Butterflies for Dinner

I owe a lot to a party-hardy Greek guy I've never met, the snobbish inflexibility of Bristol's English Department administration, and my buddy Troy Long.

As far as I can tell, they're the reasons I ended up debating the intersections of science and religion over wine and bolognase with James and Fran Bragg, British parents who had invited me to have dinner with them.

Let me explain.

So many random things had to happen to land me there.

For instance, I had to be both friends with Troy Long as well as an English major.  One without the other would not suffice.  Because through Troy, I met a guy from Chile named Andres.  On the very first weekend, we three went out for a burger/beer at a pub.  There, I learned Andres was an English major.  And like me, he was enrolled in Approaches to Shakespeare -- in which my own enrollment happened simply because all the other classes I wanted to take were fully booked.

And still I didn't want to take Shakespeare.  It was a first-year class that I snobbishly thought was below me.  But because the administration was even more snobbish in not letting me in anything else (their snobbishness > my snobbishness), I guess my having dinner with the Braggs could be traced all the way back to the English admin's snobbish inflexibility.

Anyway.  Because I was involved in Shakespeare, I got to be friends with Andres.

Andres told me about this place called BISC -- the Bristol International Student Center.  He was going to Stonehenge through a BISC-arranged trip.  I thought this was awesome.  I wanted to go.

But I procrastinated signing up.  When I eventually did, I had to scramble to get my money in on time or else risk losing my spot.  Because I felt guilty for procrastinating, I got to BISC really early -- before any of the other international students swarmed in.  Because I got to BISC so early, I got a tour from Hannah.  She introduced me to this program called Local Link.   It connects study abroad students with local British families.

This is getting complicated.

But there's more.

I'm only here for a semester, and I was very low on the Local Link priority list.  Luckily, a Greek guy ahead of me partied too much and had to go home.  I got bumped up just enough to be invited by the Braggs.

But the Braggs were very far away from where I lived.

Luckily, I'm also friends with Troy Long.  In addition to being my friend, Troy is also a cyclist.  In addition to being my friend who's a cyclist, Troy is also one of the most helpful people I've ever met.  In addition to being my friend who's a cyclist who's one of the most helpful people I've ever met, Troy and I talk a lot over gmail.  In addition to being my friend who's a cyclist who's one of the most helpful people I've ever met who talks with me over gmail, Troy offered to let me borrow his bike.  In addition to --

So you get the idea.  (I've never really liked the 12 Days of Christmas).

I used Troy's bike to get to the Bragg's house.   I got very lost.  I was cycling through parts of Bristol I'd never seen and will never see again.  I stopped at a Spaghetti restaurant and a crowded pub to ask for directions.

Because Troy's bike was so fast, I made it to the Braggs only ten minutes late.

I talked Pokemon and High School Musical with their kids.  I listened to Mr. Bragg in his music recording studio.  They showed me pictures from Kenya, which was very apt because I'm looking to deploy laptops in Kenya this summer.  It was such a genuine experience that rested on the smallest little tweaks of events.

Often, the best way to appreciate a wonderful experience is to trace back just how many things had to chain together to make it possible.  To realize how the smallest and most insignificant things govern our lives.  This phenomenon is known as the Butterfly Effect.

We never really know where these tiny adventures will take us.  But they do prove one thing.  Those who are open to new people, those who give and are given to in return, those who actively seek opportunities, those who ask questions and are hungry for knowledge, those who (as Troy's dad deems) are "risk-ready" even though that means sometimes being nervous, will most definitely be the people who -- somehow, someway -- end up with the coolest experiences.

The butterflies in their stomachs are the butterflies they end up having for dinner.

And let me tell ya, them butterflies be downright delicious. 

Infinitley variable, delightfully unexpected, they're the purest ingredients of life. 

Flash Fiction: Ghosts Don't Cry

Ghosts Don't Cry

            Ghosts don't cry.

            That's about the only rule there is in my profession, where treating the disturbing is a 9 to 5.

As I dig for a buried corpse in this junk yard, the rule flashes into my head because of the girl next to me, Allie.  She's shivering in my suit jacket.  Her eyes are as dry as the morning she first came to my office dragging this shovel behind her.

The shovel grates against my fleshy hands.

Somewhere between the moon and this wasteland, barking dogs splinter the dead silence of the night.  "Hurry," Allie whispers.  "Hurry."

And then the rain begins.

 

Twelve hours earlier, Allie Mason wandered into my office.  I looked over her file: 14-years-old, parents happily married, never touched a cigarette, A's in everything but Math. 

And yet I shivered as she dropped the shovel on my desk.  Her eyes were dry.  In this line of business, no one has dry eyes.  Everybody cries.

"So, Allie, why are you here?" I said.

"I'm being haunted," she said.

I sighed.  "Allie, the dead move on when they choose to." 

She ran her finger along the half of a silver heart chained around her neck.  "Can you dig?" she said.

 

            The rain steadies as I dig.  It drums on the towers of old cars looming in the dark.

            "Dig faster," Allie says. 

The shovel strikes something metallic.     

"She's under there," Allie says, eyes darting back and forth.  "Hurry."

When the dogs start barking again, they're closer.  Much closer.

 

 

I passed a Coke to Allie.  She didn't touch it.

"How did Laura die?" I asked.  Allie had identified the ghost haunting her as Laura.  I had not gotten out of her who exactly Laura was.

"Why is how she died important?" Allie said.

"Because," I said, "sometimes the way we die explains why can't move on."

Allie fiddled impatiently with the silver locket.  "Laura's crying for me to rescue her, Dr. Lang," she said.  "And you keep wasting time with questions."

"Allie," I said, "whoever Laura is, it's too late for rescuing."

 

But apparently, it isn't.

The rain spills down the mounds, soaking me to the skin.

I throw back shovelful after shovelful of muddy gravel.  It's harder now.  The gravel sticks to the blade.  The gullets of water wash more mud into the hole.

Eventually, I use the shovel to pry the hood from the mud.  A cloying scent of excretion and sweat waft out.

As I reach beneath the hood, I grab something cool and fleshy.  I heave, and out comes a young girl.  Her pulse is there.  Barely. 

            "Allie I've found her," I yell over the storm.  "I've found Laura."

            And then I see there's something else beneath the hood.  Another girl.  This one slashed and clawed beyond recognition.  Something glimmers around her neck.

            My heart stops.

            It couldn't be.

            "Allie, is this –"

But Allie is gone.

            Vanished.

            As I scan the junkyard for her, four growling shadows emerge from behind the pillars of cars.

 

"Dogs," Allie said.

"Dogs killed Laura?" I replied.

"They didn't kill her.  They tore her apart," Allie said.  "It was fast.  She was the lucky one."

"What was your relationship with Laura?" I said.

Allie examined her locket – that half of a silver heart.

"She was my twin sister," Allie said.

Here I expected her to break down.  To unleash the torrent of tears she must have been storing up.  But she merely dropped the locket, looked up, and said: "You never answered my question: can you dig?"

 

Can I dig.  The words from that morning ring in my ears as the dogs circle me, teeth bared, eyes glowing in the lightning.

"Allie?" I say again.  The girl in my arms coughs.  The dogs creep closer, thunder rumbling from their throats.  I scan the ground for the shovel.  It's too slippery, I know, but there's nothing else.

Then a bright light blasts from the distance.  I have no time to shield my eyes as a car tears across the junkyard.  It skids to a stop, ejecting ribbons of mud into the air.  The dogs scream and flee.

The door swings open and I toss the girl inside.  "There's one other!" I yell to the driver.  But there is no driver.  A locket hangs from the rearview mirror, the half of a silver heart now full.

            I grab the wheel and floor the pedal.  As I glance in the rearview mirror, for a moment, I glimpse Allie in the back, holding her sister's head in her lap. 

The tears are pouring down her smiling face.     

But then again, ghosts don't cry.

 

The Boy Who Cried Fire

Thirty-six hours later, my room still smells like a campsite.  

Luckily, the stench (which isn't totally bad -- I detect a toasted marshmallow or two) is the only consequence of a fire that ravaged a second-floor kitchen Tuesday afternoon.  

Apparently, someone on the second floor left a grease-filled pan on the stove burner at full-blast. 

I'm on the sixth-floor.  I wasn't in my room when it happened.  Good thing, because if I was, I probably wouldn't have believed the alarm. Among its other shortcomings, Unite House has a spotty and inconsistent fire alarm system.  It goes off biweekly, usually at 4 a.m.  I don't think these are drills.  I imagine these 4 a.m. alarms are triggered by drunk people who manage to toss a frozen pizza in the oven before they pass out.

Whatever the cause, I've become desensitized to the alarms.  The regularity with which they go off have established the boy who cried wolf syndrome many times over.  They were a tired stunt.

Not anymore.

London Weekend Part Deux

The only reason I can understand why it's the strange memories from London Weekend that stand out is because a guy running ahead of my dad in the 1984 Chicago Marathon decided to take a piss.

That was one of the two things my dad remembered from his Marathon: the urine dribbling down the guy's leg as they pushed towards the finish.  Of those two things, that's the only one I remember.  Although I do know he told me, before I ran the Chicago Marathon this past year, that he didn't remember most of the race.  Not even finishing.  

Back to London.  The strange workings of memory mean that it's not so much being on Tower Bridge, finding Darwin's grave in Westminster Abbey, seeing the Ancient Egypt exhibit at the British Museum, or wandering through the exhibits at Tower of London that I'll remember.  Don't get me wrong -- they were great.  And yet these adventures are expected.  They're the norm.  They're the 26 miles of the race that you're expected to run.  

 

It's the other .2 that stick. 

Episode 1:

"Red or white?" the MC asked.  His bloated red face was slicked with sweat from screaming out pub quiz questions for the past hour.  

I had no idea what he meant.  I had just captained our pub-quiz team to a championship -- with little thanks to me, really.  In a pub packed with over 50 U of I students and alums living in London, my team was lucky to have both Ryan, our spiky-haired London Weekend guide who actually read the stories beneath headlines, and Chris, the English husband of a U of I alum who took care of anything about England. 

"Red," I said.

The MC reached behind the bar and handed me a bottle of red wine as we left the pub to head to a Brazilian diner on the River Thames.  In the hierarchy of concerns and values of your vacation-minded U of I student, the bottle was a potion of instant popularity.

I'll have a feeling I'll be remembering that moment for a long time.  I have no idea why.  Maybe it was the spontaneity of the question.  Of having absolutely, positively no clue what he meant.  Or maybe it was the winning.  We always remember winning, don't we? 

Episode 2:

And then I'll remember the big orange "Drugs" sign.

After the Brazilian diner, Christian, a 2006 U of I alum, led us to a club called Rodeo.  The decor tried really hard to be American Old West, from the Harley to the Route 66 signs. 

But what caught my eye was the big orange neon "Drugs."  No catchy phrase, no embellishment, just "Drugs."  I found this hilarious, in a delusional sort of way.  I don't think there were any drugs there.  They wanded and padded down everyone who entered.  But then again, I'm not sure how else to excuse the flailing-limb-lolling-tongue dance style popular with most of the London crowd.  

Episode 3:

And then, of course, there was the waterfall.

On the last night, we played Circle of Death.  My roommate had annexed our room as the party room.  I decided to skip going to another club, wanting only to go to sleep to fight off a wicked sore throat.  It seemed that over the course of three days, we swapped bugs from our respective English universities so that, even if I was immune to Bristol bugs, the suckers from everywhere else got me sick.

But as more and more students piled into the room, sleep was becoming a less and less likely option. 

So I uncorked a bottle of throat-soothing 7-Up and played along.  It was good rowdy fun until someone crossed the line and threw beer out the window.

Now, Jerome, my study abroad advisor, said the average Londoner is caught on camera over 300 times per day.  Whether or not this is accurate, it certainly is true that there are cameras everywhere.

And one of them nabbed our beer hurler.

Ten minutes later, a fat security guard knocked on the door, breaking up the party and asking "Who dunnit?"  He made the usual threats -- accusations that the perpetrator could be charged with assault, or that we could all be kicked off the floor.  When some of the students denied the beer toss even happened, he victoriously pointed to the wet splatters on the window, evidently pleased with his detective work. 

I wasn't nervous, just angry.   The security guard wanted blood.  American blood made it all the sweeter.   But no one was going to be the rat, and the kid who threw the water was too much of a coward to turn himself in.  So a girl took the bullet for everyone, saying she did it while the guy who did slunk out of the noose.  I was furious at the injustice, but at the same time I was glad finally to get to bed.  Sure enough, the whole thing had blown over by morning.

In the end, what makes for a story are the unexpected snippets that grow like weeds or wildflowers in the cracks of an agenda.  No trip is worth it without these curveballs.  Luckily, they're not hard to come by. 

Indeed, a flexible mindset, a spirit of adventure, and a willingness to depart from the agendas of our expectations provide infinite opportunities for these curveballs.  (And believe me, some of them are very curvy indeed.)   The trick is not to fear the zigs and zags, but to realize that -- weeks, months, years later -- they'll be the tokens we use to assess our own enthusiasm for the experience.  They're the grains of sand that make the pearls. 

They're the reasons we should never be bored with the trials of travel.

Flash Fiction: Ugly

       A piece of flash that I read at this past Monday's Creative Writing group meeting.  The other writers were impressed.  "How did you write so convincingly about an ugly person considering how darn good lookin' you are?" they asked.  

      I guess some mysteries aren't meant to be solved ;) 

Ugly

 

My name is Eddy.  I am ugly and in trouble.

            The ugly part first.

I am downright butt-ugly.

            How ugly, you ask?  Mix phlegm with pus, then crunch up cockroaches and sprinkle them on top.  Pour the mixture in a glass.  Chug it.  My normal face is uglier than the gagging contortion of yours.

Now, for most ugly people, ugliness is beatable.  You make up for it with other redeeming qualities.  But as far as I can tell, I don't have the other redeeming qualities other ugly people have.  I'm not a good conversationalist.  I'm not an athlete.  I'm not rich, have never been rich, and will never be rich. 

I guess I'm pretty good at driving a forklift. 

But overall, I'm bad at being ugly.

Still, I am married.  And not just to any woman, but to every beautiful woman in the universe.

Stop snickering.  This isn't a joke.  I'm here to tell you and all you other fine-looking listeners how I did it. 

And that's the trouble part.

 

My wife is called Princess H0t22.  That's her screen name.  A screen name, for all you traditional lovers out there, is an online alias. 

She's hot.  Like I can't believe I haven't fried the motherboard kind of hot.  No, the pictures she posts might not really be her.  Every day her avatar displays a different skimpy swimsuit model.  But I love her no matter what.  Unconditional love: isn't that what marriage is about?  I've never shown my wife my real face, and I'm sure she wouldn't do me the disservice of showing me hers.  I prefer her being every beautiful woman ever. 

My screen name is Dr.Dude.  Unlike Eddy, Dr.Dude is not ugly.  Dr.Dude is irresistible.  In fact, Dr.Dude is so irresistible that meeting, marrying, and mating online is not good enough for Princess H0t22.

Because yesterday, she sent me this message: Dear hubby, I want to see you face to face or this marriage is over.

 

Take a deep breath before I say this.

Got it?

Alright, here goes: my wife and I have never met.  Not to say I don't like her.  I love her.  I loved her enough to marry her.  Typing "I do" in the chatroom was the happiest moment of my life.  I'd boogied so much in the virtual reception room that my mouse broke.  My fingers were sore for days.

I love her so much that I don't want to destroy our six months of bliss by meeting her.

But here I am, outside her Chicago apartment, hiding behind a bouquet of roses.  A mother pushes a stroller past me.  I try to smile at the baby but it sees me and starts wailing.  

Maybe I am good at being ugly.

I walk up to the door of the one I love but have never touched, the one I've married but have never met.

            My finger hovers over the bell.  I squeeze my eyes.  I push it.

            The door opens.

"Princess H0t22?" I say.

"Dr.Dude," she growls.  "You brought flowers."

I peek through the rose petals.

No, she's not the skimpy bikini models.  Not even close.  In fact, she's so ugly she's beautiful.

Even if she is not a she.

London Weekend 2009 Part 1

London.

Thanks to Hollywood and literature more than anything else, the city had always enchanted me. 

It was where Peter Pan soared over Big Ben; where Marlowe bobbed on the River Thames and framed his search for Kurtz; where Shakespeare's plays were first performed right beside bear-baiting pits and brothels; where 007 called home.

They say if you're bored in London, you're bored with life. 

But as I walked through London with 44 other University of Illinois students from across England, it wasn't London I was bored with -- I was bored with being in a new place surrounded by old ideas.

Cocooned in American accents, blitzed by the familiar names of locations from Champaign, I realized I'd changed.  The month and a half in Bristol had distanced me from U of I by more than time and place.  I was a different person, too.  Just different enough to be uneasy around all the orange and blue.  Just different enough to be bored, even annoyed, with our UIUC way of communicating.

From the first night's dinner chat, it wasn't hard to see that many of the UIUC students were treating study abroad as a party abroad.  They chatted clubs and nightlife, one-upping stories with crazier stories.  Nothing is more University of Illinois than crazy nightlife stories.  It's basically a social currency.  And students will go to mad-crazy-wild-stupid-dangerous ends to get as much of this currency as they can.

I'd left my stash of this currency on the plane.

Don't get me wrong: I've had the time of my life at Illinois.   I love a good time.  I enjoy listening and sometimes partaking in the fantastical excessiveness that tops the social agenda of your typical UIUC student.   Plus, who better to go to a London club with than U of I students?  

Still, I felt they were blocking me from London.  Odd, I know, considering they were the reason I was taking advantage of this free London Weekend in the first place.  But I was in a unique situation.  I was the the only U of I spring study abroad student at Bristol.  By comparison, there were six of 'em at Leeds.   Which means most of them had never had the challenge of sitting on a plane to a place where you don't know a single person.  I did.  I'd had to build a new social life. And the one I built in Bristol was different from the one I'd left at U of I.  

This bored annoyance diminished over the course of the weekend.  There wasn't enough space in my head for minor discontent and all the new experiences in London.  London's way too good for that.  And the 44 study abroad students were way too much fun.

For one, we had four things bringing us together: 

1. Free money (or at least money that's disguised as being free).

2. Free nights in a hotel.

3. Free food.

4. Beer -- free or enough of it not to care.

Put 44 U of I kids from across England in a London hotel with all four of these criteria satisfied. And what does that mean?  

That's the epic of London Weekend 2009 Part 2.

Fish 'n Chips 'n Puke 'n Stonehenge

The brief blog haitus wasn't due to a lack of writing, but an excess of it.

A flurry of scholarship deadlines, essays, and presentations came tsunami-style, so I was busy buttressing the fort with sandbags of sentences, poems, papers and preparations.

The storm is weathered.  For now.

Although it feels so good to get it done with that I never want to think of it again lest I puke all over my keyboard, I'd like to revisit the semi-truck pulling contest that was last week's Medieval Drama paper.   It was 2,000 words.  Not even half a piece of cake, I thought.   Still, I was worried.  The thing about essays here is that a lot more chips are on the table.  The stakes are amplified.  Medieval Drama is 30 modules, which translates to about 8 credit hours at Illinois.  Which is the equivalent of a little more than 2 courses.  Which means the single grade for this class makes a big splash. 

Even better/worse, despite being so heavily weighted, you only hand in two papers, and this was the first.  There's no room for a warm-up.   So as I compiled research and crafted arguments for a measley 2,000 word paper that, by US standards, I would crank out in 10 hours or so,  I did all I could to get a favorable roll of the dice.  

Despite the informality of many of the classes, the paper turn-in process is paradoxically structured.  There are three different cover sheets you have to fill out in BLOCK CAPITALS which took a good half-hour considering the course name, "Tradition and Innovation in Pre-Shakespearean Drama," is an essay in and of itself for the pixelated 21st century college student.

Add onto that the time spent dealing with widespread technical incompetence.  When I went to print, printers were down across campus, of course, and no one was in any rush to fix them.  Luckily, I'd given myself three hours to get everything turned in -- enough time to locate a working printer and get the darn thing stamped, signed, put in an airtight vaporlock chamber at the turn-in station, cross-referenced with a sample of my blood, then whisked away in an armored van.

Or so I saw.  I was a bit sleep-deprived.

Speaking of seeing things: Stonehenge.  An ancient wonder of the world.  I went on a trip through the Bristol International Student Center.  The BISC team runs a very good show.  They have tea and cakes for #1 on Monday, all-you-can-eat soup for #2 on Wednesdays and Fridays, and always good company.  That's free.

Stonehenge was fun in that it was fun to make fun of, but otherwise it is a tired-looking monument -- if that's the word -- that, in seeing, I regrettably demystified from the glossy pages of National Geographic.  For part of the walking tour, you're much closer to the road where cars fly by than the structure.  There's nothing that can pull you out of a historical illusion like a stream of cars.  

I walked around Stonehenge twice before the bus moved on to Salisbury Cathedral, the tallest church in England.  It was impressive and imposing, and I got to see one of the four original Magna Cartas.  I tried fish 'n chips for lunch.  Again, like Stonehenge, an English treat better left in the romantic cultural imagination.  Still, many agreed that both are somethings you have to partake in, and I'll subscribe to that.  If only to be puzzled once again why mediocre things are lauded and great things (the English pint, for instance, or pub food) are demeaned.

The highlight of the daytrip was sitting next to a German law student on the way home and discussing how aspiring lawyers sell their souls for big law firm money.  A common enemy and our enlightened non-materialistic selves established, we got along well.