February 8, 2013

• Ordinary people are everywhere

  I walked into my bathroom and saw something brown on the floor and discovered that it was a slug.  This was my first ever encounter with a slug.  It raised questions.  Like: what am I supposed to think about slugs?  Are slugs evil?  Do they infest things or just inhabit them?  What is the rap sheet on slugs?  Do they climb inside our mouths while we sleep like spiders supposedly do?  Do they breed like rabbits?  Do they spread the Black Death?

  I decided I didn’t know the answer to any of these questions. So I said ‘I’ll deal with you later’ and then hopped in the shower.  By the time I got out Mr. Slug was gone.  Which I suppose goes to prove as definitively as possible that I’m not the quickest showerer.

  As I was explaining this last point to my friend Kyle while driving him to class he spit a huge mouthful of coffee back into his mug.  He had thought the swallow was to the point of no return, but that was quickly disproved as definitively as the short-showerer hypothesis.

  I shouldn’t take long showers, I know.  I learned this in a first grade class that I visited recently.  They had to make a craft showing a way people wasted water and a way people could save water.  Many of them drew putting people’s heads in toilets as a way water gets wasted. 

  I was signing my name into the visitor log when a little boy came up and told the check-in lady ‘My teacher said to tell you there is pee on the ground in the bathroom.’  She asked ‘Oh yeah? Did you do it?’  The boy craned his head around and said ‘No’ and she said ‘Well how do I know you’re telling the truth?’  There was a pause before he weakly said ‘I don’t know’. 

  Sometimes when everyone else is going home from work I am on my way to work. It is a huge conflict of interests.  The other day I was runing late and I had finally gotten off the highway and was at a red stoplight.  I looked at my watch.  Four minutes to go.  I could make it.  The problem was I was on the far side of the road from the turn I needed to make.  Thus when the light turned green I needed to speed past the other cars to merge all the way to the left to make the turn.  The light turned green and the white jeep next to me starts flying.  They are right next to me and I think ‘Crap, I’m not going to be able to merge’.  Then I realized they were going so fast they had left traffic far behind, which was what I was trying to do, so I thought ‘Ok, I can get behind that’.  It then hit me that this was what I actually needed to do, that I could merge behind them to get over for my turn.

  I ended up being a minute late because of a skateboarder, but I like double entendres, so I think it was all worth it.

  On Monday Columbus was buried deep in snow, like it was under a rickety roof that had caved in all at once.  At night I stopped by my church during a work shift to get a hot drink.  In the parking lot Kyle was sweeping snow off cars and I thought ‘Is he going somewhere? Is that his car? What car does Kyle have?’  This was an idiotic thing to think, I realized, because Kyle has an ID card that says ‘Non-Driver’ and I’ve seen it.  But that was how that night was going in my mind.  It was a dark night.

  I called ‘Kyle, what are you doing?’ and he said ‘I’m cleaning off cars!’ and then I went inside.  A few minutes later I came out and he was standing right in front of me and I jumped a little.  I said ‘Oh my gosh. If you had been in the passenger seat of my car, I would have freaked out.’ 

  ‘Well,’ he explained in a voice exhausted from the cold, ‘Ok, so I was going to. But I thought it would be a lot scarier if I was in the back seat of your car. Then when you eventually looked back you would have seen me and I figured that would be so much scarier. So I actually got in your car but then I realized that I hadn’t done that car, so I rushed out real quick and then did it, and by the time I was done you had come out. If you had come out twenty seconds later I would have gotten you so bad.’  His voice was pretty frozen and he used a lot of words to say all this, but I think this is what he said.  The image of him being cold-faced and smiling reminded me of Pierre at the end of War and Peace when he comes home to Natasha.  I suppose that’s what a good author is: someone who creates something so vivid that it comes back to you as a sort of memory. 

  I went into work on Wednesday (what is this? work story day?) and started explaining to everyone that robots would never have our jobs, that I was needed to do my job.  I then listed all the reasons a human needed to do my job.  Years later when the shift ended Caitlin asked me ‘Did you go to Convergence last night?’ and I said ‘Yes, it was about the intersection of ethics and science. One part was about GMOs and the other part was about technology and jobs, like how self-checkouts have gotten rid of cashiers and so on.’  Then she said ‘Oh, so that’s what this morning was all about?’ and I exclaimed ‘You just put my life together! That feels so great!!’ because it did feel great.

  I would like to apologize to everyone who thought this post was going to be about something.  These are just some images from my life, and that’s all.  Little images that make up a lot to me.  Like the time my niece said to her mom ‘I love you this many!’ and held up all ten fingers.  Whatever philosophical ideas you may associate with me, it is images like these I will die with, the things I see when I’m not looking down at my limbs and thinking ‘what is this thing I’m in?’ 

  • 9:54 pm
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