Re: flight attendants

Specifically, "I'm happy to be the first to welcome you to (destination)."

I'd like to get into the habit of preemptively welcoming everyone around me just to take these smug jerks down a peg. I mean why do they have to gloat? They kinda have an unfair advantage.

The Great Flood of 2010

I was sitting at my computer at 2:30 AM, alone, in my bedroom, as I had been for the past few hours. Just surfing the internet mindlessly—watching stupid videos, getting caught in Wikipedia’s never ending web of links. My attention was primarily focused on Janelle Monae’s Archandroid, the album then playing on my speaker system. I had heard good things about it and skimmed the album to my liking, but wanted to give it a more in-depth listen. So here I was, dicking about doing nothing in the wee hours of the morning. Living the dream, as they say.

I was then rudely interrupted from my reverie by my pet peeve, namely, being reminded that I have a physical form that so inconveniently demands attention and service. Bah! If we were supposed to have bodies, God wouldn’t have invented a limitless network of nigh infinite information accessible from my chair. But I digress, don’t I? Well I do it for a reason. My digressions are like solid gold rollerskates. You wish you had digressions like me. Well, granted, that last one was a bit meh but who cares. I’m talking here.

My foot, tapping to the music, suddenly felt a strange, sharply cold sensation. I figured it was one of those sudden foot pains that grabs hold of the arch of the foot and for about five seconds fills it with countless metaphorical needles. So I wait for it to pass. It doesn’t. Odd. It doesn’t really feel like those pains either. What’s going on here? I start stomping my feet on the floor (just to see what’d happen, I assume) only to hear splashes coming from underneath my desk. Ah, so there it is. It was wetness; my feet were wet. Wait, my feet were wet? I’m in my goddamn room. There’s no water here. How can there be? It’s inside. This is where I live. I had a vague understanding that it was raining, and knew that my room was in a basement, but I hadn’t been outside since the rain had begun so I wasn’t expecting this. I looked under my desk to see a puddle of freaking water all up on my floor. This is behind my desk, so all the wires powering my computer, monitor, and speakers are hanging around back there. In the water. My bigass bass speaker (that’s called a woofer, right? It’s right to call it a woofer? That sounds silly) was dangerously close to being submerged, and as I realized this, in my disoriented state, I panicked and scooped it up. My speakers would break! I couldn’t listen to music! And most importantly, Ms. Monae was in peril! Er, wait. No, she wasn’t. That’s not how speakers work. But cut me some slack, I was bugging out at the time.

I turn around to see puddles all over my room. A room which, incidentally, had a massive number of items on the floor. I had been loathsomely slack in my laundry routine, and as such, the massive pile of dirty clothes on my floor were subject, now quite literally dripping wet.

A stack of books I had listed on half.com were ruined beyond repair. Fuck. So long, theoretical money.

So I look around for a stack of important paperwork for a job that I left on my floor, finding it—thank Ahuramazda!—on a veritable island of dry carpet, scarcely larger than the papers themselves. So I rush the paperwork out of my room like it’s on fire. Except, wait, if it was on fire, I could’ve put it out in all the water—never mind, bad simile. I then put my woofer (that still sounds like it’s wrong. I mean, it’s not, but still…) on a chair in the basement’s common area connecting the two underground bedrooms. Luckily the common area was dry enough for me to port the wetter items in my room all up on it, only the outer edges being wet.

I yelled for Kevin, the fellow basement-dweller, to look at what’s going on. He came down and checked out his room. Now Kevin had very recently moved into this room, having only taken his desk and mattress down into it by this time, so he didn’t have as much at stake, which was convenient, because his room was in a much more dire state than mine. The entrance to his room, and, by extension, the opening of his closet, were over a dip in the concrete foundation of the building, leading to a small valley in the carpeted floor that was now filled with standing stank-water. And did it ever stank! A weird mix of sewage, fetid stagnant water, and years-old, uncleaned carpet must.

Kevin moaned, exasperated. He was resigned about the situation, joking about it and exploring the full depths of his flooded room with morbid curiosity. He was especially taken with an area so saturated that the carpet had risen off of the concrete below. Taking a ruler, he determined the worst area had one and a half inches of water.

I was, in the simplest terms, pissed the fuck off. I paid money to live in this place, this was my apartment, my goddamn bedroom. I didn’t remember inviting no bitchass water in. Get out of my room, you bitchass stankwater! I was flustered. There was an intruder in my room, and it didn’t even give me the common decency to be sentient so I could yell at it? Hell, even a bug can get smushed. But water? Water just chills out and touches all my stuff without asking and isn't even careful with it and stinks up the place.

Who wouldn’t be pissed if this bitchass were in his/her room? Every trip in and out to relocate further dripping and/or ruined possessions of mine incensed me more as I had to again look at, acknowledge, and remain powerless against the squatter in my room. I called my girlfriend Georgia to let someone else know about this. She had been asleep and groggily tried her best to comfort me, but there was little she could do from her house in the suburbs. Still, it was a mite comforting, and comfort is hard to come by in situations like this.

By this time, Kevin and I decided to wake up another roommate, Eddie, who sleeps in a bedroom on the first floor. Our other roommate, Damien, had work in the morning so we decided to leave him be. Eddie was expectedly shocked by the state of our rooms. In showing him the worst sections, I noticed that the water seemed to be spreading, rising. I referenced photos of the water I had taken on my phone as soon as I registered its presence—and the level was most certainly rising.

I ran upstairs and opened the front door to see some Ghostbusters-style end-of-the-world storm bursting from the sky. Fuck. Fuck. This is not good.

I was forced to return to the pool of festering sewage water that was overtaking my room and move items I had previously thought safe. Still, there was a lot that was left where it was. I assumed that anything elevated off the ground more than 3-4 inches couldn’t be in any danger. Every trip in and out of my room irked me even more. How dare our landlord rent us such a leaky piece of shit? I’m paying for this room? For the privilege of having water steal it from me? Inexcusable. I wanted to scream in his face, verbally beat him to submission for letting this happen. True, it “technically” wasn’t his fault, and the storm was “of startling magnitude and responsible for widespread flooding across the entire city,” but seriously, as if that was going to change my mind.

It was somewhere around this time that I noticed that water was seeping past the edges of the common area, encroaching dangerously close to where we had moved all of our things. Apoplectic with frustration, we set out moving all of my earthly possessions yet again, this time from the common area of the basement. By the end of this, it was clear that the common area was well on its way to being completely submerged. The water was quickly rising well above ankles and became more and more black. One might even say it could become none more black. One might. It’s certainly possible. I’ve heard it said before.

By this point, anger wasn’t even an issue. The puddles I discovered an hour earlier would be welcomed with joyous tears compared to what had forced itself into our basement. This was something differently entirely, a disgusting, ever-expanding, ever-consuming beast taking all that I considered mine. I had been out of my parents’ house long enough to no longer consider my room there as my home, as it were. It wasn’t “home base” anymore. I had very few things there, very little emotional connection. This room, in this apartment, was mine. Everything that meant something to me, everything I cherished, everything that was mine was inside of it. And it was being taken. It wasn’t mine anymore, wasn’t safe, wasn’t anything but a container of sewage. It couldn’t happen, this water couldn’t take what was mine away from me. I felt things I had never felt before. There was some sort of tangible, determined force literally and deliberately taking what was mine away from me. I wanted to fight, lash out, but I knew I couldn’t, and every second the enemy grew. I was convinced it would never end, the storm would surely last another day, nothing would be saved. Having a lot of water in one’s basement sucks, but having a potentially infinite amount of water in one’s basement is unbearable. Hyperventilation took hold, each breath more like a desperate grasp at wisps of air to pound into my lungs, to little effect. I felt like I was slowly suffocating. I was near shaking, didn’t know what to do, where to go—everything seemed lost. It was all under now. Under that god damn water. Under any other circumstances I might have broken down in tears, but even that was beyond my comprehension at this point. I’ve never witnessed so-called “panic attacks” first-hand, but I imagine they go something like this. Every trip now involved more sloshing through the nauseating water, now at shin-level, taking more and more out of my room. I had incapacitated myself with my emotional suffocation, so the burden fell on Eddie and Kevin (and Damien, who we had accidentally woken up). Nothing I thought was safe turned out to be. In the end, all that remained in my room was my poor empty desk and bed frame.

Eventually the water did stop rising. We determined that, at peak, there were eight and a half inches and that it smelled like misery.

I had called my parents and weakly explained my situation, somehow thinking that they could make it better. My dad graciously agreed to pick me up (at 4:30 AM no less!) and take me to a dry room, and a tub that hadn’t oozed forth both pink and black liquids, in that order.

It wasn’t “my room,” the room that had meant so much to me, but it was good to be somewhere stable. After the water had leveled off I calmed down, apologized for not helping towards the end, even got calm enough to joke about it. I was shaken but survived. Nothing important was destroyed. I had made it out.

Ten days later, I moved back into my newly carpeted, newly repainted, mold-free room. And in all honesty, it feels absolutely amazing to have it back. Someone could easily spout some Fight-Clubby, anti-establishment screed about how our possessions are worthless, they don’t make us who we are, a human should be more than that, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t care. Some things mean a lot, some things are cared for passionately, some things have all my music saved on them. But it’s not so much about my things as a space of my own. A place that is mine, where I can be alone, be myself. It’s not that much to ask for. Mine was taken away and it touched me much deeper than I would have expected. There’s so much taken for granted, so much that can just go away at any second. So much that, even when it seems like life is working against you, is unfathomably awesome. Here I sit in my room, again, writing this rambly piece of crap, and does it ever feel good to be back again.

A Guide to Pretentiousness

For those who are not lucky enough to have it come naturally. (Blogspot is being uncooperative so you gotta click on the chart for it to be big enough to read. Sorry.)

I am now indistinguishable

from the throng of be-scarfed would-be writers who use their blog instead of writing something of publishable quality. Be on the lookout for half-formed works to be heaped upon the already oversaturated wasteland of bloggery. For my thoughts must be seen and shared! Praise be to narcissism. Why did I break down?

Yesterday my friend Kevin and I were walking down Damen Ave and came across a statue of a cow peering into a telescope, presumably on some type of scientific venture, which, as one can likely surmise, is in itself a noteworthy achievement for a cow, a species who rarely have the time for intellectual curiosity. I do not know exactly what he was attempting to observe, or what analysis he made of his findings; I am not a mind reader, although I did use a semicolon which makes me smart.

A plaque on this statue read "Cowlileo," presumably a pun on famous astronomer "Li'l" Leo Da Vinci. Kevin's keen mind caught the intended meaning however, a play on "Galileo." We agreed that this was tremendously stupid. No possible stretch of the imagination can justify why it would be considered clever or insightful to replace the "Ga" in Galileo with "Cow."

I bemoaned the wasted potential of this stupid name, saying, and I quote, "especially since they could have gone with the much better 'Cowpernicus.'" I came up with this in like two seconds.

That's why.