#152. A Dance and a Mission (Thursday, February 16, 2006)

What was your best day…of experiencing an inner shift that you can’t explain?

My infamous early-2006-to-mid-2007 ambition kick (#93, #65) was simultaneously highly productive, highly destructive, and—most definitely—highly instructive. Its aftereffects, good and bad, still persist today. Yet if I had to point to one event that kickstarted it, I’d struggle to name one.

This day was probably the closest thing. But “close” is strictly relative here. Strictly.

Leading up to this day, I was in a pretty good spot in my life. I was healthy, happy, set up to go to a good university in two years’ time and eventually have a good career, all of that. But within all that, I was just there—blindly following the path I was supposed to follow, without really imagining I could direct my life anywhere outside it.

The Dance

Thursday night was the winter semi-formal dance. And it wasn’t even close to Jolt (#8). I was one of the first people there, as usual. I sang along loudly to all the bland popular songs, spent a lot of time in the halls talking with my two best friends—at this point about equally so—Nigel Healey (#16, #1) and Damien Bei (#54)¹, and did the awkward slow-dance thing with girls who didn’t mean anything to me.²

By contrast, Damien had his eyes on a few specific girls. Most were in the grades above us, and I couldn’t understand the appeal of any of them. Except Sophie Watson, who was in our grade. His crush on her was a lot quieter than the others; he’d only mentioned it once or twice, and I had somehow latched onto her as the one I teased him about constantly. In hindsight, probably because I actually agreed with him that Sophie was good-looking.

So, as we pass several of his girls of interest throughout the night, I continue my teasing, knowing that Damien was a lot of talk and would never actually have the guts to ask any of these girls to dance.

But then, later in the night, after about an hour or so apart, I tease him again—specifically about Sophie. And he just tells me, completely matter-of-factly, that he’d already danced with her.

Well, that was a shock. And, looking back, I clearly reacted with more jealousy than I understood at the time. After the dance,³, on the bus home with Damien, I went on a strange mini-rant about how I hadn’t asked any girls to dance—even though I had—because it didn’t feel genuine if I didn’t actually like them. Damien, for his part, never brought up Sophie again. He just listened and responded like he genuinely understood what I was saying—which no normal person would.⁴

The Mission

Friday was a PD Day—i.e., a day off from school—except for us nerds in the space simulation club (#101). We were doing a one-day mini-mission to Venus. (It was a compressed form of the annual five-day mission to Titan two months later.)

The mini-mission crew consisted of Sean (club head and mission commander, #101), Shawn (deputy commander), Jackson (pilot), Nigel, and me. I had followed Nigel into the club (#16) only a few months earlier and had been tangentially involved up to this point, so this would be my first actual space-simulation mission. And, objectively, it was wild.

Most notably, late in the mission Sean got infected by some disease⁵ on the Venus surface, started going mental, and we had to lock him in the hot lab. An hour later, Shawn went in to check on him, and I sent my bowl of ramen along as food. He went in, got infected too, and the whole thing spiraled from there, ending with Nigel, the second-lowest-ranked crew member, becoming commander.

Shawn ended up eating the ramen. More seriously, what stuck with me was that I was the only person on the crew who never became commander. Somehow, even in a simulated chain-of-command collapse, I remained at the bottom.

What’s interesting about this episode is that, like the dance the day before, it’s objectively not a positive story. I didn’t feel particularly inspired or excited by the mini-mission, and two weeks later I was actually close to quitting the club because I didn’t feel any real purpose in it, before I discovered the mythical Copernicus storage facility and became quartermaster (#101).

Yet somewhere across those two days—Damien dancing with Sophie, then me taking part in a legitimately cool simulated space mission and barely enjoying it—something seems to have shifted. I don’t know what. I don’t know how. And after twenty years, I’m not going to force an explanation now.

All I know is that, chronologically at least, these two days seem to form the clearest dividing line between go-with-the-flow high school Jeff and has-a-constant-chip-on-his-shoulder high school Jeff. And that chip never quite disappeared. Twenty years and counting…

As in #128, the only specific conversation I remember was about Latin: our supervising Latin teacher was trying to convince us to take AP Latin the next year. Only Nigel did.
I didn’t have a strong crush of my own at the time. I’d had a big thing for Noelle that fall, but unlike with Samantha Wisniewski two years earlier (#54), I was wise enough not to engineer some bet with Damien that forced me to ask her out.
I distinctly recall being the most thirsty I have ever been, leading me to buy three cans of pop and down them right there with Damien watching.
Nothing ended up happening with Damien and Sophie. Later that term, Damien and I made a deal: if I edited / half-wrote his Catcher in the Rye essay, he’d ask Sophie out. I did such a bad job that, when the time came, I was too embarrassed for him to watch and pretended to be busy. He got rejected.
On the topic of diseases, Sean frequently warned us about “hantavirus” from rat droppings in the hot lab. I didn’t know what that was, and it sounded so much like “hab gnomes” (mythical creatures that lived in our habitat) that I assumed he was joking. It wasn’t until well after my Space Sim days that I learned hantavirus could be extremely dangerous. Again, the safety standards left something to be desired.