#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 (#87, #62) was simultaneously a highly productive, highly destructive, and (most definitely) highly instructive period of my life. Whose aftereffects, good and bad, still persist to this very day. Yet, if I were asked to point to one single event that kickstarted it, I would struggle to identify any.

This day was probably the closest thing. But, “close” is strictly in relative terms 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, have a good career, all of that. But between all that, I was just there; just blindly following the proper path of what I should be doing, without thinking that I would ever be able to drive my life in any way different from that norm.

The Dance

Thursday night was the winter semi-formal dance. And… no, this was not Jolt (#8). Not even close. Nothing of real note happened. I was one of the first people there as usual, I sang along loudly to all the bland popular songs, I spend a lot time in the halls talking with my two best friends—at this critical point, about equally so—Nigel Healey (#14, #1) and Damien Bei (#49) about a bunch of random stuff that I now forget.¹, and I did the awkward slow dance thing with some girls that didn’t mean anything.²

By contrast, Damien had his eyes on a few specific girls. (He always had a standing list.) All of them were from the grades above us, and for all of them I couldn’t tell what the appeal was. Except for one girl in our grade, Sophie Watson. His crush on her was a lot quieter than the others; he’d only mentioned it once or twice, and I had somehow decided to latch onto her as the one to tease him constantly about. In hindsight, it was because internally I actually kind of agreed with him that Sophie was good-looking.

So, as we walk many 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 to 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, not gloatingly or in an annoyed way, just straight matter-of-factly, that he already did dance with her.

Well, that was a shock. And, looking back, must have initiated a jealousy inside me that I did a really bad job of containing. Because, following the dance,³, as I took the bus with Damien, I went on this strange mini-rant about how I didn’t ask any girls to dance (even though I had?) because it didn’t feel genuine if I didn’t truly like them. For his part, Damien didn’t even bring up his success with Sophie at all, and just chilled and responded to me genuinely like he understood what I was saying (which no normal person would).

Side Note: It was just a dance. Nothing ended up happening with Damien and Sophie.⁴

The Mission

Friday was a PD Day—i.e., a day off from school; except for us nerds in the space simulation club (#86). We were doing a one-day mini-mission today, to Venus. (As the name implies, it was a compressed form of the annual five-day long mission two months later, which is described in all its extra-vehicular glory here: #138).

The mini-mission crew consists of Sean Stewart (club head and Mission Commander), Shawn De Vries (deputy commander), Jackson Shandon (pilot), Nigel, and me. Having just followed Nigel to the club (#14) a few months and being just tangentially involved up into now, this would be my first space simulation experience. 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 decides to check up on him, and I give him my bowl of ramen to deliver as foot. He goes in, gets infected as well, and the whole thing just spirals out of control from there, ending with Nigel—the second lowest-ranked crew above me—becoming commander. (Shawn ends up eating the ramen; but more seriously, what sticks out here is that I’m the only person in the crew who never becomes commander—like me being lowest-ranked was a point in itself.)

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 out of lack of purpose, before I discovered the mythical Copernicus storage facility and became quartermaster (#86).

Yet… between Damien dancing with Sophie and me partaking in a legitimately cool simulated space mission and not enjoying any of it, something must have awoken in me. I don’t know what. I don’t know how. And I’m not going to try and piece together an explanation here (I’ve had over twenty years).

All I know is, these two days—chronologically at least—felt like the clearest demarcation point between “go-with-flow” high school Jeff, and “has-a-constant-chip-on-his-shoulder” high school Jeff. With that chip never quite disappearing for twenty years and counting…

Again, just like in #122, the ONLY detail I remember is a Latin conversation. This time, with our Latin teacher who was supervising the dance and was trying to convince us to take AP Latin in our junior year. Only Nigel did.
I’ll note here I didn’t have a strong crush of my own at the time. I had a big thing for this girl, Noelle, in the fall term; but like Samantha Wisniewski two years ago (#47) she didn’t even know me, and I was wise enough this time to not make a bet with Damien that would force me to ask her out.
Where 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.
Though, later that term, I came to an arrangement with Damien that if I edited / half-wrote his Catcher in the Rye English essay, he’d ask Sophie out. Turns out, I did such a bad job on the essay and was so embarrassed for his sake, that when the time came for him to do it, I kind of pretended to be busy and left the scene. He got rejected. (I realize now he was likely planning to ask her out anyways; hence why the payment was so low compared to the other side in #47.)
On the topic of diseases, Sean would make frequent reference to “hantavirus” risk from rat droppings in the hot lab. I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded so much like “hab gnomes” (mythical creatures who live in our habitat) that I thought it was him joking. Until well after my Space Sim days did I realize that virus could have a 50% mortality rate. Again, safety standards left something to be desired.