A Novel Idea

Hurricane Dean

So in light of recent events I seem it necessary to e-mail you and tell you that I almost died yesterday and it was in the least bit awesome. As a matter of fact it sucked. Actually I will go as far to say that it fucking sucked. Put on your PJ’s and fix a cup of tea because this e-mail should be pretty long. I have also sprinkled some obscenities into this e-mail so you understand the passion with which I not only have experienced these events, but also that with which I am writing them. So without further ado, the tragedy that was my life yesterday.

After we get cut off I try for about 10 minutes to call you back. I didn’t have anything particularly important to say, but I feel like one of the worst things in life is the lack of a proper good-bye. It was a bad omen of things to come. So after I stop calling I for some reason keep imagining you off to some Dragon’s cave in the dark ages where Ukranian peasants have doomed you to a life time or servitude to the demon beast. You had on one of those cone hats with the ribbon on top and it was pink. Strangely enough that is all you had on. Just kidding, well kind of.  Actually I am not kidding, we should make this happen one day, sans dragon of course. Ok stop laughing so you can better appreciate the seriousness of this e-mail. My flight to Miami wasn’t bad because I slept the entire time. I had been up since 4 in the morning and it felt good to get an hour nap in. Which brings me to United States Weather Systems and the nerds who love them. We have a hurricane named Dean chillin in the gulf right now. He is a category 4 and pretty much did his best to send Jamaica back down to the bottom of the ocean. Now I don’t even know why I am even going on this trip considering that if you draw a line from Miama to Port of Spain, Trinidad, you will run smack dab into Dean. I was wondering how we were going to manage getting through this mother fucker of a hurricane and get my slightly over weight ass safe into yet another country I have never been before. Come to find out the wise agents at american airline had already thought of a solution. Oh we will just fly around it.

I knew it was going to be interesting when we spent on hour on the tarmac waiting for some “routine” maintenance to take place on our aircraft. Now just some background info on me and flying. I used to be pretty scared of it, now I am okay. I am okay as long as I get on board, the plane then leaves, the plane flies around for a while, and then the plane lands. I also need these events to happen in that order. I am not okay with routine maintenance coming in and fucking up my flow. So after the maintenance is done we take off. And about an hour into our flight the pilot come on to the PA and says “We would like to welcome you to our flight, our flight time is slightly extended today due to the course correction needed to bypass Hurricane Dean. In case you are wondering if you look out the right side of our aircraft, that is Hurricane Dean” Yeah you could see the hurricane from the plane. It was pretty cool actually, cool like seeing a tiger in bush right before it pounces on you and then rips your throat out into a million little threads. It was about 20 minutes after this announcement that the real fun began. We started hitting a little turbulence which is no big deal to me. It was the fact that this bouncing around lasted for another half hour that started to concern me. Then things got worse. The plane was dropping and rising and moving all about spontaneously and it was really intense. All the flight attendants had been ordered back to their seats and everyone on the plane was quiet. It was surreal now that I think about it. Then we hit some sort of wall and people started yelling because the plane was really all over the place. I am just waiting for the oxygen masks to fall from the ceiling. So here I am about to die and all I can think about was “God Damnit the last thing I had to eat was a fucking blueberry scone from starbucks” Seriously, that could have been my last thought in life. Not, “Man I should have done more for the kids” or “I wonder if I have ever really experienced love.” My last thought would have been about a fucking scone! How crazy is that? It was such a Garden State moment. Everyone on the plane is freaking out over life and not wanting it to end and I am Zach Braffing it all the way to the ocean floor. Seriously if the Shins would have been on the loud speakers I would have been like ok what the hell is going on here?

Needless to say, by proof of this e-mail, I didn’t die. We survived the storm. That is two hurricanes in the past 3 years that have tried to kill me and failed. I have looked death right in the eye twice and you know what? Death blinked…err…blinked twice, maybe it has some dirt in its eye or something. Regardless the flight scared the hell out of me. Trinidad come to find out is awesome. It is a beautiful country with some really good food. I am going out exploring tonight and hopefully find a new adventure to annoy you with.

Africa....(First Draft)

The first thing you notice when you step off of a 14 hour flight from Houston to Luanda is that it is fucking hot.  The second thing you realize, if you are anything like me, is that you have never traveled outside of the United States before and even though every movie you have ever seen clearly wouldn’t steer you wrong, the outfit you have on looks completely ridiculous.  So there I am, trying to clear customs in a land that I have never been to before, about to meet people I have never met before, in flip flops, khaki cargo pants, and loosely buttoned forest green short sleeve shirt with pockets on both sides of the chest.  I am a walking cliché.

Luanda smells like old leather, mildew, and sweat all mixed together.  This wonderful bouquet fallows you around everywhere and eventually you just get used to it.  As I am still adjusting to the odor I walk outside of the airport and realize very quickly that I have larger things to adjust to.  The primary of which is a feeling that I had never experienced in my life.  It hits you in the gut.  It is very primal to say the least.  It is a feeling of fear, but not panic.  Your senses are heightened and immediately you feel very unpleasant in your own skin.  This feeling I was experiencing is called minority.  As a white male growing up in a country club in a suburb in Louisiana you can imagine this new sensation was something I could have done without.  All of a sudden I realized that being a white face in a crowd could be a very dangerous thing.  Being a white face, dressed like I am going on a god damned safari in the middle of a populated city is even worse. 

It took all of five minutes outside of the airport for me to realize that the quicker I separated myself from the American thought process I have had for 24 years the better, especially considering the amount of AK-47s there were in plain view.  As an American, every movie you have ever seen, the good guys are shooting at the people with AK-47s.  Think about that for a minute.  Try to find one reference in our American culture where the good guy uses an AK.  You can’t, unless he is picking that gun up off of a dead terrorist or evil minion.  Hopefully, I thought to myself, if something goes down these guns will be firing in the opposite direction.  Come to find out, the people with the guns know how much they scare Americans.  I had only been in the country for 3 hours when I had my first run in.  And afterwards I got to change my outfit because I just about pissed my pants.

Now let me save you some time on Wikipedia and explain to you a little bit about Luanda.  It is a city compromised of about 5 million people.  This is a fact, what wikipedia will not tell you is that there are about 8 million cars in the city.  I would say out of that maybe 100,000 of them actually run.  This is pertinent to the story because as you can imagine, parking in this city, with the ratio of cars to people, can get a little tricky sometime.  

After touching base with the main office in the city, I was heading to check into the hotel with one of the managers of the area, Mark, and his maid, who was a native Angolan woman.  We hopped into the range rover to bring me to the hotel.  Mark was driving, the maid was sitting shotgun, and I was directly behind Mark in the back seat.  As we began to back the vehicle up there was a loud thud on the hood of the car.  Mark immediately slammed on the breaks and we look to find that there is a police man banging on the hood. Mark puts the car in park and the moment he does this the back passenger side door opens up and another police officer jumps in the car with his gun.  It has become very clear to me at this point, that the police officers have seen the velociraptor scene in Jurrassic Park one too many time.  I see the gun, pointed in my general direction and all I can think to myself is “Mother fucker, my tombstone is going to read, Here lies Richard, he got raptored in Africa”  It should also be made clear that, despite their tactics these aren’t exactly elite commandos here.  They are very thin men, who stink to high hell, and talk way too loudly.  Dude, you’ve got the gun, therefore you also have my undivided attention, please procede with your request using your inside voice.

Apparently, unknown to me, this kind of thing happens all the time here.  Mark turns to the maid and asks her to talk to them.  The speak very poor English and Mark speaks very poor Portuguese so as you can imagine negotiations begin as a complete cluster fuck of broken phrases and lots of pointing.  The maid informs us that Mark and I are being placed under arrest.  The charge is illegal parking.  And we have to drive the police officers back to the jail.  So that they can book us.  Yes that right, we have to drive the police back to their own jail.  My thoughts quickly switched from my tombstone to what the calling shotgun rules are if you are getting extorted by the police in a foreign country.  I quickly came to the ruling that AK beats shotgun and whoever had the most bullets could sit wherever they damned well pleased.   

So back to the charge of illegal parking.  Getting arrested in a city with millions of cars for illegal parking is a lot like getting kicked out of a public pool for getting too wet.  Mark knew the cops were just looking for a bribe and he asked me to very calmly step out of the car.  So the three of us step out of the car which just pisses the police officers off.  Now they are yelling at us in Portuguese and pointing there guns at us.  Mark, who I am about 90% sure at this point has a death wish, pulls out his cell phone and calls everyone in the office to come downstairs to help out.  The bigger the crowd in these situations the better.  As he is calling me one of the police officers yells something at the maid.  She translates to me that he wants to know who he is calling.  I told her to tell him that he was contacting the American Embassy to let them know that we were being arrested and that they could contact us at the police station.  She didn’t have to translate that one back to him.  The second the word embassy shakingly dribbled off of my tongue his eyes got wide.  “No, no embassy” he said.  This quickly got the attention of the other police officer who came over to find out what was being said.  I quickly told the maid to repeat what I had just said.  She told both of the men the story again and the men quickly came back with a new demand that they weren’t going to arrest us, but there was a fine we had to pay.  I told them that we had already contacted the embassy and that they were on their way down to the jail.  The men sheepishly turned and just walked away.

Mark hangs up the phone and turns to me to find that the situation has been resolved.  He asked if I had paid them.  I told them I had not. He then asks, “Well what did you say to them” I just slapped my under developed biceps, gave him a wink, and responded, “I told them not to fuck with me.”

Rebecca...The E-mail

Dear Rebecca,

I understand that it has been a while since we have talked.  After you and I broke up I was pretty sure you were, in fact, the biggest bitch I would ever come in contact with in my life.

However, upon further investigation, I have found that you are, in fact, only the second worst person I have ever met.

Thought you might want to know about the upgrade.

Sincerely Yours,

Richard Benjamin Kaufmann III

Ukraine...the e-mail

Ok guys here it is a play by play of the bloodbath that was my expedition into former soviet Russia.  I will break it down by days:  This is pretty long and boring actually, but it will explain a good bit.

Sunday:  I arrive in Ukraine at 5:30 pm after spending the past 24 hours traveling from New Orleans, to Detroit, to Amsterdam, and finally into Kiev.  Stefanie picks me up from the airport and first impressions are great.  She looks amazing.  She is a beautiful girl and has aged like a nice french wine.  I pick her up and kiss her on the cheek and she is tells me how she had forgotten how handsome I was and we do the generally mushy first meeting bf/gf stuff.  We take a cab to the apartment we are renting in the center of kiev.  It is about a 20 minute ride there and the conversation goes really well on the way there.  It is fun because the cab driver only speaks broken Ukranian and Russian and Stef and I are having a ball commenting about how much he smells like beer.  Generally speaking it was good times.  I settle in at the apartment and change clothes.  I give Stef all of the things I brought to her, some food, some soaps, The Office DVDs and an external hard drive that she needed.  She was so happy about all of this stuff I thought it was going to be a sure thing.  That’s when the first red flag went up, she never said thank you.  She expressed how happy she was to have all of these things, but never stopped and looked at me and said, hey thanks for brining this to me, it means a lot.  I figured she was just saving the thanking for later and we decided to go out and eat.  We ate at a Mexican food restaurant, (read this as Mexican food that tastes like italian food) in Kiev and at this is where things starting going south.  We started talking about her family, bad move she hates her family, and how happy I was that she was nothing like them.  Then she drops this bomb of a question on me. “Why didn’t you graduate college”  I explained to her that I didn’t really like college and that at this point in my career, while I haven’t complete ruled out college, I was happy with not graduating because I have an amazing job and that within the IT industry being active in the field for 5 years is just as good as a degree most of the time.  She then pretty much called me dumb and that she couldn’t imagine not being able to talk about Nietzsche or other philosophers, I told her that I read Nietzsche on my own and that if she felt the urge to talk about how god is dead and how we are all just part of a herd I was more than happy to oblige.  Things went to awkward town after that and I was really looking forward to getting her to bed to end the first day after that.  We climb into bed the first night and I lean over and give her a kiss and tell her that I was glad to be in Ukraine, she said she was glad too and then she went to sleep.  My body thought it was still 2 in the afternoon so I didn’t sleep much.

Monday:  I might have slept about 3 hours the night before and Monday morning Stef’s BFF comes in to meet me.  This girl’s name is Shelly and she is actually pretty cool at first.  Right off the bat Stef and Shelly start speaking Ukranian, which didn’t really bother me as I figured they were just talking about me and that was fine.  5 hours later they were still speaking Ukranian to each other and I might have actually said about four dozen words to them.  Never once did this girl ask anything about me, not how I was enjoying the country, or what it was like seeing stef, nothing, I was a third wheel and this grew very frustrating for me.  At dinner Stefanie turned to me and said, you know you are not being that funny, Shelly keeps telling me that she thought you would be funnier.  Now I love being up-front and honest with people as much as the next guy, but this pissed me off.  I turned to Shelly and said, sorry if I am not funny it is just that I don’t speak Ukranian and throughout this entire day that is all you and Stef have been speaking.  Monday night was a bright spot for Stefanie and I because the day had been so rough without her really speaking to me much.  We prank called some of her friends to freak them out and when we went to bed I thought we had gotten past the awkwardness between the two of us and that after her friend left things would be good between us.

Tuesday:  Tuesday was the longest day of my life.  We went to more churches and saw more statues and shit like that, which was cool, but I was tired and Stef and Shelly continued to basically ignore me.  I hadn’t been drinking enough water since I arrived and I was pretty dehydrated.  I could tell I needed water because when I would piss it pretty much looked like maple syrup.  Shelly left at 6 and Stef and I’s train left at 10.  Stef needed to buy our tickets for our trip back to Kiev so she stood in line for a while to buy that.  I was standing in line talking to her when she turned to me and said, I just realized I don’t care about what you are talking about and you are speaking pretty loudly right now, so could you do me a favor and go somewhere else.  Wow, this turned me on more than anything anyone has ever said to me.  I told her I would be happy to and went and wondered around the train station by myself for the next hour and a half while she waited for her tickets.  We went and sat at a cafe in silence when she go the tix and then boarded the train and went to sleep.  The train was this post soviet monstrosity that smelled like a cross between old gym socks and a wet vagina, but not the good kind of wet vagina, the bad kind, the very very bad kind.  We pull into her town around 4 in the morning and go to her apartment and fall asleep together. 

Wednesday:  We wake up Wednesday morning and I had pretty much had enough with the silent treatment and figured we could talk about what the deal was.  This is when she turns to me and says.  Honestly, I don’t like who you are, I don’t like the way that you act, and I think this trip was a huge mistake.  She then proceeds to tell me that I am overly considerate and that she is insulted every time I open a door for her.  I told her that it was a mistake for me to come and see her and that she was pretty much a liar just like the rest of her family.  Things got pretty heated from there and she spent the rest of the day in her kitchen reading and I spent the rest of the day in her bedroom watching the office on DVD.  There wasn’t any food in her town that day so I literally ate a tomato and cucumber the entire day.  I was mentally and physically exhausted and was basically trying to get some water into my system so I didn’t have to die next to this bitch.

Thursday and Friday and Saturday:  Basically after the break up things just went to hell.  We traveled to Poltava together at which point we yelled at each other in the street.  I had said something dumb, probably using the wrong tense of a verb or something like that, and she came back with some comment about me not graduating college.  I immediately though of you guys and the pride that you would have for me if you were there about to witness the verbal lashing I was about to unleash on this girl.  It went a little something like this, “Stef I understand the fact that you and I are not really getting along right now.  I also understand how, you could have gotten the impression that I am a happy person.  You see for the past 6 months I have generally enjoyed having you around, I have shared parts of my life with you that not everyone gets to see.  You need to understand though that happiness is not one of my strong points, generally speaking, I am what most people refer to as an asshole.  The things that make me happiest are the downfalls and short comings of others and up into this point I have not rejoiced in the presence of all of the things wrong with you.  However, if you make another comment about this trip belittling me in anyway, I will call out your deepest darkest insecurities so quickly that you will have no choice but to realize the emptiness of that cold cavity you call a heart and send you crying back to America where you will realize that no one in this entire world wants to be with you.”  Her faced dropped and she just turned away.  I smiled for the first time in a week.

Yeah there are more things like that but you get the point. 

I spent Saturday night in Amsterdam, where yes I did things that we will not talk about through my work e-mail.  I also sent one of the best/worst e-mails in my life. I got home yesterday and couldn’t be happier.