Hey Mister, Turn It On, Turn It Up, Turn Me Loose

Seven weeks into this grad school adventure and I'm just getting around to writing about it.  It's not an easy thing to assimilate all the disparate thoughts and emotions from the first few weeks of the change into a single coherent piece.  So I won't.  I'll let this be a sort of stream of consciousness with a little image association.

Off We Go!

Seven years I've been out of school.  Seven years earning my living by the sweat of my brow.  And now I'm back learning to be a student again.  "The Grass Is Greener" syndrome is definitely in effect here.  Working for the last seven years, I've often glorified the school days when I had so much flexibility in my schedule.  I just studied some and took some tests every few weeks.  Add to that the fact that as a Political Science major, college for me was an exercise in learning for the sake of knowledge acquisition, not necessarily for any applicable, practicable skills.  Now that I'm back in private school and paying big bucks to get practicable skills to use in future jobs, I find that the daily routine of the working world, not to mention the regular paychecks, is looking pretty green.  Trying to develop the discipline necessary to be a successful student has been challenging.

But more than that, trying to manage the stress of keeping up with the massive workload has at times gotten the better of me.  I find myself abandoning my working-world stress relievers for my old, bad-habit stress relievers because of the time commitment of the work relievers.  Rather than take the hour off from studying that is required from lace-up to shower to go for a good run, I make a 5-minute drive to the corner gas station and pick up everything that looks good and spend the rest of the evening shoveling it all into my face while I freak out that I'm just not understanding statistical risk simulation.  This adds another level of stress that I'm losing control of my diet and nutrition, and it makes me want to eat some more.  I now understand Fat Bastard's lament:  I eat because I'm unhappy, and I'm unhappy because I eat.  It's a vicious cycle.

I love the student body here.  They represent over 70 different countries, and even more perspectives on the world.  It is endlessly fascinating to interact with my classmates.  They are sharp, bright, informed people.  When I'm on campus, it is a great feeling.  When I find events off-campus, they are always enjoyable.  I went to the Arizona State Fair with a friend from Kyrgyzstan and new Russian and Uzbek acquaintances from campus.  Got to see a massive demolition derby.  Went to a Hindu dance celebration with a group of Indian students.  Ate some Hindu manna.  Hitting the batting cages with my Japanese classmate, golfing with one of my Indian classmates.  All of this makes living here in Glendale easier.

Because if I'm being honest, Thunderbird is an oasis in a cultural desert.  There are other parts of Phoenix that I like just fine, but Glendale is...sigh.  I guess it's just as well that there's nothing to do or see here, because it helps focus on studying, rather than spending more money.  I guess what I'm trying to say is, I look forward to the opportunities for travel that this program offers.  If everything goes according to plan, I'll be spending March and April of next year in China.  And I'm looking to get an internship elsewhere next summer, whether in another city here in the states or in another country.  So if any of you Dogs of War has any connections looking for an MBA candidate with an apocalyptic mindset and awesome negotiation skillz, send them my way.   

Our semesters here are divided into halves called modules.  The first module just finished, and it was a pretty insane amount of work for students just getting used to being in school.  Because so many of the students entering this program come from non-business backgrounds, the curriculum has to be condensed to provide entry-level training in the core business disciplines.  So undergrad classes in corporate and managerial accounting that may be taught as separate, semester-long courses are condensed and pressurized and fed to entering Thunderbirds through a six-week water cannon.  Having finished that course, I'm about to begin the same drill in finance.

This work load is made all the heavier by having a non-credit, mandatory course called Career Management, in which the career center teaches students how to write resumes, cover letters, emails, how to network with alumni, how to interview, etc.  The first day of this class, they inform you/freak you out by telling you that you are already 2 weeks behind in your job search and that if you want to get a job of any kind after you graduate in two years, you better grab a bullhorn and start yelling from the mountain tops about how great you are immediately.  There's a big MBA hiring conference every fall in mid-October, 6 weeks into school.  The career center wants you to believe this is the end-all of hiring events and is the only place you have any chance of landing an internship the following summer.  In reality, there are about 300-400 companies with two or three available positions each being wooed by over 10,000 MBA students.  It's The Bachelorette x100 with a lot less kissing and a lot more desperation.  About 170 students from our school went.  I was not among them.  I knew my chances of getting a rose were very minimal.

Instead, I chose to focus on the Thunderbird career fair that just finished up this past Thursday.  Many of the companies were smaller and less known, and they were coming to our school specifically for what T-bird has to offer.  I got all researched up on the companies and discovered that I wasn't all that interested in what they had to offer.  In the end, I was a bit disappointed in the event and was left wondering if I'll ever be able to land an internship for next summer, let alone a job when I get out.

My Thoughts Exactly, Sir

I really do enjoy the program so far, career fretting and body destruction notwithstanding.  Now that I've had my first round of finals/midterms, I'm reaching a more zen place with my stress.  I guess you'd say I'm settling in.  Learning to balance.  I'm excited for what the future of this program will bring my way.  I miss my friends from DC.  I miss the city itself.  But I know I'm on the path to more, if I can make it happen.  It'll be an interesting two years.

When's Christmas Break Again?

I tell you what, the combination of boredom and stress can take the mind on odd journeys.  Case in point:  Tuesday's review for my Wednesday morning accounting final.  I feel like I am woefully unprepared for this final, yet I'm bored out of my mind watching the professor work through problems on the board.  A thought out of nowhere strikes like lightning, "He's Australian."  From there, it's a prairie fire of thought association spreading across the wasteland of gray matter residing behind my eyes. 

Australia is hot, probably at least as hot as Phoenix in some places. 
Most of it is a big desert, I think.
What's their water situation like there?  Is it sufficient for sustainable growth?
What are their natural resources?
(OIL?)
 Mel Gibson is from there.  (The Jews never had to cross a wasteland like that.  Is that why he feels so superior to them?)
Wait a minute.  Mel Gibson.  Mad Max.  That's where Mad Max was filmed.  Of course they have oil, if the movies said so.  That's what Lord Humungus was after.
 All roads lead to Humungus.

In the end, I found myself sizing up my professor according to how well-suited he was for the apocalypse.  "Sure he can tell you where your missing Accounts Receivable went, and he probably could advise you on how to reduce your days payable.  But in hand-to-hand combat, those arms will be ripped right out of their sockets.  As soon as he's out of ammunition, he'll have to fight.  Then he's dog meat." 

Yeesh.  I like to think that boredom without the stress would have taken me on a more magical journey involving flying carpets and a big blue genie and a princess in a halter top.  Maybe Thursday, it'll be a whole new world.

Words That Make Me Pale

How would Georgia capture this?

I'm a lover of words. Ideas, concepts, visions, thoughts. An artist has his paint brush, a photographer her lens. I paint my visions with words. Like any aspiring master of his craft, I work to improve my skills. I study the works of others for what it is in their writing that evokes emotional response from me. I occasionally review my past efforts for mistakes and ways I could have better told a story or painted a picture. And of course, the artist is only as good as his tools. To that end, I'm constantly looking for new words to add the deep reds and bright blues to my canvas. Toothsome. Mussitate. Obsequious. Mmmm. Delectable.

Once in awhile I learn a word that is so powerful and terrifying in its ability to convey imagery that it bleeds the color right out of my face. I encountered just such a word this week. It is not for the faint of heart, so if you are easily nauseated, you'd best move along now. it comes to me via a good friend and occasional Humungus contributor, Phat Mexican. The word is:

Vaganus      

Hrm.  A-Hrm.  Ha-rumva.  Ha-rumvavavav. Ugh.  Sorry.  Dry heaving just writing the word.  What does it mean?  What is it's origin?  So sad you asked, but if you insist...

Phat Mexican's wife brought their second child into the world this week (Salute!  May the second be as handsome as the first.)  He picked this word up from the nurses in the obstetrics department.  It is a hybrid term born of the unholy union of the words "vagina" and "anus".  It is industry lingo for the not-dissimilar union of said orifices that sometimes occurs during childbirth.  Hrm.  Aaahr.

As a celibate bachelor, I have yet to peak behind the curtain in OZ.  I'm not privy to all the dirty little secrets women keep hidden.  I function in a world relatively isolated from any form of Woman composed of anything more than the sugar and spice of folklore.  So when I read Phat Mexican's story about his conversation with the nurses that day, and the graphic frankness of their descriptions, the fairytale glow in my dreams dimmed a little bit.  

The Humungus in me says all things end in blood and filth.  But I don't want to hear that right now.  I need comforting fables like the always-popular "girls don't fart."  All of this other stuff...I dunno.  And given that the vaganus would be at least partially my fault for planting my seed in the first place, I'd feel awfully guilty every time I saw the wife sitting on her inflatable donut while my progeny gnaws her nipples to rawhide.  I mean, how can I be responsible for inflicting such suffering on a human being I'm supposed to love? Yeesh.

Vaganus.  Hrm.   

After the Boys of Summer Have Gone

So where was I before the sun cooked my brain?  Ah, yes.  Summer's treats.  Let's get on with it then.

I think this summer may aptly be described as my Summer of Baseball.  As I began laying the plans of my exodus from DC, I put in a request with my brother, The Nuge, to fly out and help me make the drive west.  The Nuge was willing, under one condition: that I meet him in Boston to begin our drive.  He had seen DC a number of times, and wanted to go somewhere he'd never been before.  When he suggested this, it occurred to me that I had never been to Fenway Park.  I don't care much for the Red Sox, but I'm a big fan of visiting different baseball stadiums, and Fenway is a historic park.  So we agreed to catch a game while we were there.  Then I got to thinking, "There are a lot of parks along the way back to Denver.  We should visit those as well."  I ran the idea by The Nuge, and he liked it.  Fate gave a wink and a tip o' the cap, and made sure that all of the teams along the way were having home games on the days we planned to pass through their cities.  Then, having laid those plans, I thought, "You know, if I could just make it to a couple more, I will have visited every ballpark here in the Northeast."  So I made that my goal before leaving the east. 

On consecutive weekends in June, I spent the night in Chinatown at Dirty Harry's place so I could catch the 6:30 AM Chinatown bus to NYC.  The C-Town bus, for those not familiar, goes from DC's C-Town to NYC's C-Town, but also stops at Penn Station in NYC.  There are a number of companies that make the run, so your experience can be very different depending on which company you get your tickets with.  My first trip was to see Yankee Stadium, and when time came to depart, the driver gets on the bus and barks in broken English something to the effect of the restroom not flushing, so please don't throw the deuce or we'll all have to smell it the whole way to NYC.  Sir, I will hold it as long as I have to.  Thanks for the warning.

It was a day game, so the game finished around four in the afternoon.  My Chinese Chariot didn't depart for DC until seven, so I took a nice long stroll from Penn Station in midtown all the way down to Little Italy for some Gelato.  This may not seem extraordinary, and it's not on its face.  What made it special was that it happened to be the day of the NYC Pride Parade.  The parade had gone right down Broadway about an hour or two before I got there.  So the parade was long over, but the street was still all blocked off.  I was able to take my stroll right down the middle of Broadway, and I didn't even have to put on my leather daddy gear to do so.  It was a surreal feeling, one of those unexpected providential nods that make the times in between memorable.

The next weekend was the same drill, only instead of the Bronx, this time I took the Long Island Railroad out to Brooklyn for a Mets game at Citi Field.  It was a hot and muggy day, and I had no sunscreen.  But the stadium was great, probably one of my top five so far.  From my seats in the right field grandstands, I could watch the planes taking off from La Guardia airport.  And something I didn't even realize, it is right across the train tracks from the U.S. Open tennis stadium.  Had I known, I would have made the trip for an Open in prior years.  Oh well.  For the ride home, I had a nicer bus, but in the row behind me I had some ridiculous Jamaican woman preachifying to the man next to her the entire four-hour journey.  Can you imagine having to listen to Calypso from Pirates of the Caribbean jabbering nonsense for four hours after sitting in the sweltering sun all afternoon?  You can rationalize some pretty violent stuff in that condition.  My will held out, though.  Just barely.

I made one more trip to NYC before leaving the east coast.  Again, I took a C-Town bus, and this time stayed the night in a crummy little hostel on the upper west side a few blocks from Columbia University.  That night, I met with my trainer from my mission, whom I hadn't seen in nearly ten years, and who lives in the city working as a playwright.  Very talented guy, it was great to catch up with him.  We parted after dinner and I had nowhere to be until the next day.  So I wandered into Central Park to pass the time and stumbled upon the New York Opera giving a free performance in the park.  Again, an unexpected nod of fate.  The next morning I wandered Greenwich Village and Chinatown, hit up Magnolia to mack on some cupcakes, and then beat it out to Brighton Beach to meet an old Russian friend who had recently moved there.  Brighton Beach is a head trip.  Store signs are all in Russian.  It didn't even occur to me to speak to people in English.  It also happens to be an armpit, so if you ever get the chance to go, don't.

Upon returning from my final trip to the city, it was time to load my car and get outta Dodge.  I got it all in with room to spare, and pulled out of DC on Thursday morning around 11.  The Nuge's plane arrived Friday in Boston at five o'clock in the ay em.  So in the meantime, I drove to Syracuse, NY, to visit an old friend from Denver doing a grad program there.  After dinner, I drove through the night to arrive in Boston at 4:30 AM.  I napped in the cell phone waiting lot for about 20 minutes until The Nuge called, and then we were on our way.  We parked near Boston Commons on Charles Street around 5:30 and began our tour of the Freedom Trail, but came back for breakfast at a cafe there when we realized that none of the historical sites were open yet.  Thanks to our early start, we managed to see all of the Freedom Trail sites and still had time to drive out to Lexington and Concord to visit the Revolutionary War sites, as well as head up to Cambridge to wander around Harvard's campus a little.  In the afternoon, we went to see the Bunker Hill monument, but were so exhausted that we just fell down in the shade of a maple tree and slept for about an hour.  By then, it was time to get over to the game and start the baseball portion of the trip.  It's all travelogue-ish from here to Denver, and I'm assuming most everyone has been to a baseball game before, so I'll just give you the cities we visited and let the pics give a taste of our experiences.  From the Friday night game in Boston, we went to Pittsburgh, stopping at Penn State for lunch.  From the Saturday night game in Pittsburgh (with fireworks after the game!), we went to Cleveland and caught an Indians game the next day before departing for Chicago and a rendezvous with the Cubs at Wrigley Field on Monday night.  At that point, The Nuge had to get back to work, so we left for Denver straight from the Cubs game, arriving home around noon on Tuesday. 

And now to the pics:

The Concrete Mausoleum

Jeter takes a swing

Me with the Bleacher Creatures

Somewhere in my top 5 favorite stadiums so far.

Posing so easy, a caveman can do it

Flatiron building down Broadway

It's the 21st century and Bostonians are still sitting on wooden seats

The Green Monster

I do love festivals.  This one may not be my scene, though.

The Nuge on a bronze donkey.  This has GOT to be in Revelations somewhere

Pittsburgh:  Definitely my favorite so far.

The view just before the fireworks

Fireworks on the one night we happened to be in town??

Anointed by the hand of Roberto Alomar

Cuban Pete at the Indians game

Gotta admit, the war drum was a pretty fun feature of Jacob Field.

Was going for a shot of the robot street performer, but got a two-fer with this Cleveland fashionista

At Notre Dame, me and Touchdown Jesus

Knowing nothing about Chicago, we opted for the full-blown tourist experience of a double decker bus.

The Nuge at Wrigley.  Great surrounding neighborhood.

Very intimate feeling park.  Much better than Fenway.

Once back in Denver, I caught a Rockies game (where they scored 12 runs in one inning!), and since arriving in AZ, I've been to three D-backs games (first time in a dome).  For the scorecard, I've been to eleven parks this year:  DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, NY Yankees, NY Mets, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Denver, and Arizona.  I only missed Toronto in the northeast.  One day, Blue Jays, we'll party. 

The Sun God Will Not Be Mocked

Icarus flew low
to beat the sun's heat.  But in
Phoenix, Ra laughs last.

I Can Haz Grate Summer?

Man, some summers are just too spectacular to let go without a wrap-up.  And this summer...oh boy.  I almost hesitate to write about it because I don't want to sound like I'm bragging.  But it was a good one by any standard.  Even if you consider that I was homeless and sleeping on people's floors (and once in my car) from May through most of July, it was a damn fine summer.  I see the living situation as a testament of the amazing friends I have to let me impose on them.

I suppose a season this great doesn't happen without a decent lead in, so let me set the stage:

I had been applying for a job with the government, and as often happens with the government hiring process, it was taking FOREVER.  So as a backup plan, I had researched MBA programs and spent the winter and early spring applying to those programs.  At about the same time, my family-tight friend and roommate of three years, Mzungu, decided to take a position in Kenya and announced he would be leaving when our lease was up at the end of April.  I was very excited for Mzungu, but dropping him off at the airport was a very sad day for me.  By this time, I had learned of my acceptance to Thunderbird, so that was my one small consolation.

Knowing that so much change would be coming at once, I pushed myself to stay active and to pack as much in on the east coast as I could, in case I don't make it back that way.  I got a new, more aerodynamic haircut that even a Vietnamese stylist couldn't screw up:

   
They can't screw it up mainly because I do it myself now.  So much easier.  So much less stressful.  And cheap.  No shoulder massage afterward, though.  Everything in life has tradeoffs.

I also ran a few races.  First was the Charlottesville half-marathon. It was a blast running through the UVA campus and the wooded farmland outside of Charlottesville.  We visited James Madison's estate, Montpelier, on the way back to DC.

The first weekend in May, I joined a team with Mr. and Mrs. Dirty Harry, as well as Lady Justice for an Amazing Race-style run around the city.  It was probably more exhausting than the half-marathon, to be quite honest.  Fun though.  As much as losing is ever fun.  Got to see a lot of parts of the city I'd never visited.

The following weekend, I went to the second leg of the Triple Crown of horse racing, The Preakness.

It's called 'The People's Race' because they let the riff-raff populate, and sometimes copulate, on the infield while some crappy rock band like Nickleback provides the white trash mood music.  We, of course, had grandstand seats so that we could actually see the race and avoid the ruffians.  Which we did, for most of the day.

Don't ask me about the hats.  I have no answers for you.

Notice the Jaegermeister tent in the infield.  It was that sort of scene.

 

A group of us did go as a diplomatic envoy into the bowels of the infield to mingle with the commoners and collect data on their habits. 

The Diplomats

Ultimately, we found their rituals to be savage and uncouth.  For $20, they would sell you a red plastic cup that entitled you to free beer refills all day as long as you didn't lose your cup, and could still raise your hand to the tap.  One clever wildling had duct-taped the cup to his hand, but had, in his exuberance, consumed far too much of the frothy beverage to stand up, let alone make the return trip to the dispensary.  Cleavage was in abundance, male and female, both on the chest and lower back.  It felt like the third day of a KISS tribute band festival.  So after completing our information gathering mission, we beat hoof back to higher ground and watched the rest of the races.  I made some bets and subsequently got hammered on them, but I was mostly just picking randoms, and had no expectation of winning.  It just makes the race more fun when you have skin in the game.

The following weekend, a group of about 15 people decided to drive to Hilton Head Island, SC, to run a mini-triathlon.  Hilton Head is about ten hours from DC.  The race started at 6 AM on Saturday morning.  I had taken Friday off in order to make a leisurely day of the drive.  Plans sometimes change.  My friend and current roommate, Bullit, had to leave town for a business trip. He wouldn't return to DC until 5 PM on Friday and had no way of getting to the race on his own.  So I stuck around to pick him up that evening and drive down together.  It was a lucky thing we did, because we ended up picking up one more travel companion that had meetings early on Friday and would have been unable to go without our late caravan.  Together we pulled out of DC around 5:30 in our Nissan Cube rental car, SC-bound.

The problem with the late departure is that we didn't get checked in to our hotel and get to sleep until 3 AM on Saturday.  We slept for two-and-a-half hours and hustled to the starting area.  I'll tell the rest of the race in pictures:

Most of our group preparing for the swim portion

 Yes, 50-year old Moobs beat me in the swim.  Shut up about it already.

Unless you want to look like Jack Tripper, spend the extra $15 and rent a racing bike.

 DONE!  Can we go to the beach now?

Not yet.  Lunch at the Salty Dog first.  Refueling after a race is important.

 Darkness washed over The Dude, and his sleep was glorious.

 

The following weekend was Duck, which I've detailed here and here.  The weekend after that was tubing the Shenandoah, which I detailed here.

So for those keeping track, we're now at the second weekend of June.  This was the weekend of the demolition derby in rural Maryland.  A demolition derby so big, they needed different weight classes.  There was the compact, four-cylinder class with its Mazdas and Sentras and Corollas.  There was the V-6 sedan class.  There were the 'exotics,' minivans and cross-overs mostly.  And then there were the SUVs/trucks.  Driving a '78 Chevy Suburban in a demo derby sounds like it would be so much cooler than it actually was.  Those big ships were too heavy to get any speed in such a small space and their steel was too strong to do much real damage.  Surprisingly, the compacts were the most fun to watch, because they were flying around the field.

To be continued...

...soonish.

Humungus Counsels Fellow Alpha

Dear Released-

Good question, if you are starting from the assumption that this system of abundant resources will continue in perpetuity.  But Humungus readers know better.  And you can be sure that those women aren't operating on any such assumption. 

You see, most women have a sixth sense about these things, so they can feel the looming collapse. This would be a useful attribute if they weren't also tragically handicapped by the most female of traits: Caring.  They recognize that the days of scarcity are nearing and they worry about the survival of their young.  These bastards are the product of beta-male seed, and their survival is highly unlikely when staring into the teeth of the superior whelps that you will eventually sire. And yet, as they look upon their inferior progeny, these women are still burdened by the caring emotion, and perhaps a little guilt at having spent their days coupling with feral betas. 

Now when Woman realizes her folly, she tries to change her trajectory by changing horses.  She is in search of a warrior, the streetwise Hercules of Bonnie Tyler's dreams.  It is an educated bet on her own survival.  Her lamentations have triggered memories long buried under a dung heap of mediocre men and offspring.  Now she wants to raise warrior whelps born of true warrior seed.  At some point in your relationship, she smelled something Alpha about you.  Again, sixth sense; whether she's conscious she's doing it or not, even from a young age, she is collecting scraps of behavioral cues on men and filing them away in descending levels of utility/usefulness.  Scraps of you in her files pointed to better than average utility.  That's when she contacted you and proceeded to stroke your ego.  It's easy to be flattered by such advances.  Don't.  It is likely a trap.

You see, for as much of a handicap as caring and emotion are for Woman, she has learned to counteract her weak nature by being exceptionally deceptive and manipulative.  Woman never stops playing the numbers game.  Who knows how many alpha files she has tucked away in her memories?  How many men has she said the same thing to?  The irony is that the man who falls for her chicanery will be the least alpha of all. 

Pre-Apocalypse Man has long swallowed the deceptions of Woman; this has not changed since the days of Adam.  But we are far beyond paradise already, and as we learned from Seeing Dead People's letter about defective humans, we must start practicing apocalypse thinking now.  Post-Apocalypse Man can't afford to carry the weight of questionable loyalty.  So here's the lesson in all of this:  Always be very suspicious of any woman that flatters you.  You may be every bit the alpha that she says, but her need for your Man Skills is selfish in nature, and she will manipulate you.

As there is no getting around Woman's cunning nature, you must seek out traits in your woman that will add positive value to life after the collapse of civilization.  If she must be cunning, make sure she is loyal, so that she will be sure to use her skills of deception against others, to your ultimate gain.  Also, look for a woman with strong legs, strong hands and a strong back for carrying water and supplies.  The last thing you need is a woman incapable of carrying more than a dog in a purse.  I would expect nothing less of a good Alpha.   

Duck Week, Some Assembly Required

Proper preparation for a beach vacation generally starts by February.  Christmas and New Year are finished.  College Bowl Week is over.  The Super Bowl has been decided.  There are no more excuses for your riotous consumption of delectable foods.  You have to stop eating compulsively like you're pregnant and start eating like a grown up again.  Unfortunately, this didn't dawn on me until the drive down to Duck.  As I was licking the nacho cheese off my knuckles and simultaneously lunging for some Dolly Madisons in the glove box, I felt the seat belt snug tight against my love handle.  It was then that I knew I had wasted the days of my preparation.  Oh well.  At that point, nothing to do but pretend you meant to look like that.

That's because come Saturday morning, it's time to hit the beach.  And since most of the people only stay through Monday, you have to make hay while the sun shines, as the old gaffer would say.  Saturday is the biggest beach day of the weekend.  There's the annual volleyball tournament starting around 9 AM, and this is the day when everybody congregates in the same spot for a day's worth of sun and swimming and more flirtatious tomfoolery than you can shake a stick at.  It's a tricky thing learning to pace yourself on your first day.  When people know they only have three days of stick-shaking good times, they tend to run too hard and get too much sun that first day and then the rest of the weekend is lost to exhaustion.  It's understandable.  Everybody wants to have a rockstar beach vacation.  But it's better to be the Mick Jagger of Duck Week than the Jimi Hendrix.  My first trip to OBX, I went the Hendrix route. I wound up bright red with heatstroke on Day 1 and spent the rest of the weekend begging for agua and aloe rubs. Taking a full week off work, if you can, is well worth it.

This year, Saturday began with breakfast with my housemates, almost none of whom I knew.  See, since most people are lining up housing months in advance, they get to choose houses where they know most of the other 30 people in the house.  When you wait until the week of the trip to make arrangements, you wind up in a house of odds and ends (mostly odds) who also decided last minute.  This outcome was fine for me, as I enjoyed my housemates.  And at breakfast, I ran into the one guy at my house that I knew, Mr. Meth.  Mr. Meth is an attorney, one of those guys who thinks thoughts about three times faster than the average human and is limited only by his mouth's ability to form the words.  Occasionally when he's asking you a question, he expects an answer by the time he finishes asking, if not sooner.  If you haven't provided an answer by the time he places the question mark, or at least begun moving your mouth in anticipation of an answer, he immediately re-poses the question.  The resulting sensation is that of having a conversation with a meth head or a high-functioning autistic.  This can sometimes be exhausting, but I knew Mr. Meth to be a good guy.  So after breakfast, I invited him to wander down the street to a house where many of my DC friends were staying to touch base before hitting the beach.  I was unaware at the time, but this extra stop was the beginning of what, for brevity's sake, I will refer to as The Band.

You see, it adds to the experience to get a good, relatively small cohort assembled that can go out together.  Not an exclusive clique, mind you.  Rigidity in groups is the death of fun and possibility.  Especially at the beach.  But when groups swell to 30+ people, you need flexibility to do things separate from the group, or maybe even separate from your smaller cohort, things that may not interest everybody.  Like Voltron, you need to be able to go out and kick some butt according to your own agenda and reunite later to share notes, introduce new friends, or go on the attack together.  Otherwise, you turn your entire vacation over to the tyranny of the majority.  Case in point, I wanted to be sure to get my running in while I was there.  So while the Band members were out harvesting groupies or catching up on their Hollywood gossip mags, I would put on my swim trunks and run a few miles until the sweltering heat chased me into the soothing embrace of the ocean.

Anyway, upon arriving at my DC peeps' house, I ran into Hero.  Hero is a friend of mine from San Francisco who, despite living on the west coast, seemed to know everybody already.  Some people just have that gift.  She also has pipes like Bonnie Tyler. Whether she had come to Duck in search of a white knight upon a fiery steed, she wouldn't say, but she introduced me to two friends (and future Band members), Lobster Paws and Suk Suk.  Lobster Paws is a refreshing combination of beauty and brains stretched over the 5'10" frame of a beach volleyball player.  As impossible as she was for the boys to ignore, she made the mistake of applying sunscreen everywhere except her feet, thus distinguishing herself the rest of the week as "that tall blond girl with the swollen red feet."  Suk Suk is a delightful opera singer with a mind for mischief and a curious ability to sooth over-fed bellies with rhythmic chant and massage.

Hero, Lobster Paws, and Suk Suk

L

Lobster Paws, Hero, Me, and Mr. Meth

For those counting at home, that makes five members of The Band.  It just so happens that my car seats five.  So we all piled in and headed out to our first gig on the beach.  We hadn't been there for ten minutes when the grabass went into full swing with a co-ed game of football.  Ten minutes after that, I came up lame with my first injury, a sprain of the ligaments between the second and third toes (self-diagnosed.  I'm not a doctor, but I play one at Duck Beach.)  So afterward I was restricted to bocce ball tournaments and frolicking in the waves.  I'd have been upset about the gimpy walk, but in the sand everybody walks with a gangsta lean, so nobody noticed.

I was meticulous throughout the week about applying sunscreen and hydrating, so I avoided the energy drain and sunburn of the first day.  Some good grub and a quick early-evening nap put me in just the right mood to make a fool of myself.  The buzz around the island was that one of the houses was having a dance party later that night.  You may say, "Feel like making a fool of yourself + Dance party = Perfect match."  For some that may be true.  But it's too anonymous for me.  I'm the kind of fool that needs a spotlight.  This is one of those times when being in The Band comes in handy.  While everyone else was driving around looking for the dance party, The Band cruised down the island to the local watering hole for some Saturday night karaoke.  The five of us were the only sober ones in the place, and it was every bit as joyous as you would expect.  Suk Suk started The Band performances off strong with a rendition of Killing Me Softly that had every woman in the place singing along.  Hero foolishly took the advice of some guy and performed I Need A Hero, a song she didn't know the lyrics to, despite having a voice custom made for such a performance.  It cratered.  Mr. Meth followed later with the most delightfully WASP-y rendition of Bust A Move ever.  And it was transcendent in its earnestness.  I was the last solo act of our group.  My performance of Keep Your Hands To Yourself definitely wasn't going to make anyone faint.  However, my contribution to the night stood out for one reason:  my very special backup dancers.  Drunk guy is just the beginning.  Once the camera footage calms down, you'll see Fancy Pants emerge from behind the pillar.  I have nothing to add that the footage doesn't convey.  Gold sequined booty shorts, as a rule, speak louder than any words.

Sunday was a slow moving day with not much to report.  It was rightfully a day of rest from the partying, and was consumed mostly by visiting friends around the island, occasionally punctuated by meals.  Enriching at the time, but boring to write about, and even more boring to read.  Let's get to Monday, the last dash for most people before returning to the real world.

Monday is a much more integrated day at the beach than Saturday.  Saturday, people are just starting to get to know others, just beginning to venture outside of their own groups.  By Monday, you're practically family.  I spent most of the day swimming, wandering up and down the beach playing bocce, or catching up with friends old and new.  Because of this, I missed out on all the fun Suk Suk was creating with a little prank called "ghosting."  Ghosting is when you follow someone around mimicking their every move without them knowing.  This is an especially amusing prank when played on a guy who is hitting on a girl.  There he is, doing his best to seem impressive, but failing miserably because the girls behind him are illustrating just how absurdly subjective the battle of body language can be.  The most serious or confident gesture can be totally undermined by having as many as five people behind you copying every head tilt and hand motion.   I'm not positive that I didn't get ghosted myself, being that I was oblivious to the activity until late in the day.  I have only Suk Suk's word to believe.  Hopefully no embarrassing pictures like this one surface.

 Chicken Wing getting ghosted

That night, one of the houses up the island was hosting a karaoke party.  We figured that the success of Saturday night at the bar would give us the upper hand as seasoned pros.  But I'm telling you now, this weekend was a tale of two karaoke cities.  It was the best of karaoke, it was the worst of karaoke.  Now, I love my people, but doing karaoke with large groups of Mormons is the lamest thing this side of Wichita (as an aside, the sole exception to this rule was my friend B's birthday party when Matty C., the tax attorney, broke out a solid delivery of Like A Virgin.  I'll never forget that.)  Whereas Saturday night was a boisterous crowd of backup singers supporting your efforts, the Monday night crowd seemed to think they were sitting in Simon Cowell's chair for a taping of American Idol.  Either that, or they were expecting some Janice Kapp Perry or something equally awful.  A rousing rendition of Fat Bottom Girls might have shortened my "new friends" list significantly.  Add to this a karaoke machine meant for small house groups of 10 friends: weak speakers, couldn't hear the music or read the lyrics.  It was a train wreck from the first note.  By about the fifth song of the night, it was obvious that there wasn't much life in this thing.  And yet somehow I let Suk Suk talk me into getting up, thinking that a jaunty duet of Summer Nights might get the crowd into it.  We closed the party down, and not in a good way.  I'm not exaggerating when I say that as soon as we finished, the entire room of 30-40 people rose as one and began filing toward the door.  I guess they don't know talent when they see it.

The nice thing about staying the whole week is that you can afford to recharge your batteries after everyone leaves on Monday without feeling like you're missing something or wasting valuable vacation time.  You can afford to hang out in the Food Lion parking lot for two hours chit-chatting about nothing in particular.  You  can squeeze in a run before lunch while everybody is uploading pictures to Facebook.  You can go to the beach or not go to the beach all day long.  You get to have the special experiences, like the girls singing Take Me Out To The Ballgame on the field during the seventh inning stretch of a college summer league baseball game.

 Root, root, root for the home team

 

Or you can drive a few miles up the beach, beyond where roads will take you, to see the wild horses roaming the shore.

 Peter, Suk Suk, and me

Or you could witness Mr. Meth nearly spin off this planet when he has an adverse psychotic reaction to a lame party (I wish I could have captured this in a photo.)  Or maybe you'd be content to nurse a cold bottle of Nehi Soda outside a ramshackle gas station on the edge of nowhere and talk weather with the locals.

Sooner or later, the time comes when you have to leave Duck.  All week long, there is a slow trickle of departures.  By Thursday, there are barely enough left to have any sort of meaningful gathering.  Oddly enough, though I had supposedly been relaxing for an entire week, I felt like an overgrazed pasture, chewed down to a nub.  I don't think I realized how fatigued I was until I stopped for gas on my way off the island.  After filling up and grabbing some road grub, I pulled away from the station with the pump still in my car.  Symbolic, perhaps, of the fact that though you may fill your car's tank, if you leave Duck with fuel left in your own tank, you may have done it wrong.  But that's up to you to decide.

   Lunch at the Bad Bean

DC Peeps' House

The Band touring a shower.  Sounds lame, I know.

Putting Rebekah in a dilemma.

Last day with The Band

Duck Week, An Introduction

I mentioned that tubing the Shenandoah was partly a redemption for flaking out on my married friends in order to go to Carolina's Outer Banks for Duck Week.  You may be asking yourself, "What is Duck Week?"  Well, here's your primer. 

Every Memorial Day weekend and the following week, Mormon singles from Boston to Miami (and a shout-out to my CA peeps!) congregate in Duck, NC.  For those that haven't been, it's not a complicated thing to understand.  Imagine Spring Break in Daytona Beach, FL.  Now move that atmosphere to a more remote location, make nearly everyone young working professionals, and make them Mormon.  Sounds pretty dreadful, right?  Sounds more like after-hours speed-dating at an accountants convention at Disney World.  Add Extra Quirkiness + Heightened Expectations - Booze - Age-Appropriate Behavior + Potential Visit to Sugar Shack = Duck Week Snog-a-palooza.  At least that's the reputation that it has acquired over the years.  It has the potential for fun, adventure, and relaxation without the rotting smell of desparation that accompanies any event branded as a "singles" getaway.   

So many people roll their eyes and whisper about the meat-market feel of the week.  I've long suspected that the ones complaining about the meat-market sensation are those whose beef is left in the cooler.  In my experience, I haven't found it to be anything near so slutty.  In reality, only a small portion are looking for the weekend hookup, and an even smaller percentage of those actually get what they're looking for.  So I don't understand what the complaining is about.  I say live and let live.  If someone came to lay on the beach and relax, let them lay on the beach and relax.  If someone came to kayak and chase wild horses on the sand dunes, good for them.  Why should it make any difference to me if someone showed up to Duck looking for some road beef?  Bully for them if they get it.  That's the real beauty of the Duck experience:  you can find whatever you want there.  Especially if tankinies are your thing.  I find them mildly ridiculous, but there are other options available for all beach-going tastes.  It is entirely up to you what shape your vacation takes.  With that in mind, I made the decision to attend this year, and I'm oh so glad I did.  

   

Adopting Lazy as a Life Theme

I've avoided writing about any of my adventures of the past month partly because I'm lazy, and partly because I've been having difficulty knowing where to start from.  So we're gonna tell these stories in reverse, Memento style.  Today's installment:  Saturday tubing on the Shenandoah river.

The genesis of this trip came mostly from my guilty conscience.  As a nice treat for Memorial Day the week before tubing, I decided to hang my married friends out to dry.  I had planned to take a 3-day road trip of unknown destination with Dirty Harry and his wife, but the Wednesday night before our departure, I decided to scrap our plans to join the rest of Eastern Single Mormondom in the annual spawning run to Carolina's Outer Banks.  I knew I would need some decompression from that trip, not to mention some redemption.  So in hopes of cushioning the flakiness, I floated the tubing idea to Dirty Harry before I left.

Now, do you remember last summer's retreat to the Shenandoahs for the waterfalls?  The need to get out of the city and commune with nature.  Sometimes the need for Mother Nature is brought on by too much work and the humming vevuzela that is the city.  Other times, the need is brought on by too much vacation or a schedule packed too tightly with fun.  I can't be the only one to need a vacation from my vacation.  That's what this tubing trip was about.

So I invited a handful of folks, who in turn invited a few more.  We ended up with a pretty good group of about 14 to head out to Front Royal, VA.  There, we would float a three-mile stretch of the laziest river you've ever seen.  If Jeff Lebowski were a river, he'd be the Shenandoah.  It takes three-plus hours to float the three miles.  In that time, you relax.  You jabber about things that don't matter with people that do.  You forget your cares, your stress, your name, your nationality.  Your swimsuit, if you're into that.  You drink in the sunshine and any tasty beverages you may have tied to your tube.  Turning over on your tube without falling in is the only concern, and if you do fall in, the water's warm and inviting.  It's the perfect amount of time to relax without getting bored.  And afterward, you catch a great barbeque joint on the way out of town.

I made one poor decision on the day, and that was in my choice of dessert.  But I feel comfortable in knowing that it was a choice that I couldn't have avoided under any circumstance.  Even knowing then what I know now, the universe would have warped space-time to bring us together anyway.  So, in keeping with the lazy day, I laid back and rode the slow, easy current of fate as it carried me into the arms of a sundae called The Fat Elvis. When debating between a simple rasberry softserve dipped cone and a sundae called The Fat Elvis, there really was no debate, right?  Right.  That sundae really tied the day together, man.

Reality Check

Sometimes the constant blaring of celebrity gossip shows and cable "news" punditry can whip us into frenzies over a whole range of issues that just don't matter.  And then a single article can slice through the din like a razor.  Such was the effect of this New York Times article about North Korea.  I strongly recommend you read the article in its entirety.  It affected me powerfully.  I like studying political systems, but I'm not even interested in the academic comparison of Socialism to Capitalism after reading this.  All I want to do is gather my family around me and thank God for them, and that we're free to argue over whether to grill bratwurst or hamburgers this summer (Answer:  both).   

Political Discourse of the Lunatic Fringe: Detestable and...Hilarious?

Politico published a sorta disturbing little article this week claiming that threats made on the lives of members of Congress have increased 300% so far this year.  Sigh.  My first reaction is to question what would lead someone to think it's okay to threaten a politician and/or their family like that.  I can sympathize with disagreeing with a politician's views or votes or whatever.  But what went wrong in your head that made you think that killing them would be an answer?  I don't know for a fact, but I feel safe in assuming that the vast majority of people of all political stripes are repulsed by such actions.  Who are these creeps?  Well, according to the article, they veer from the comically bungling Black Widow biker gang-types, to the significantly more psychotic Max Cady-types.   First, from the article, the bunglers:

FBI agents tracked the calls to a 54-year-old Texas man who lived alone — and who at one time had owned a 20-gun arsenal of handguns, shotguns and rifles. According to the documents, he told officers that he was “really, really drunk” when he made the calls. He said he was just “venting” — taking out his frustrations after hearing a discussion of the Fairness Doctrine and becoming concerned that the government would attempt to abolish the radio shows of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

Damn that Fairness Doctrine!  I'mma kill me some politicians fer that crap!  Guvmint ain't gonna take my Rush.  He's just speakin' too much truth, man.  Fightin' socializm and stuff.  Where's my Pabst?  Guvmint sucks y'all.  Hey, doesn't SSI come today?  I'mma get paid and buy me some ammunition 'fore Hussein Obama takes it.  Communizm sucks too, don't it?  Yeah.

That may be true, communism does suck, but at least under communism you'd have a job, inefficient though it may be.

Then there are the true psychopaths who are unsafe to anybody:

"I voted for you,” the caller said in a voice mail to Democratic Rep. Heath Shuler’s district office. “If you vote for that stimulus package, I’m gonna kill you. Simple as that.”

The FBI says the caller was a 70-year-old resident of Shuler’s North Carolina district with a history of mental illness and a cache of guns. In the weeks before calling Shuler’s office, the FBI says, the caller beat and choked his wife. She told the FBI that she’d tried to clear her home of guns — and that she went to bed at night with a can of mace tucked under her pillow.

When agents showed up at the man’s door, they asked him why he’d threatened to kill Shuler.

“I was trying to work the political scene,” he said.

At some point in a person's development, it must become evident that s/he is dealing with a dome full of bad brains.  Couldn't we try to catch these folks early, before they procreate, and get them out of the gene pool?  I'm not advocating euthanizing them or anything like that.  More like, since they seem to  prefer acting like animals, we could strip them naked and drop them in the middle of the serengeti.  Or we could put them to work doing something useful.  We'd let them keep their tinfoil hats, but we could strap solar panels to their backs and set them loose in the Nevada wild.  Give them AM radios and beam Rush's program to them through a drone that flies circles overhead so they have to just walk in circles to hear His Corpulence bloviate all day.  And then we could set up wind turbines in Rush's studio.  Between those two alternative energy sources, we could power the western United States for the first six months of the year.