a way to make sure I’m not touching anybody else’s keyboard, OK, and they’re not using mine. Because we’re getting into flu season, and I can’t afford to start thinking about the flu, if only I weren’t so scared of needles, or vaccinations, I could get a flu shot and sleep easy for a while. But even just the cold, isn’t it always cold season? Or strep throat. One time this guy at work told me that he was recovering from strep throat, and so I quit, no way.

I think I’m getting carried away, but I’m actually very brave, it takes a lot to rattle me. What was that? Did you hear that? I think someone’s at the front door. I can’t be positive that it might not be an attacker. Look, just, if you’re reading this, do me a favor, use your germ-ridden cell phone and call the cops, tell them to swing by and just kind of drive really slowly in front of my house, just to, you know, scare away any would-be home invaders. I think they’re still knocking. Hurry up, all right? I can’t take the sitting here, squirming, imagining all of the hundred different ways in which this is all going to crash down around me, just wind up horribly, horribly wrong.