10/23/14

Fast forward a year. Maybe a little less. Maybe a little more. Remember how I said Annie was allergic to everything–it wasn’t a joke. She moved out and into a house with some friends from Denver. It was an awesome house. Cold and poorly insulated and collegiate. They had I think 6 people living there I think. It only had three bedrooms. It also was a moldy house.

Annie became very sick and at first she couldn’t figure out why. She would be sick from time to time while living in the apartment with me, but it wasn’t so consistent or so bad as when she lived in this house. After trying everything she could think of she went to a doctor for a scratch test. They tested 50 different things, pollens, molds, things like that. She was allergic to every single one. She concluded that she couldn’t live in the Pacific Northwest. She had to move back to Denver. I remember her telling me and it was like a rock in my stomach but I didn’t let it show much. We were good enough friends–I knew we wouldn’t just lose touch.

At the same time Annie was leaving I had started dating a girl. Beautiful, out of my league looks wise. I have a theory about beautiful women that I might inform you of sometime later. It’s not flattering. Rachel and I would both graduate in June. Rachel was the girl I started dating. I was very upfront about what I wanted with her. I just wanted to have fun. If our relationship became work I wasn’t interested. She didn’t seem to have any kind of problem with that.

I started my own homebrew and would still go to the Eastside Tavern on Thursdays, but it wasn’t the same without Annie. I just didn’t have someone to talk and talk and talk to. Rachel was 20 and didn’t drink anyway. Not only did she not drink but she didn’t want to be around people who were drinking. She felt that alcohol was the opiate of the masses. I’ve always thought the opiate of the masses was T.V.

Fast forward again. Spring rolled around as did our graduation. As good a party as I’d ever been a part of.

Rachel and I had planned to go to South Korea together to teach English. She’d gotten into a very expensive ESL training course. Typically, I hadn’t. I just took a cheap online course, but we both got similar jobs, so I don’t think it was any worse in the end. I also think I was probably a better teacher than she ever was. She just wasn’t real. . . understanding.

I got a job before her and had to leave three months before she would be coming to join me. We’d settled on going to an island called Jeju Island. If you’ve never heard of it before–look it up, it’s amazing. Just google it. Right now. Really. . . Yeah, that’s where I lived.

 

10/21/14

Olympia WA, on a rare cloudless day.

Jet lagged and exhausted (I had barely slept on the plane at all) I arrived on the pickup platform and found my dad waiting there. It had been six months, but we’d talked quite a bit over skype and whatnot while I was traveling.

We loaded my by stuff into his car and then headed south down to Olympia.

It might seem weird but this was 2008, which doesn’t feel all the long ago. But in 2008 the Iphone was a new thing, I didn’t even have a cellphone of any kind, not even 3G devices were still rare or for people who had more money than I did, and so there was no way for me to call this girl I had never met who I might be living with.

We drove down to The Evergreen State college, but it was a sunday so the library wasn’t open. I was still able to pick up a wifi signal and call her phone over skype. Unfortunately she didn’t pick up and so after a couple tries we just got back in the car and headed home.

I at least had one week to sort things out, as it was spring break.

A day later I got an email from Annie that explained how she had lost her phone and so that was why she hadn’t answered. She would have a new phone soon and we agreed to meet the day before classes started. I told her if it didn’t work out I could always just kip with a friend until I find a different place. I met her at a Cafe Vita in downtown Olympia–you should never invite a someone from craigslist to your home.

I walked in and surveyed the people in the cafe. I think she had said in her emails she had red hair because I remember looking for that. She also had freckles and when I said, “Annie?” and we shook hands I noticed her skin seemed thinner than most peoples.

I thought I had seen her around before but I couldn’t be completely sure.

We hung out and just talked here and there about travels. She had just gotten back from Hawaii hitchhiking around and working on farms.  We talk about what classes we were taking and what we were interested in studying as a whole. Then it came around to the place in question. It was a two bedroom, one bathroom, smallish place. I’d never lived with a girl before. She’d never lived with a guy before. I was totally willing to try it out and she seemed ambivalent but she was the one that said, “So would you like to see the place?”

I told her I would.

I followed her back to the place which was tucked back in the woods behind the organic farm, near campus. It was an apartment over a garage and right next door was the landlords, Carmen and Steve. The place was beautiful and clean. I told her it looked great. We went next door and spoke with Carmen and Steve. They looked at me a bit like–are you sure about this guy? But we signed the lease and I just never met. I was living with someone, suddenly, I hadn’t ever met and who I didn’t know. But that would change.

 

10/20/14

Back then I had hair that hung down well past my shoulders. I’d tie it back in a ponytail. Apparently that didn’t change how the Sea-Tac security felt about me once I landed in Seattle. No sooner had a lifted my bag off the conveyer belt did a woman in uniform ask me to “come this way please.”

Random my ass.

I shouldn’t have written down that I had gone to the Netherlands on my little customs form. I should have left it at Germany, UK, Spain and Italy, because that’s where I had told my school I was going. Instead I had gone all over. Denmark, Czech Republic, Hungary, Scotland, and Portugal were added to the list. After bumping into some infuriating French people in Amsterdam I had concluded that France could wait.

Back in Seattle the lady lead me over to the “Random” back search line. It had been very difficult to fit everything in my bag, as I only had one and I’d picked up some things when I was in Europe as souvenirs, naturally. The woman then proceeded to take everything I had in my bag and shake it out and go through the pockets and then toss it to the side.

Once everything from every pocket had been strewn all over the table she said,

“Alright. You can put everything back now,” as if she was disappointed she hadn’t found something wrong with my stuff.

I wasn’t an idiot. I wasn’t going bring back a bunch of pot or mushrooms or something like that. It took me a long time to pack everything back into my bag. The whole while the woman was dismantling someone elses carefully packed bag and tossing the things in my direction, glancing at me from time to time as if it were my fault my stuff had been unpacked.

I wondered if she’d EVER found anything dangerous. Probably not. Here she was, thinking she was protecting the USA from terrorists, but really what she was doing was invading normal peoples privacy. The paradox of the false positive strikes again.

For those of you who don’t know what the paradox of the false positive is there is a wonderful book called “Little Brother,” by Cory Doctorow, that explores that issue. It’s a YA book, but blew my mind even when I was in my early twenties. For you who don’t want to take the time to read that book I’ll try to explain the false positive paradox here.

When you’re conducting a search for something that’s very very rare, lets say, since I was just searched in an airport, a terrorist, the instrument with which you search needs to be very precise. New York City is a city of 8.4 million people. In New York City there are probably three or four terrorists at any given time. If you have a instrument, or proceeding that is really good at catching terrorists, lets say 99% effective that means 1 person out of 100 will be singled out as a terrorist when they actually aren’t. In a city of 8.4 million people that means this test would find. This means the test would tell the tester there are 84,000 terrorists in New York City. Despite have a test that tells the truth 99% of the time the test is actually inaccurate to a startling degree. The sad thing is, however, that most procedures to find terrorists aren’t even close to 99% effective. Their more like 60% or 40% because, really? What does a terrorist look like?