From the Archives — King-Size Snickers Lost

Introduction

This little tale, from my archives, needs little introduction. I wrote it while a student at UC Santa Barbara. I was living in Isla Vista, the student community of UCSB. I did a lot of training rides on US 101. I ate a lot of junk food while riding. I was broke.

King-Size Snickers Bites the Dust - November 12, 1988

Today I rode up to Buellton, a nothing town 35 miles away, which has (as its only claim to fame) a restaurant called Andersen’s which is famous for pea soup. Billboards span the entire coast from north to south advertising Andersen’s. Other than that, Buellton has nothing special to offer, except that it makes a good destination for a long solo ride.

Not feeling like a piping bowl of pea soup upon arrival (it was 85 degrees and sunny), I went to a mini‑mart, the same one I always go to. I got my usual Buellton meal—a pre‑packaged beef and grease burrito, an apple, a super‑duper‑size Coke, and a King‑Size Snickers Bar—for the trip home. I could have eaten something more healthy, I suppose, but just as you don’t buy a hamburger at a Mexican restaurant, you don’t buy good food in Buellton. There is no better place to get junk food; I consider it part of the culture of the town. Besides, the dreaded bonk (whereby a rider completely runs out of energy and can hardly make it home) serves as incentive to give myself something with some calories.

Ninety minutes later, I could’ve been one of those guys in the Snickers commercial: “Well, after a couple of hours of turnin’ ‘round those pedals, boy, you know you’ve been workin’! I take a break, kick back, think about playin’ ball tonight, and then go for a Snickers. It fills me up. I’m no longer hungry. It gets the job done. I can go back to work. Look at all those nuts. You ever see so many nuts?” Then the music would pipe in, “Snickers really saaaa‑tisfies you!”

Of course, in my life, it’s never that easy. You can’t just whip that baby out and start eating; to consume a Snickers bar on the road takes careful planning. Since it’s been in my jersey pocket long enough to melt, the empty wrapper has to go in a baggie so it won’t smear my jersey pocket with melted chocolate. But the baggie I brought along wasn’t empty, yet. It was full of Wheaties.

Why Wheaties? That’s a fair question. Wheaties is not a particularly good fuel for cycling because it’s not sugary enough. It’s just that I had to use them up. I’d bought them for the box, which featured Doug Smith, the first cyclist ever on a Wheaties box. On the back of the box, it explains that the whole Wheaties/Schwinn team is counting on Wheaties Champion Nutrition to help power them to victory. [More than ten years later Lance Armstrong was featured on a Wheaties box, and magazines said he was the first, but of course they were wrong. It's also worth noting that Wikipedia is wrong about this, too. I could point this out to them but I’d rather lord my superior knowledge over them.]

I feel a particular connection to Doug Smith because I beat him in a race once. It was July 13, 1986, and the event was the Maglia Rosa Bicycle Classic in Denver. I was only a junior, and he was a pro, but we raced together in the Slow Race at the end of the day. In this event, the last rider across the line wins. Doug Smith and I were among of the last people left standing, and he came over and tried to take me out. The fool! I swung the back end of my mighty Team Miyata around and knocked his tires out from under him. I do not recall what breakfast cereal I’d eaten that morning.

So anyway, before eating the Snickers I had to finish off the bag of Wheaties. They were good. Then, I carefully unwrapped the bar of brown gold. Meltage was at a minimum, and through intense concentration and effort I was able to remove the wrapper in one piece. Then I successfully put the wrapper in the baggie, which I stuffed in my jersey pocket. I had to keep my eye on the road, of course, so as not to run over an old car tire or something. Meanwhile, I had the Snickers lightly clenched in my teeth, acutely aware that if I bit too hard I could sever it and I’d lose most of it to the road.

Finally, I had it made: the Snickers was in my hand, I was savoring the first bite, and all the trash was taken care of. Nothing to do now but enjoy the complete bliss of a King Size Snickers Bar, letting that satisfaction drain through my body. I wished I could think about playin’ ball tonight.

I chewed the first bite slowly, while gazing fondly down at the rich milk chocolate and peanuts in peanut butter nougat. Then, tragedy: I hit a pothole, the bike bounced, and the King Size Snickers was knocked right out of my hand. Since I was fighting to stabilize the bike, I was powerless to save the bar as it plummeted towards mother terra, hitting my leg on its way down, before slapping the asphalt like a dead fish, flattening its virgin end grotesquely. For a split second, I was so startled and alarmed by the sudden tragedy that I just froze. Then, the denial stage set in: no, that didn’t really happen, I didn’t really just watch my entire King Size Snickers bar bite the dust. No. This only happens to other people. Then, the anger stage. “Damn the State of California! I’ll sue those bastards for letting their highway get this rough! A whole bar!” Then, the final, inevitable stage, remorse. “Nooo! Noooooooo!” I began weeping openly at my loss. “Sni‑sni‑sni‑snickers, noooo! Waaaaaah! K‑k‑k‑king size! Aaaaaugh!” I beat the handlebar with my fist. “Oh, god, how could this happen?”

You’re wondering how I could be so distraught over something which isn’t good for me anyway. But look at it this way: the Snickers bar is actually a weight loss tool. Without it, I would certainly bonk, which would mean riding the final fifteen miles in agony, thinking only of food. I’ve even hallucinated, thinking I’ve seen food, after the dreaded bonk. Then I would get home and lay waste to the refrigerator, and then pass out and be worthless for the rest of the day. No, the Snickers bar is an integral part of my training. Besides, they’re so tasty!

I thought of going back. It was a big bar; maybe some of it was still good. But deep down, I knew I was just fooling myself. A passing truck served as a painful reminder that I was on the southbound leg of Highway 101, a freeway, and there was no going back. Besides, the candy bar was dead. The word echoed in my brain. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. I had seen it spill its peanuts‑in‑peanut‑butter‑nougat guts all over the asphalt.

I remorsefully wiped up a piece of peanut that it had left on my leg in a last ditch attempt to cling to me. Suddenly, I didn’t want to go on. I didn’t care if I ever reached Isla Vista. I didn’t even want to find a 7‑Eleven. No, a new Snickers would never be the same. But I had to go on, to forget this tragedy. It wouldn’t be easy. It never is. I resorted to drowning my sorrows in flat Coke.

dana albert blog

Fiction - Before the Fall

Introduction

The assignment this week for the fiction writing class I’m taking was to start telling my life story in summary. (“Summary” here means the part of the story that gives the reader background about the characters, situation, etc. versus immersing the reader in a pivotal scene.) My classmates and I were told to do summary for awhile and then stop and move into a scene.

We were told this exercise could be autobiographical. Because I’m trying to learn to write fiction, I didn’t stick to the truth, nor to the facts, with this exercise. You should consider it purely fictional. (The resemblance of characters to actual people isn’t pure coincidence, I must confess.)

Before the Fall

I was late to my own birth, hitting the scene two weeks after my due date. The backdrop of my childhood was Boulder, Colorado. The seventies.

To outward appearances my family was a very close, happy one. Outward appearances were my dad’s specialty. For so many years my three brothers and I had no idea how miserable our parents’ marriage was. For Christmas one year my dad bought my mom this really posh stuffed bear called a Gund, which got him a lot of good press from his relatives. We all assumed that my mom loved the Gund, but learned later that she actually hated it for making her self-absorbed husband look caring and sensitive. If my brothers and I had only known, we could have offered to coat that bear in model airplane cement and torch it for her.

Mom was begrudgingly complicit in this illusion of a happy marriage. For example, she would let Dad kiss her hello when he got home from work. It was, I later realized, a grotesque parody of a kiss: a reluctant reaching outward of the two pairs of lips, as tentative as a young kid’s hand timidly reaching out to poke a sea urchin in a tide pool. A micro-kiss, with an absolute minimum of actual lip contact, lasting just long enough to make a little smacking sound. (See? Your parents are in love. They still kiss.)

My brothers and I fought a lot, but beneath it we respected one another. We kind of had to because we were all social outcasts. None of us got along with our classmates. Occasionally I’d encounter an older kid who knew one of my brothers and would say, “Ewww, you’re an Anderson?!” It was a stigma, but also a strange honor in some way—sort of an us-vs.-them deal.

The oldest brothers, Seth and Ryan, twins, were almost four years older than I, with Mick right in the middle. Mick and I hung out quite a bit but the others usually ignored us. The main thing that bonded the four us together was the shirking of household chores. I remember one day in particular when we killed a whole afternoon at this. Ryan was supposed to mow the lawn while the rest of us dug weeds. The lawn was half weeds and half dead. Our neighbors, the Gales, had this lush, perfect, Technicolor green lawn and the boundary between our properties was sharply delineated, like their grass was a different species, in its robust prime, while ours was disheveled and elderly and sick.

Ryan mowed one strip across the lawn, turned the lawnmower around, started back, and then ran over the cord, stopping the machine dead. (We must have been the only family in America with an electric lawnmower.) It would be weeks before Dad got around to replacing the extension cord, so Ryan was off the hook. He wheeled the dead mower back to the garage, strolled back out, and flopped on the lawn. I picked halfheartedly at a weed. We were paid three cents a weed to pull them, but the roots had to be intact. On a hot day like this, it just wasn’t worth it. I glanced over at Seth. He was lying on his back, pretending to drive a car. I watched his left foot expertly working the clutch as he went through the gears. He steered with his left hand and by the looks of it he was on a twisty mountain road. It would be two years before he was old enough to drive, but he appeared ready.

Mick was on his feet, looking across the lawn to the neighbor’s car. Mr. Gale’s son Craig was seventeen and had the coolest car—a late sixties Mustang Mach 1. It was not in good shape—if you looked closely you saw layers of flaking paint, dimpled like an orange peel, from amateur paint jobs, grey beneath orange beneath blue, and inside the upholstery was peeling like a banana—but the car had good bones. We all dreamed of getting a ride in it one day, but it wasn’t running. It just sat.

We all gave Mick our complete attention because we knew what he was thinking. He suddenly sprinted toward the car and just before he reached it he screamed, “Look out, George!” and made a terribly realistic sound effect of screeching brakes. Then next second the car had knocked him off his feet and he sprawled over the hood, bouncing twice before tumbling to the ground. Of course the car hadn’t really moved, but the illusion was uncanny: our eyes told us this kid had just been hit by a car. We ran around to the other side of the car to look at Mick sprawled on the asphalt. He was in bad shape: convulsions racked his broken body.

“Yeah, that was a good one, but I think you need to tone down the convulsions—they’re a little overdone,” Seth said. Mick got to his feet. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “But how was the rest of it?” He’d been practicing his stunt all summer and was still perfecting it. We made our way back to the lawn. I took my weed digger and winged it at the grass, hoping to impale the ground so the handle would stick up. I was Pepe, Steinbeck’s young hero, throwing a switchblade at a post for practice. I picked the digger back up and was about to try again when Mick took another run at the Mustang. This time, as he landed on the hood, the car horn came on, and stayed on. FRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA…. Gave us the willies.

After a few brutal minutes of vainly hoping the horn would shut off, we went and knocked on the Gales’ door. Mr. Gale answered. He was wearing a white tank top and looked like he’d just woken up. He tried to be grumpy about the car horn but couldn’t help laughing. We all must have looked stricken. He went over to the car, opened the driver’s side door, popped the hood, then came around to the front and disconnected the battery. The horn stopped. Mr. Gale asked what made it turn on and Seth and Ryan immediately ratted Mick out. That was the end of his being hit by the Mustang.

That was one of a great many useless, idle, indolent days we brothers spent that summer. The best part was that we had no idea that our basically happy family was about to be ruined. Had we known, we’d have tried to make the best of our time together, which just would have felt strained. We really didn’t know what we were about to lose until we lost it.

The end began in my mom’s car, a Volkswagen Dasher, coming back from swim practice. Ryan was riding shotgun—seating was by birth order and he was twenty minutes older than Seth—and I was in the back middle seat because I was smallest. Mom said, trying to sound casual, “What would you boys think if I told you I was thinking of divorcing your father?” A chorus: “No, Mom, don’t do it!” But it wasn’t a real inquiry—her mind was already made up.

A week before Labor Day my mom bought a condo and moved into it. Condos back then seemed a sudden, novel phenomenon and vaguely subversive, only in part because the first time I came across the term, it was on a giant “CONDOMINIUMS FOR SALE” banner that college kids had folded over itself so it read “CONDOMS FOR SALE.” Our parents, who both worked full time and had historically not paid a huge amount of attention to us kids, each began a campaign to win us over and turn us against the other parent. The ultimate prize? Custody.

So it was that on one of the last evenings of summer, Dad took Seth and Ryan to the new James Bond movie while Mom took Mick and me to Baskin-Robbins. Today’s jaded kids might not think such outings would be a big deal, but to us it was an amazing show of largesse. It was a hot day and Baskin-Robbins was completely mobbed. The line snaked out the door and across the strip mall all the way to La Paz Fine Mexican Dining. Customers sprawled across the lawn out front. When my mom realized how long we’d be waiting, she went off to go shopping. “Just meet me out front here,” she said.

Everybody gets ice cream. Out front were little kids wearing t-shirts with big iron-ons (“Star Wars,” etc.) and there were older guys who were shirtless and bronzed. Many of them had on those super-short running shorts with the piping down the side. Boys had taken off their shoes and tube socks, girls had kicked off their sandals. A teenage guy said to his girl, “God … my arms are so damn tan.” Inside, I tried to take a number from the little pink dispenser and pulled out two feet of spooled paper tickets. Mick helped me stuff it all back in there.

We didn’t mind the wait because soon enough, after the ice cream outing, after a few more days of purgatory, a few more bribes, we’d be expected to tell our parents which one we’d decided to live with. We hadn’t heard of joint custody and our parents evidently never considered it. Instead they went for the King Solomon approach, splitting the family right down the middle, with the kids working out who would go where. It was a no-win scenario and we sought to forestall it as long as possible.

Baskin-Robbins had never before seemed like such a grim place. Suddenly I was down on everything. Their “Thirty-One-Derful Flavors!” slogan struck me as really dippy. The flavor name “Here Comes the Fudge” was annoying because though I somehow knew it was a play on “Here Comes the Judge,” this cultural reference was just another that had passed me by. That French Vanilla “costs a bit more, but it’s worth it!” seemed a cynical marketing gimmick. The staff seemed bored, and then irritated at how many taste spoons I asked for. Was it my fault nothing tasted good enough?

A radio was playing and the guy next to me at the counter, a young adult, was lip-synching to the music: “I guess it’s just the woman in you that brings out the man in me.” Like that’s a good thing. As the guy reached for his ice cream cone, I noticed his bracelet. It was engraved: “DAMN I’M GOOD.” Is that how it works? You just declare how great you are? Is that why my family was collapsing—because we got tired of holding each other back with our humble, cozy complacence? Was dead-weight Dad the only obstacle to Mom becoming damn good, or getting a man who was?

Mick and I left with our cones and then they were gone in minutes and we had nothing to do but stand among the throngs outside and wait for Mom. Once she got going on errands there was no stopping her. When she finally arrived, we heard her car before we even saw it. Its engine made a distinctive rattling sound because it was a diesel. (Of course we had the only diesel station wagon in America.) Mom was driving through the parking lot at like one mile per hour because there were so many people everywhere.

And all at once, Mick saw his opening. It must have been a thrilling moment of insight, like when Watson and Crick first deduced the double helix. It was a moment of mental brilliance, and yet Mick acted on pure instinct. He raced through the crowd, bounded down off the curb, and let out a perfect brakescreech. Then—BAM!—he was bouncing over the hood of Mom’s car, which made a great noise as it caved in and then sprang back into shape. He’d left out the “Lookout, George!”—he’d finally realized, just in time for his big moment, that it was the least realistic part of the stunt. He also skipped the convulsions—when I raced around the front of the car to look at him, he was deathly still, lying on the road in a fetal position. As many times as I’d seen this stunt, I couldn’t be completely sure he hadn’t been hit. If the action had stopped here, half a dozen witnesses would have said, “I saw the whole thing! That crazy bitch must’ve been going thirty miles an hour!”

But it didn’t stop there. As people crowded around the accident scene trying to figure out what to do, Mom suddenly opened her door and jumped out. She was furious. “Get up!” she screamed. “Get up off the ground, you brat!” More amazing still, Mick rose from the dead, jumped to his feet, and the two of us got in the car. As Mom drove, cursing, from the scene, Mick and I were laughing so hard it didn’t even make any noise. We couldn’t get enough air and tears were streaming down our cheeks. It was the pinnacle of the summer and of our childhood. Our last hurrah.

From there, things unraveled predictably enough. Mick and I moved into the condo until he and Mom couldn’t stand each other anymore, and then he drifted away and began living in a total dive with a bunch of deadbeat teens, filling his days with weed and the like. I got hooked on something far worse: TV. It started out socially, watching David Letterman with friends, but it got worse over the years to the point that I ended up taping shows like “Simon and Simon” and “Remington Steele” and watching them during the day, when other kids my age were in class. I missed my brothers terribly.

Over the decades, my brothers and I eventually made good. After passing the GED, Mick took fifteen years putting himself through college, took a degree in electrical engineering, and although he’s not rich yet, he was just granted the patent for mRFIDs, microscopic radio chips that fit not just in your wallet but on your earrings or car keys. (So long as your personal effects are within a quarter mile of your smartphone, you’ll never lose them again.) Ryan has created the ingeniously compact encryption algorithm that can run on a chip that small. Seth now lives in the Netherlands where he’s a soap opera star. I’ve got a lucrative real estate job that I could do in my sleep, and usually do, as I bide by time: when Mick is a billionaire, I’ll write his authorized biography, or maybe his unauthorized biography. Maybe both. Whatever else we Andersons accomplish and enjoy, though, I doubt I’ll ever recapture that pure joy of carelessly pissing away a perfect summer day on a half-dead lawn in Boulder.

dana albert blog

Fiction - Doctor's Daughter

Introduction

I’m taking an evening class in fiction writing over at UC Berkeley, my alma mater. Our first session was last Wednesday, and the teacher had an ingenious idea. She broke the class into groups of three and had us each tell a personal anecdote to the other two students. Then she gave us ten minutes to write down our anecdote. As our homework assignment, she told us to take half an hour to rewrite our anecdote, but incorporating one of the two anecdotes we’d heard from a classmate.

At first this struck me as impossible—after all, my anecdote had nothing to do with the other ones. But as I thought about it, everything fit together very well, and it solved my biggest problem in writing fiction: coming up with an idea. Sure, half of this story started out as true, but the action now happens to someone else, and the story is merged with my doubtless faulty recollection of a secondhand tale which I then further fictionalized. I'm sure you'll agree that the result can only be considered fiction.

So here’s the story. (Yes, I went over my half-hour.)

Doctor’s Daughter

My name is Tara. I never liked my name—it always reminded me of “Taras Bulba,” like I came from an ancient family in the steppes of the Ukraine. (It could have been worse: my mom had considered naming me “Terra,” as in Earth. My whole life I’d have been thought of as a hippie!) I grew up in Etna, California, a tiny town way up north with zero traffic lights. Most of the folks in town were poor farmers or poor ranchers. My dad was the only doctor around and though he officially worked in the hospital about half an hour away, an awful lot of his work happened at the house, at night or on weekends. Many of the locals, who either couldn’t afford or didn’t trust hospitals, would save up their problems for when he got home. Often I ended up helping him out.

My mom pretty much stayed in bed, which is a long story I won’t go into. Suffice to say I never felt like my family was very normal. Not that the townsfolk were much to compare myself with. I had to remind myself that the families on TV probably weren’t typical either.

On a Friday evening in the fall, when I was about nine, I was bored, sitting by an open window waiting for my dad to get home from work. An unexpected rainstorm had blown in and I was watching the rain come down in sheets when I heard the hiss of a car’s tires on our street. I thought it was my dad but to my surprise it was a modern black sedan I’d never seen before. It turned onto our gravel driveway and pulled up to the house. A man in a nice grey suit climbed out, walked right up to our door through the pouring rain, and rang the bell. I ran down the hall to my mom’s room and called through the door: “There’s a man in a suit at the door!” My mom told me to call my dad and ask if he was expecting anybody. The doorbell rang again.

I phoned my dad. It must have been quiet at the hospital because they found him pretty fast. “Oh, shoot!” he said. “I totally forgot. That’s Ferdinand, the account manager at Fortis. I actually had an appointment with him tonight. Tell him to hang tight—I’ll rush right over.”

“Uh, dad, it’s pouring rain here. Should I let him in?”

“No, you shouldn’t. See if your mom will let him in.”

I rang off and with a sigh called to my mom again. Sure enough, she wouldn’t come out. I got to the front door just as the doorbell rang a third time. I peeked out through the mail slot. I could see the man’s nicely pressed charcoal grey woolen slacks, and his leather shoes with a nice design pierced all around the toe. “Um, are you Ferdinand?” I asked timidly.

The man knelt down and peered through the mail slot. “Yes. I have an appointment with Dr. Stevens. Are you his daughter?”

“Yes. I just called him. He forgot about the appointment but he’s on his way here. I can’t let you in because my mom is ... busy.” I thought of adding, “She’s cleaning her rifle and isn’t quite done reassembling it.” But other than my dad, I could never get a grown-up to take me seriously.

“Um, are you sure you can’t get your mom?” he said. “I kind of, uh, locked my keys in my car. I'm getting soaked out here.” I told my mom. She still wouldn’t come out. I reported back to Ferdinand. To my surprise, he agreed to wait it out.

I went to my room and stared blankly at a book. What business did this man have with my dad? Must be important if he was willing to wait. Was he a banker? Were we losing our home? A long while later I heard the crunch of tires on gravel as my dad arrived. I got to the door just as he opened it. He was staring at Ferdinand. “Oh, man, Ferdinand, look at your suit!” he said. “It’s all bubbly! It’s ruined!”

Sure enough, the fabric of the drenched suit was all fouled up. The wool was separating from the lining and had the texture of bubble wrap. Ferdinand looked stricken. Dad led him to the kitchen table, took his suit jacket, sat him down, and gave him a fresh dishtowel to dry his head and face.

Soon there were papers spread over the table, covered with lots of fine print and some charts. My dad never sent me away when he talked to other grownups; he was always hoping I’d learn something. The two men talked awhile, but nothing they said made any sense to me until my dad finally stood up and said, “You know Ferdinand, I wasn’t actually that interested in this meeting, to be honest. You were so enthusiastic I didn’t know how to say no. But the truth is, this fund has been underperforming for years and I was planning to sell it anyway. I’d actually like to close out my account.” And just like that, the meeting was over. My dad signed some papers, and then Ferdinand packed up his briefcase, wriggled back into his wretched bubbly suit jacket, and left.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

“Well, I somehow let this guy talk me into this meeting to go over my investment portfolio. When I showed up late, and then stupidly blurted out that his suit was ruined, I actually started to feel more bold. Like, ‘I’m going to Hell anyway for keeping this man waiting in the rain, so I might as well finish him off.’ Poor guy. His business must be really hurting to come all the way out here to talk about a portfolio of only a few thousand dollars.”

“But dad, he looked ... it looked important. I’ve heard you complain about money. Couldn’t he help?”

“Yes, possibly, in some indirect way. But it’s hard to take a man like that seriously after a long day of seeing patients.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“Well, Ferdinand moves people’s money around all day, electronically, and if he’s lucky the numbers go up. There’s nothing tangible about what he does for a living.”

“What does tangible mean?”

“You can see it. You can touch it. Money is so abstract. It’s like this all-powerful force and sometimes it just gets me down. You know the first thing that happens when a patient comes into the ER? No matter how bad the illness or injury, the patient has to work out the payment first thing. We’re supposed to be providing care for these people but the first order of business is always sorting out the payment.”

I’m sure I’ve embellished my memory of that evening. I couldn’t possibly have remembered these conversations in such detail because I wouldn’t have grasped the concepts at the time. But I understood enough to feel kind of disappointed about the meeting. Not so much about the ruined suit, but because my did dismissed Ferdinand. I kind of wanted my dad to associate with people in nice suits who drive modern cars and talk about money and investments. That was part of the more sophisticated world, the TV world, that of course I dreamed of escaping to. Being a doctor, my dad should have had all kinds of money but it never seemed he did. I suddenly felt very tired, and after a quick dinner (grilled cheese, Campbell’s soup) I went to bed.

In the middle of the night my dad shook me awake. “Tara, wake up. I have a patient and I need your help.” I couldn’t believe it, and yet I knew the drill. I dragged myself out of bed, cleared the dining room table, and spread out a fresh clean sheet for the patient.

It was Drummond, a guy down the way who raised ostriches. Ostriches! He’d somehow cut his arm really badly on some machinery. His arm was wrapped in a giant towel that was totally soaked in blood. He’d injured himself during the late afternoon and then spent the next several hours arguing with his wife about going to the hospital. He’d never been to a hospital and wasn’t going to start now, blah, blah, blah.

Dad stretched him out on the table and removed the bloody towel. Then he went to the kitchen sink and washed his hands for like five minutes straight, got out his medical kit, filled a syringe with something, and started stabbing Drummond all up and down his arm with it. It was like a five-inch needle. “This is just Novocain,” he said soothingly, as though his patient wouldn’t want anything stronger. Blood was getting all over my fresh sheet. I would be doing all the clean-up, of course. At times like this I really resented my mom, sleeping away. After all, she chose to marry a doctor in a small town and should have known what would be expected of her. Somehow that duty had slipped a generation and here I was, a little girl who didn’t choose a doctor for a father, playing surgical nurse with real blood.

We waited around for ten minutes to let the anesthetic take effect. Then Dad got started on sewing up Drummond’s arm. My job was to hold it down. This took all my strength. Drummond was a tough old dude but was clearly in great pain, and couldn’t resist trying to recoil. Dad gave him a wooden tongue depressor to bite down on and Drummond snapped it in two with his teeth. I winced. Dad gave him two more tongue depressors, stacked together. Drummond snapped those, too, sending a shiver down my back. I don’t know how biting down is supposed to help anyway; maybe it was just to keep him from cussing. Finally Dad gave him a clean rag, the color of pink clay, to chew on.

When you’re a doctor’s kid you learn how coarse medicine really is. Putting in sutures, for example, is just sewing up a guy’s skin with a needle and thread. I had to pay attention and it was like watching my mom sewing closed the Thanksgiving turkey with twine or dental floss: just as crude as can be. (By his own admission Dad was only “okay” at sutures. At the dinner table one time he ranted about a surgeon he’d watched stitch up a boy’s face. “He was so good at stitches,” he raved, “it was like plastic.” Plastic surgery, he meant. I had to remind him I was trying to eat.)

Dad finished up and sent Drummond on his way with an Ace bandage wrapped around his arm. “In about a week or ten days you can come back to have those sutures removed,” he said. “Or you can remove them yourself—just snip one and drag the whole thread out.” I was up for another half hour, cleaning up. A bed sheet really isn’t very absorbent and I was just smearing the blood around. I had to soak the sheet and towels awhile in the washing machine, on cold, before adding the detergent and starting it up. Like I said before, I knew the drill. I finally got back to bed at around three.

Fortunately, the next day was Saturday and I got to sleep in. That afternoon I was sitting on the front porch with Dad when Drummond came walking up our driveway dragging his kid’s Radio Flyer wagon behind him. Between dragging the wagon and holding his bandaged arm up over his head, Drummond was, I felt, lacking in dignity. “Good, keep that arm elevated,” Dad said. “What have we here?” The wagon was full of these giant eggs, the size of cantaloupes: ostrich eggs. Dad’s fee. Did Dad send Drummond away, like he did Ferdinand? No, he happily unloaded the wagon, acting like ostrich eggs were the greatest treasure on Earth. “Isn’t it amazing,” he mused, “that the world’s second-fastest land animal can also lay these giant eggs? Puts a hen to shame.”

Drummond didn’t say much, and was soon on his way. We would be eating giant omelets for months. I couldn’t help myself. “Dad,” I complained, “did you ever hear of money? What’s so great about these eggs?”

“Well ... just look at ‘em!” he said, still smiling.

Yeah, I know. You can see them. You can touch them.

dana albert blog

Race Report - Everest Challenge 2011

NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and some coarse humor.

Introduction

I meant to post this race report last night—I’d already written it for my bike club—but I fell asleep unexpectedly at around nine. My wife found me, sitting up, holding a water bottle in my hand that I must have been about to drink from when sleep overtook me. This was four days after the race. That’s how tiring it is.

Anyway, what follows is my report of the 2011 Everest Challenge California-Nevada Climbing Championship. I hope you’re not looking for a tightly edited perfectly-paced action drama, nor a feel-good bromance, nor a soap opera of who did what in the never-ending Masters 35+ dynastic saga. As usual, and as with life, it’s all about the food.

Pre-race

Three of my East Bay Velo Club teammates and I drove to Bishop in a two-car caravan: Ian and I in his sporty Euro-edition Golf, and Paul in his element in his Element with Rob. (Two others, Jamie and Steve, had gone up in advance to adjust to the altitude.) As we passed through Oakdale we tinkered briefly with the idea of eating at the House of Beef. Next door was House of Tykes. Either you drop your kids off while getting barbecue, or it’s a cannibalistic venue.

As we’d hit Oakdale too early for lunch, we instead stopped later at Priest Station where Paul and Jamie had dined the year before. We had a great table out on the deck and paid extra for Premium Burgers (i.e., grass-fed beef ). Ian and I had mayonnaise with our fries and could tell that everybody—Paul, Rob, those at the next table, and the proprietors—were pretty impressed. In fact, the staff must have decided to keep us around as long as possible to attract other diners, because the service was remarkably slow. It worked, though … by the time we left, the place was hopping.

Alas, because of this delay we reached Bishop too late for the happy hour at Whiskey Creek Saloon. (No, we wouldn’t have any booze the night before the race, but there was discounted food.) It was more important to get in a good spin on the bikes, to sort out our legs after the long drive.

Dinner, therefore, was the free Everest Challenge pasta-feed. Last year, you may remember, was almost a fracas as the volunteer staff unwisely tried to throttle the flow of pasta. This time, none of the rider/diners got any flak. But we didn’t get any sausage either. “In this economy” etc. There was plenty of garlic bread, at least for me. Absolutely nothing prevented the others from taking like ten pieces on their first trip through like I did, and yet I was chided for hogging it. Excuse me, but is this a pre-race meal, or a little snack before a fun run? Are you going to throw elbows or throw tantrums? Anyway, the bread had giant chunks of garlic, and I had three huge plates of spaghetti (on a scale of one to ten, ten being the best, this was … free).

Of course it’s a bit hard on the stomach to eat so much. Alas, I was unsuccessful in my normal bedtime evacuation ritual. I was reminded of that old restroom graffito, “Here I sit, my hopes deflated, tried to defecate, but only micturated.” (I’ve cleaned up the language of that ditty for this report.)

By now you’ve guessed the rest: extreme flatulence, EC Edition. It was bad. I slept fine until about 4:15 a.m., and then suddenly was fully bloated with gas, like a large dead hoofed animal that has ballooned up enough to actually float on a little lake until a boy scout with a .22 shoots it and it fricking explodes. Neither Ian nor I could sleep with flatulence of this magnitude. (Rob, in the main room on a king size bed, probably slept like a baby. We’d played Ro-Sham-Bo, odd-man-out, to decide who got the big bed, and Rob won fair and square. Of course that didn’t stop Ian and me from berating him all weekend for being a prima donna.)

Our breakfast stuff overwhelmed the little mini-fridge. The thing was unplugged to begin with and it took it several hours to drop below room temperature. I suppose there’s a commentary to be made about three kinds of milk—regular dairy milk, rice milk, and soy milk—for three guys, but I won’t be making it. We had some cheap yogurt from Smart & Final, a traditional EC destination, and though the yogurt said Grade A it seemed kind of marginal (off-brand, corn syrup, etc.). Who gets the Grade B stuff? Inmates? The military? Rob had a big Coke in the little fridge, and then all our bottles of various energy drinks, and I spent about twenty minutes trying to get the door to close.

So, breakfast. In addition to the iffy yogurt, I had my Uncle Sam cereal, with 10 grams of fiber per serving, less than a gram of sugar, and the consistency of cat litter. It’s probably the second-hardest breakfast cereal to eat (next to Grape Nuts, or “grape pits” as my brother Max calls them). You take a bite and then chew for a couple minutes while you put on sunscreen or pump up your tires. It tastes like cardboard. Very high-end cardboard. Ian, ever loyal to the Crown, ate his Weetabix with its lowly 4 grams of fiber.

In its defense, Weetabix seems exactly like the kind of cereal Wallace and Gromit would eat. Nonetheless, you’ll be happy to know that I asserted my American pride, alerting Ian to the fact that Uncle Sam has been around since 1908, whereas Weetabix is a relative interloper, not appearing on the breakfast scene until 1932. (I gleaned these dates from the cereal boxes.) Of course Ian immediately rejoined that Weetabix was officially recognized by the Queen. Those British are so fricking pompous.

Stage 1 – 88 miles, 14,965 feet of climbing

During Stage 1 I consumed five large bottles of my preferred energy drink and one bottle of the race-provided drink (which is widely rumored among our ranks to cause serious stomach issues that make you look like Moomintroll or ET or something). I also had like four gels. Let me explain how hard it is eating gels during the EC. Lacking any particular muscular strength, I strive to be as efficient as possible. This means not rocking a lot on the bike. I’d like to think my upper body isn’t rigid, but merely still. It was so still during the extra-hot second climb that some sort of strange membrane of air or sunscreen or something was being created between my skin and my sweat. I would only become aware of it when my arm would shift slightly and send the sweat sliding off this membrane and suddenly I’d feel a swish of cool. Being this still, my body sort of reshaped itself into this climbing mannequin, more like a sculpture than a puppet. So when I tried to access my jersey pockets, my arms were so stiff I could barely reach anything. It was like trying to get a finger to bend again after it’s been in a splint for six weeks. The tops of my pockets seemed halfway up my back. I got gel on my number, gel on the other stuff in my pockets, residues of gel I couldn’t get out of the package draining down into puddles in my jersey … it was a mess. I also had a half banana someone passed up. Oh, and I had a giant mouthful of bile that I had to re-swallow after I half-barfed. That kind of sucked.

The last climb was crazy. A storm was brewing (though without coming to fruition), which hampered the accuracy of my bike computer because it uses barometric pressure to calculate altitude, and uses altitude gain plus speed to calculate my power. In certain sections there was a terrible headwind, which made it hard to keep the bike moving given my not-so-low gearing. These sections gave me my most inaccurate power readings of all—it read like 90 watts when I had to have been putting out over 400. I held back on the non-windy sections to save energy for the windy ones, which ended up being less frequent than I’d feared. Thus, I sort of loafed for much of the last climb—not a problem, since the second stage of the race would certainly use up any surplus energy I carried forward.

After I finished Stage 1, atop its final climb, I had like eight Cokes. Not eight cans, but eight cups filled by the volunteers, who are all distance runners who volunteer here just to be cool. Now, when it comes to booze, I’m careful not to fall prey to the “bottomless cup” model, where it’s hard to modulate your intake and you might end up downing, say, a pint glass of bourbon without realizing it. Discrete units like bottles of beer are much safer. But with soft drinks, especially after a ride like that, who cares! Worst case scenario I get too much caffeine and can’t sleep … but then who can sleep after Stage 1 of the EC anyway?

All the same, I switched to ginger ale at some point. My throat was so parched I couldn’t talk, but boy could I burp. After a liter or two of carbonated fluids I could talk again, though by that point I was busy gobbling quesadillas and Reese’s peanut butter cups and potato chips. There was chicken soup, too, with noodles. I have figured out what’s so strange about the EC soup noodles: they are never boiled, but rather thrown in to non-boiling broth. So they’re both crunchy and soggy at the same time. You could probably pay big bucks for such a novel thing at a fancy restaurant, along with lobster foam and quail eggs and such.

Jamie won the first stage among the Masters 55+! We’re all very proud. Not only that, but based on when his category started, he was actually the very first rider—out of 335 total—to finish. Nate English was glued to his wheel at the end.

They switched the course around this year, swapping the first and last descents. (This was to eliminate pelotons in the one residential section of the course.) The new course had about ten fewer miles of racing, most of which were downhill. This meant it was hard to compare times from last year to this year. Since my main goal with this race is to be faster each year—part of my effort to battle the ravages of age—this difficulty of comparison was kind of a bummer. Still, I was almost an hour faster on Stage 1 this year so I’m pretty dang stoked. Here’s the course profile with my heart rate and power:

For the data nerds among you, here are my climbing stats (power and heart rate):

- 242 watts at 155 bpm on first climb;

- 239 watts at 157 bpm on second climb;

- 215 watts at 150 bpm on last climb.

Note that these are "dog-watts"—that is, they're based on my rate of vertical gain, my speed, and my weight (f=mgh) without considering wind resistance, etc. That 215-watt stat is particularly off (i.e., low) based on the headwind and the stormy sky.

Dinner was, once again, at the little Italian place. I have done some special research this year and can actually tell you the name: The Upper Crust Pizza Co. No, this isn’t the Boston chain with the award-winning TV commercial. (Who ever heard of such a thing? The only TV commercial that deserves an award is a really short one, like under a second, or maybe a beer commercial with really hot babes.) We went to the one-off Upper Crust whose domain name is up for sale.

As always, we started with a pizza as appetizer. Steve celebrated his EC Rookie status by choosing the ‘za: we had the, dang it, what was it called? Something silly like the Ranch Hand or Wrangler or something. I tried to find the place’s menu online so I could get the name of our pizza but I only came across a two-star review from a guy name Jesse G. who complained, “they put way too much cheese on the pizza for my taste.” What a pussy. Hey Jesse, why don’t you go ride 117 miles over three mountains and then get some pizza. Too much cheese? Hell, I was salting my pizza! Just for the salt! I was craving salt. I’d have eaten a whole stick of salami if it had been provided as garnish, which come to think of it is a pretty good idea.

On a pizza called the Ranch Hand you’d expect toppings like hardtack and tumbleweed, but it was a classic: mushroom, sausage, pepperoni, something else. (I can’t remember the fourth topping—I guess I ate too fast.) Then we had pasta. I heavily promoted the chicken Marsala and two others had it. Jamie had something that looked exactly like it but wasn’t, apparently. I will publically apologize to Rob for not warning him that it was a cream sauce. It never occurred to me to classify this as a cream/non-cream dish. Just that it was chicken, and pasta, and fattening, and actually this time the pasta was a bit overcooked but dang, it was good anyway. So was the oddly spicy cream of mushroom soup. I’m doing EC again next year just to eat at Upper Crust again.

After dinner we had to go to K-Mart, America’s Favorite Store, so Ian could buy some earplugs. Why earplugs? Because my flatulence had kept him awake from 4:15 a.m. on the night before. (When he first complained about this, I thought he said his own flatulence kept him awake from 4:15 a.m. on, and I thought, wow, what a coincidence, I was gassy too at that time! And I started to wonder if, like female roommates end up on the same monthly cycle, guys sharing a room might start to have synched-up flatulence. But no, it was just me doing the flatching.) Ian purchased some Hearos, despite his misgivings that the attenuation chart and noise reduction info on the package didn’t cover flatulence. I told him not to worry because my concussive blasts were doubtless much louder than the norm anyway.

Back at the motel, Rob studied an impressive legal textbook, and I couldn’t help but feel sheepish about the fact that, though cycling may be enough for some of us, others are actually getting somewhere in life, making something of themselves. It didn’t help that I was pretty much brain-dead and struggling just to transfer my race numbers to a clean jersey. I mean, here Rob was deep in thought processing complex ideas about law, while I was somehow managing to pin my number not only to the jersey but to the bedspread. When I was finally done, and Rob had realized he wouldn’t get any studying done with me forgetting every thirty seconds to shut the hell up, we headed out to McDonalds for some freedom fries. We brought some back for Ian. Look at this happy customer.

Stage 2 – 88 miles, 14,070 feet of climbing

During Stage 2 I drank four bottles of my preferred energy drink, about a bottle (two halves, really) of the race-supplied beverage, and a bottle of water. It’s hard to take on a bottle of water during the race because you don’t want to use up limited water bottle cage space for a non-caloric beverage. So during the hottest stretch (90+ degrees) of the third pass I rode along holding the bottle of water, drinking greedily from it, like Landis in that famous Tour stage. It didn’t work as well for me. (Maybe it was the testosterone, blood transfusion, and Jack Daniels that worked so well for Landis.)

Oh, and I had three gels and a half-banana. I didn’t want the banana—the very idea of eating it made me want to hurl—but it was a little kid volunteer offering it up which was so cute. Once I took possession of it, of course I wouldn’t waste it. That’s just how I was raised. So after carrying it for half a mile or so I choked it down.

I was fricking dying on that last climb. It which gains more than 6,000 feet over 20 miles, and I’d blown up before even reaching it. I was nauseated and weaving and fighting off despair. My heart rate was stuck in the 130s, sometimes dipping into the 120s. I was afraid to look at my bike computer’s mileage reading: to know how many miles I had left would be too demoralizing. At one point I saw the 6,000-foot elevation marker, and was elated because somehow I’d missed the 5,000-foot marker and thought I was still below it. But the elation didn’t last long as I realized being at 6,000 feet wasn’t actually that great of news: I still had over 4,000 feet to climb. During this climb I only passed one guy in my category. That gave me a little bit of a morale boost, because at that moment I hated him even more than I hated life. This was the kind of suffering that I wouldn’t wish on anybody except maybe the other Masters 35+ riders, all of them , damn them.

I don’t know how I made the summit without losing my shit entirely. When I crossed the line I thought I was going to burst out crying. Its’ the kind of bike-induced misery that—now that it’s over—I wouldn’t trade for anything. A real Vision Quest kind of suffering. The kind of torment that forges you, like heat-treating a frame, as long as you survive the process and don’t come out warped like a damn Cannondale.

After finishing I had a bunch more Cokes, but really couldn’t touch anything else sweet. I did eat a whole bunch of the feta, spinach, and mushroom quesadillas. Actually I couldn’t tell if they were mushrooms or olives because the feta was so salty. Let me tell you something about salt: it’s good for you. I’ve been telling people for years that it only raises your blood pressure if you have a genetic predisposition for high blood pressure. I’ve been contradicted on this point so often I was starting to doubt myself until Rob volunteered the very same fact. And he’s got like a Ph.D. in some related field. He said he used to get muscle cramps as a kid because his well-meaning mother fed him a low-sodium diet, and then when he moved into the dorms and started eating their salty food he never had another muscle cramp. And I’ve never had one either. I eat salt like crazy. And my blood pressure is, well, good enough. If I had some more of those feta quesadillas right now, I’d eat them recreationally even though my body is probably pretty much back to normal.

Looking back at my heart rate and power stats for the second stage, I see that I wasn’t really as slow on the final climb as I’d feared. Here are my stats for Stage 2:

- 244 watts at 146 bpm on first climb;

- 224 watts at 140 bpm on second climb;

- 214 watts at 138 bpm on last climb.

Compare those to the stats for the first day, and compare the graphs, and you can see how much the first day took out of me! I was pleased to learn that, meltdown notwithstanding, I was 3 minutes faster on Stage 2 this year than in 2010.

We all had a great time in the race, and then a great time descending for twenty miles back to our internal-combustion rolling saunas. We all showered in Steve’s room (he stayed an extra night—brilliant!) and then headed over to Erick Schat’s Bakery in Bishop—an EC tradition. I got the last two slices of rye bread with my famously “not lean” pastrami sandwich. They’d run out of rye bread the previous year, too. What is it with these people? They do make good food though. Rob got two sandwiches: a turkey sandwich and the Mule Kick. Somebody always gets the Mule Kick, doubtless because of the catchy name, but I’ve never seen anybody order it a second time. At least Rob had the balls to admit it was a terrible sandwich. I don’t know how a place that makes such a killer pastrami sandwich can also make something lousy.

Now, I’d asked Rob about his sandwich purely to gather material for this report, but of course the others made it out like I was hinting around for a handout. As much as I denied this, I couldn’t convince Rob and soon I’d inherited one of the pieces of bread from his Mule Kick, with a bunch of Dijon mustard, and some cheese. Why does Dijon mustard exist? Just so men can show off that they can handle a spicy mustard that tastes like ass, if ass were spicy? Dijon is to a sandwich like hops is to beer: it turns a flavor into a pissing contest. “Pardon, monsieur, mais avez-vous du Grey Poupon?” / “No way, dude, I’m an American! I like French’s mustard!”

The trip home

On the way home we stopped at this little restaurant in Groveland we ate at last year. Pizza. Now, last year they had some weird quirk with the menu where a one-topping pizza cost like $5 more than a plain pizza, and yet the super-combo with like five ingredients was only $1.80 more than that. I was hoping to exploit that loophole this time, but they’d closed it up. But here was something new and just as weird: to get a single topping on a 16-inch pizza cost like $5. But to get a single topping on an 18-inch pizza was only a buck. How did these guys come up with their prices? A Ouija board? We didn’t care. We went with the 18-inch pepperoni.

Rob announced, shockingly, that he wouldn’t be having any pizza. He said he had heartburn. I’m pretty sure that almost any female would have said, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” Since I’m a guy, this didn’t occur to me (at least not until later); instead, I tried to convince Rob that pepperoni was really good for heartburn. When this failed I asked the waitress if we could get Tums as a pizza topping. She said, politely, that we couldn’t. Rob had split pea soup with ham and I could smell it from here. He said it was pretty good but oddly not that salty. Easily fixed.

I got home just before midnight and when I put the dodgy Smart & Final yogurt in the fridge, the crappy wire shelf flexed too much and dumped the yogurt container on the floor where it burst open. The cat, ominously, gave it a sniff but declined to lap it up. My motor skills were shot and I was barely functioning and it seemed to take forever to clean up the mess. I got the towels too wet and was just smearing it around and my god, the Everest Challenge is so hard. Be sure to join us next year!

dana albert blog

From the Archives - How to Choose a Major

Introduction

Long before I went to college, I knew I wanted to be an English major. There was simply no other subject to which I could imagine applying myself. That said, I had plenty of friends who took awhile deciding. Perhaps that’s what led me to write the following essay, during my sophomore year. I can only speculate, because I have zero recollection of writing it. Looking back, I can tell it’s me, albeit a younger, snottier version. I think I’ve mellowed out over the years. If nothing else I know how to spell “cuckoldry” now.

How To Choose A Major — September 27, 1989

As far as I’m concerned, UCSB is the right school, regardless of a student’s field of study. Why? Because everybody rides bikes to class. I mean, everybody. You’ll see a few students walking, but their bikes probably just have flat tires. The important thing is that there’s a minimum of VW Cabriolets, Vespas, and Kawasaki Ninjas here. I refuse to attend school in a place where these stupid motorized vehicles reign.

Okay, so you’ve chosen your school; now it’s time to choose a major. Come with me to my classes and you can get a taste for what each major is like.

English Lit

First up is English 20, which is Renaissance Literature. I didn’t take this class because it sounded interesting or rewarding, but for these reasons: (1) English majors like me are required to take it, and (2) nobody else wants it so it’s one of the few English classes I can get. There seem to be too many English majors at this school, plus non-English-majors who need English classes for General Ed, so the English classes fill up fast.

What can I say about the lecture? It’s okay, I guess. Better than other classes: instead of scrambling to write down every word, I actually listen to what the professor has to say. I look at the notes of the girl sitting next to me to find out how to spell “cukoldry.” She’s written “cutaldy” and obviously doesn’t care how it’s spelled. What does seem to concern her is her handwriting and the headings on her notes. Three colors of felt pen. The heading lists the name of the class, the name of the professor, the times the class meets, the section number, and the date. This information is not useless. When she’s hung over some Monday morning and can’t remember what any of her classes are, it could come in handy.

I’ll bet she chose English as a major, figuring the practice she’ll get in writing and organization in this department will prepare her for her career one day. Her attention to little details extends to her outfit: her dress is impeccable, from the crisp collar all the way down past the blindingly white socks with little fuzzy balls on them to her shoes, which are cute white and teal numbers with lots of Velcro. I’m wearing mended shorts, the inevitable bike race t-shirt, and the my black-and-white Nike high-top basketball shoes which I call Shamus because they look like killer whales, which is why I bought them.

My notes are much sloppier than hers. Instead of her huge, loopy letters with tiny circles dotting all the i’s, my handwriting looks like the last words of a dying man, scrawled desperately on linoleum with his own blood in an attempt to expose the man responsible for the gushing knife wound in his back. I’m sure this girl uses three different colors of highlighter, too. Buying used textbooks, I can’t avoid the blight of highlighters. As if reading boring drivel wasn’t bad enough, I have to deal with pink, blue, and green paragraphs. As far as I know, the highlighting is completely random. It’s usually the most concentrated towards the front of the book, because by the second midterm, most students have realized the futility of highlighting, or they’ve dropped the course.

French

French is next. I think foreign language classes are all the same: “discussion” format, instead of a lecture. French teachers must have even less money than I do: this one has worn the same dress every day this quarter. With foreign language classes, at least lower-division, it’s never a professor, always an instructor. I wonder if that’s what all foreign language majors have to look forward to one day. That doesn’t really bother me, at least compared to other idiosyncrasies of foreign language teachers: they always smoke (in fact, they’re probably the only smokers still around at UCSB), and they’re intentionally ambiguous about their backgrounds, as though they were ashamed to have been born in the U.S.

The instructor is arranging the class in a big circle around the perimeter of the room. I think I know why she always does this: first of all, it kills time (which is about all French instructors ever try to do), and it keeps students like me from hiding out in the back. If I was as ambitious as that guy over there, Dave, I would have positioned myself right next to the instructor’s desk, in her blind spot. But I already established myself in the back on the first day, and besides, this cute girl just sat down next to me and confided to me that she’s not quite sober after last night. That seems a lot more enticing than various negative forms in the French language. She’s trying to do her homework during class, and I look at her work. As with the girl in English class, the content is completely off but the form is perfect. She answers each question with a giant exclamation mark comprised of a circle with an inverted triangle above it. Very cute. This girl is likely an undeclared major. I don’t have anything to base that on; it’s just a strong hunch.

The instructor is breaking us into groups of three, in which we’ll write sentences (using various negative forms, of course) to describe roles she assigns us. My group is given the label “extravagant” and so Evan, who is obviously an Art Studio major, and I think real hard about what an extravagant person is like. I know Evan is an art studio major because he has forsaken his French textbook to make more room in his backpack for paperbacks (mostly Sartre and Camus and the like) and he is sporting the “starving artist” look. His old mended, faded jeans are spattered with paint from the studio, and his long curly hair is blasted back from his forehead as though he had just been blown away by one of the gigantic studio speakers they have in the art department. My roommate, Casey, is a lot like Evan, and I find them both to be very agreeable people. Perhaps the low-stress environment of the art department puts them in a more relaxed mood then other majors. Of course, my cycling would severely clash with my image if I tried to be an art studio major; after a ride my cheeks are rosy and if you’re an art studio major it’s cool to look pale and emaciated. Then again, at least I’d have the emaciated part down.

The third member of our group says nothing, just writes down everything. I look at her notes: every single word that has been uttered since the class began has been recorded verbatim. Throughout my notes, all you’ll see are entries like, “For Tues: ex. A&B p. 98; wkbk ex. A p. 45 in ink.” Wait, there’s one more entry in my notes, a simplified form of a clumsy equation for math class that suddenly came to me a minute ago. Other than that, I figure extraneous notes will just tie up more of my time if I have to read them later. This girl must spend hours re‑reading all her notes every night. As far as original thought, she is completely useless. She reminds me of my old factory co‑workers: seemingly content to do the grunt-work, but unwilling to generate ideas. We try to get her to participate, but it’s useless: she has no aspirations to be part of the brains of our operation.

Now the teacher has broken up our groups and we share our sentences with the class. Dave is first, representing the “professor” group. Always ready to put some spark into the classroom proceedings, Dave has written the French equivalent of “nobody listens to the professor because she is stupid” and has just read it to the class. I like Dave. He’s an English major through and through. Although his hair is good and long for that liberal arts look, it isn’t as unruly as that of an art studio major; it’s combed to represent the sophisticated side of our major. Often he wears a visor which he piles the hair up on, to keep it out of his eyes. Although I was originally skeptical, now I wish I’d just bought a visor instead of having my hair cut. Now my hair looks more accounting or econ. I’m suddenly aware that the teacher is addressing me, asking me to respond to Dave’s avant-garde statement. I could say something straightforward, but I can’t resist picking up where he left off: “What’s that? I didn’t hear you.” (In French, of course.) What a wasted effort. Here I’ve gone out on a limb with the teacher, and a good ninety percent of the class didn’t catch my joke. They probably didn’t understand me—no French majors here.

Math

Next is Calculus class. I compare this class to a painting I saw once of a bunch of fish all fighting over a worm—on a fishhook. That’s right, this class has the element of competition to enhance its unpleasantness. We don’t just compete on tests, but also just getting into the classroom! Today, strangely enough, nobody is in the room when I get there. Here’s why: the class has been moved to another building. I head over there frantically, and sure enough, the room is completely filled up. Why are all these students fighting over seats like they were at a rock concert? Simple. Only from the very front row can you hope to make out the professors nightmarish calculations (which make my handwriting look neat by comparison).

After we scramble to turn in our assignments, which the professor collects in a flimsy plastic bag which is now tearing in several places, I scan the front row for a vacant seat. I know I’m dreaming, but I actually find one. Somebody’s backpack is there on the floor—could mean the seat’s taken, or it could belong to someone in the next seat. I sit down: I figure succeeding at this game requires taking a bigger chance than the next guy, just like parking in San Francisco. This time it doesn’t pay off—I am violently accosted by an irate female classmate, the owner of both the backpack and the seat. Take careful note: girls in calculus class are not looking to pass the time on the way to an MRS degree. I mean, let’s face it, what guy in his right mind would try to pick up a girl in a math class? These girls are here to get their piece of the pie, even if (or especially if!) it means trampling a lot of guys in the process. She’s not dressed for aesthetics—it’s pure business. Efficient slacks that won’t snag on the table in the library late-night study area, no frilly skirt to bunch up under her at the chair in the computer lab. Button-down shirt with big pockets for extra pens and a calculator. Hair coiled into a tight bun that won’t obstruct her vision as she scans the logarithm tables. Eyeglasses, because contact lenses and all-nighters don’t mix.

I finally find a seat in the front row—a Godsend, because if I can’t see the equations, I’m bound to fall asleep instead of copying down the professor’s strange graphs and theorems. I can even put my feet up on the stage. But it’s not all roses—the guy next to me is a hopeless motor mouth. He absolutely will not shut up. “Yeah, I guess you can sit there. I was saving it for Steve, but I guess he won’t be showing up. Up real late, I’m sure, probably partying. Nice seats, huh! This is just like summer school! Duh, huh, huh!” Look at him. Pathetic. Multicolor surfer-dude shorts, Corona t-shirt, prim and proper hairdo. He’s on the social track, obviously hungry for universal acceptance. I’ll bet his career goals include a big house and a BMW. “What the hell is he doing up there? Hey, are you getting any of this? Hey, I think I’ve seen that theorem before, back in high school in Morgan Hill! Wait, is that ‘as x approaches a,’ or ‘as x approaches 2?’ God, man, his handwriting is terrible. Have you looked at those homework problems for Friday yet? Look at all of these! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, god, there’s like thirty problems here!” I press the cold steel barrel of my revolver into his ear and say, “Buddy, you talk too much.” He drops his books on the floor and runs out of the classroom. The professor shoots me a quick glance and returns to his equations as my fellow students glare in disapproval at my disruption of the class.

The guy on my right is a male version of the girl who attacked me for trying to steal her seat. But the male is worse: he constantly mumbles about how he already knows all the equations, and his breath stinks. I know exactly what happened: he ate a peanut butter sandwich right before class and didn’t have the decency to at least rinse his mouth out. He figures he doesn’t have to be decent because he’ll be making fifty grand in a few years anyway with his engineering degree. I don’t care if he does—I’d rather starve to death with breath that’s face-to-face close than lug fifty pounds of Calculus and Digital Fundamentals books back and forth to the library for the next three years, scarfing down peanut butter sandwiches during my few spare moments.

The professor has gone so fast that he’s finished his lecture ten minutes early, as he has done every day so far this quarter. He could slow down a bit so that maybe some of the students could keep up, but hey, he’s got a reputation to keep up here. If the other guys in the math department caught wind that some of this guy’s students actually understood the material, he’d never be invited to another department luncheon, or whatever it is math professors do when they’re not solving derivations or making graphs.

History

My last class today is history. There’s Tor. I recognize him because he’s in my French class—otherwise, he’s just another generic History 4A Western Civilization student, one more addition to the sea of faces in the giant Lotte Lehman Concert Hall. But I can tell he’s a History major: the glazed look his eyes had in French class is gone, replaced by little points of light. This guy obviously loves facts. Ideas are vague and unstable, insights are false—only cold, hard facts turn him on. But don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying this guy loves history. I don’t think the term “history” needs to be synonymous with “facts.” I actually doubt that Tor cares at all about ancient Mesopotamian cultures. I’ve checked out his notes: statistics, dates, names. That’s it. This is one guy whose notes are not bound to aesthetics—in fact, there’s no organization whatsoever. Just thousands of facts, which will be transferred to note cards and memorized later.

I did that once, for a history final that was 80% of my grade. I memorized so many facts I thought I would vomit and in the toilet bowl it would look like alphabet soup. Of all those facts, all I remember is that the amount of horse manure that accumulated in Philadelphia was truly breathtaking. I once knew the year, the street, and the exact weight per day. Who weighed it all, anyway? I much prefer factoids—statements that sound like fact and give an argument support like fact, but are actually made up. I’ll show you how it works. “I hate horses and here’s why: on 9th Street in Philadelphia in an average day in 1934, 13,000 horses deposited 145 tons of manure. That’s 3/4 of a pound for every man, woman, and child!” Would you know enough to correct me? Probably not. So why memorize real facts?

I try to organize my notes, but the professor, too, is just spouting names, dates, places. Another fact-lover. I think he’s a geek. At least he’s wearing a suit. Never mind that he looks like one of those stupid little kids who wears a miniature suit to a wedding and implores you to think, “That stupid little kid is too young to be wearing a suit.” The prof does look better than Tor, who’s sporting a dingy, blank sweatshirt, Toughskins jeans, and blue Keds running shoes. His attire suits him well: fashion is always changing and hard to pin down. Maybe 501’s were out last year in favor of acid-washed jeans, and this year Lee is heavily promoting its new “three-day weekend: fourth day” image. Leather Aviator jackets may have come and gone. These are ethereal fashion feelings—but blank sweatshirts, Toughskins, and Keds are facts. They’ve never been “in” so they’ll never be “out.” They’re as old as time and will never die.

Tor’s hair is long and greasy, and even though it’s sort of smeared away from his eyes, he looks like a sheepdog. He doesn’t wear his hair long per se; it just happens to be long because he isn’t even slightly aware of its length. Below his intertwined legs, one foot crosses over on top of the other as if trying to meld with it. The only time I’ve ever sat like that was when I was at home alone one night, a paranoid eight year old, and my malicious brothers had turned off the power at the circuit breaker and I thought if I pulled my whole body into a solid mass I’d be more secure somehow. Now, I’ve only had one psychology class, but I’m going to guess that Tor’s body language is expressive of what’s going on inside—feeling out of touch with an unstable world, he seeks solace in sturdy, unyielding facts. Hence the History major.

Synthesis

What am I getting at here? Well, this is UCSB, and what we’re studying probably won’t affect our eventual careers, since this is not a vocational school. Students here do not choose their majors according to what they want to learn, or what they want to be. They choose majors according to who they already are.

So. Who are you?

dana albert blog