Apparently I Enjoy Jumping From High Locations

The first time I realized this was back when I was in Talloires in 2006. There was a really cool place that our host families took us where you could go cliff jumping into Lake Annecy. I remember my host brother telling me about the 24 meter (78 ft) jump that none of the locals were insane enough to attempt. This was a challenge if I ever heard one. So after a few shorter jumps, I decided that I was finished with the jumps designed for infants. It was time to jump 78 feet: pretty much the equivalent of 8 stories. I told people that I was going to do this (the first of the Americans to do so; I didn't even witness anybody do it before me. I assumed that my host brother's tales of survived attempts were true enough I guess?). The reaction I got was either "yeah right Sevs, shut up and keep jumping off the baby hills with the rest of the normal human beings," or "you're out of your goddamn mind you lunatic." At this point I started to get the hint that my brain might be broken for even considering this....whatever.

So anyway, I hiked up to the jumping area with a few people who I was able to convince that I wouldn't chicken out. I peered over the edge, and I'm pretty sure at that point every bone in my body turned to jello and even I started to doubt my own insanity levels. However, if I backed down, it would NOT have looked good for my pristine record of doing completely crazy shit for ABSOLUTELY no reason at all. Honestly, I hadn't even seen anybody do this before, how do I know that right below the water level there's not some huge jagged rock with a bunch of French peoples' bones scattered around, or some dinosaur-monster that dines on anybody dumb enough to jump from a high precipice into some unknown depth of water? I was starting to worry that this decision would get me naturally selected. As in most situations where I'm nervous, my stomach started going crazy; it felt like there were a bunch butterflies having sex in there and that I was about to vomit up some disgusting lump of concentrated dignity. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW HIGH 78 FEET REALLY IS. It's nuts you guys.

I snapped back into reality when my friend Rebecca shouted up "are you doing this, or what?" She was on a lower ledge, waiting to take a picture of me in mid-air. I immediately realized that if I backed down from this, I would tarnish my record of being the most awesome/heroic person in the history of her friends. It was here that I had to prove the true depth of craziness that I tend to represent around other people. So with shaking knees and feign of confidence, I counted to 3 and ran off the edge. I can't describe the feeling I had as I was falling for 2 or 3 seconds, because the only thing running through my mind was, "I'm definitely going to die. I really hate when I make stupid, impulsive decisions, because now I'm going to die and there's very little I can do to avoid that in mid-air. I hope my dead body doesn't form an embarrassing pose as I sink..." It felt like an eternity. However, with that much time, my brain wasn't functioning enough to remember the advice I had received earlier: land like a pencil, point your toes down, and clench your ass. Whoopsidaisy. Well, as evidenced by the fact that I'm currently writing this message on the interweb, I DID survive. But my ass hurt like a motherfucker.

After my jump, 3 other heroic/insane Americans also plummeted to their half-deaths. These brave souls, Ani, Justin, Matt, and I, formed a super-elite group for the remainder of the Talloires trip. We would constantly flash the 2-4 sign that we invented, with a nod of understanding that what we had just done would forever define our level of commitment to doing completely insane things for nothing more than a whimsical dare. If you don't believe me, I actually have a video of my jump here.

Rebecca photographed the greatest moment of my life. Thank you for being such a skilled photographer.

This brings me to the reason for this post: I went skydiving today. That's right: I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane at 14,000 ft, hit terminal velocity, and fucking landed on the ground like a god damn champion.

My friend Colleen made all the arrangements, because she was tired of people saying things like "oh yeah, that sounds really cool, count me in!" only to hear back a month later "oh you were serious? No I'm not doing that." I was not one of those people. So I drove down to New York last night, got up early this morning with Colleen, her roomate, and his brother, and we friggn went skydiving. While it lacks a certain terrifying, gut-wrenching feeling of questioning my own sanity (because I've actually heard real accounts of people surviving skydiving jumps), I decided that skydiving isn't TOO touristy, and that it would still be an epic experience. So we all strapped into a harness with some tandem instructor dude, got in a little prop-plane, and flew to 14,000 feet. A bit higher than 78. But anything above 40 feet doesn't really make a difference, because EVERYTHING looks like a suicidal disaster waiting to happen. I was all prepped with my instructions, some signals and whatnot, and put on my hat and goggles (which tend to make people look like a hilarious human-penis), and got ready. Up until this point I was not phased AT ALL for what was about to happen. I don't know why; I just felt safe. I didn't have that "butterflies in my stomach, fucking" sensation, and I don't even think it hit me that I was about to jump out of a moving aircraft. Colleen was the last one off the plane, so after our two comrades somehow disappeared out the door (all of a sudden they were gone, I didn't even notice), it was only me and my instructor, and her with hers. Even walking up to the open door of the plane, I wasn't nervous in the least. I have no idea why I wasn't the least bit scared, but I was a friggn stoic legend: standing at the exit of the plane garbed in my harness and penis-hat, leaning out the door with a huge goofy grin on my face. I was pumped.

The only thing running through my head was "I AM GOING TO ROCK THIS LIKE A HURRICANE." It was a fact. The plane had to make a turn, so I was standing at the door for at least thirty seconds, staring at the curvature of the Earth, the clouds, and ground almost 3 miles below. My instructor was a pretty cool guy and kept half-shoving me in and out of the doorway to give me a scare, but I ate it up with a spoon. I was loving every second of this. My adrenaline was going bananas, and I couldn't wait to jump out of that friggn plane. Before I knew it, the instructor counted to 3 and I was already out. I don't even remember jumping. We actually did a complete front-flip in the air as we jumped out, because the first thing I saw was the bottom of the plane getting smaller with each moment. We had about 40 seconds of free-fall, where my instructor let me do some pretty cool stuff. As all the other beginners were coughing up blood from fright and crapping their pants, I was still completely un-phased by the entire situation when we first met. I think he understood how eerily comfortable I was, so he made the decision that we'd do some cool tricks during the fall. I used my arms to control our rotation in free fall. I was having an awesome time, so I started making us go through some pretty mind-blowing spins. Let me just say that the feeling that you were spinning completely out of control in free fall is AWESOME. Because aside from the first 5 seconds of jumping, you reach terminal velocity and you actually aren't accelerating anymore, so it just feels like a calm, relaxing, floating feeling. Even though you are falling at 125 mph. This was a pretty cool feeling, but since there is something seriously wrong with me, I wanted to mix things up, so I had us do those crazy spins.

At 6,000 ft, the instructor would show you the altitude so you could pull the rip-cord. I saw that we had 6,300 ft, so I opted to wait a little bit. He started waving his hand frantically in front of my face as we reached 5,700 ft, so I GUESS I should pull the cord, lest he be forced to do it instead. There wasn't any crazy jolt like you see in videos, it actually felt alright. The remainder of the fall was a nice, gentle glide down. Well, except when the dude gave me the controls of the chute. I quickly learned that if I pulled really hard to the right or left, we'd spin really fast and hit some G forces. He was having a good time with it, so I was really being a maniac with those controls. Eventually, as all good things, our time had to come to an end, so we flared the chute and had a soft landing. I actually felt like a champ, because instead of all the other tandem couples who land amusingly on their asses, we landed on our feet.

I don't have any pictures of the skydiving jump, but trust me; it was an unforgettable, awesome experience. I think I retrospectively crapped my pants just THINKING about how cool it was. It was over way too soon. I will definitely be doing this again.

A Few Epic Dreams from Early 2006

Most of these include zombies in some way. Big surprise.

2/25/06

Zombies had attacked, and I had to get to my Uncle's house for safety. One zombie was chasing me down a road for 20 minutes until a car came. It stopped, so I said that I was hitch-hiking and hoped that he could take me somewhere. The zombie caught up with me and got in the back seat of the car. I slammed the door and ran off as the car drove away. Sorry dude.

I made it to my Uncle's house. He had a bear, which when I saw it, I started to fight it. We wrestled, but then decided to fight the zombies together instead. Joe and Keith from South Hall were also there. The leader and second-in-command of the zombies came to the house, which was now my house. Joe went out to distract them and started having sex with the "vice-president" zombie in the back of one of my cars in the driveway. (WHAT?) Keith went out with a gun and tried to shoot her, but she bit him. Then I went out and picked up the gun to shoot her. Apparently, Ryan (one of my friends from Tufts) had replaced my gun with a water gun, so I shot nothing but water at her. I found myself in the middle of all the zombies with no weapon. I couldn't even kill Keith before he turned into a zombie. I ran into the house to find the real gun, but Ryan had taken those too. The end????? Thanks a lot, Ryan.

6/15/06

This dream started out kind of cool. We had to hike up a really steep mountain. Me and Lauren found some Gentiana clusii (wow I guess I was in Talloires during this, and I was obviously in the middle of memorizing flower names for my "Flowers of the Alps" class. Real cool, Sevs. Real cool.). Then it sort of turned into a nightmare. I had to protect Lauren from a bunch of ninja people. I had two samurai swords and I kicked ass. Then we were trapped in a creepy house, and Death was trying to kill us with gross or creepy methods. One was a pile of yellow tentacle things that grew toward us and tried to strangle us. I cauterized the tops of the tentacles so they couldn't grow anymore. Whenever we went into a dark room, Death was a shadow there waiting for us. We found my Dad, who was watching a video of all the fucked up things Death was going to do to us if he caught us. Some people's heads grew bigger and bigger until they couldn't see. Then a huge bug-thing came up behind them and devoured them. I'm kind of glad I woke up at this point.

8/26/06

My dream started with me and a bunch of others inside a prison. Zombies came and started attacking. Geoff was stuck in one of the cells, so I ran out of the prison, locking as many of the zombies in as I could. Me and Gary (another friend from home) made it outside, fighting off a couple zombies as we ran to the street. Gary grabbed a handgun near a cop car as a zombie (who was holding shotgun shells) approached us. Gary covered me as I tried to get the shotgun in the cop car. I got it out and shot the zombie in the face, but it did nothing. As it came closer, the cop said it was a gun to draw fire, not a real shotgun. I went back to the car to get the real gun and blew the zombie's head off.

In another dream, my Mom and I were in the same location as the last dream. It this dream however, you became a zombie by a bird biting you. I was protecting everyone and a penguin bit me. Then a panda ran through the scene and down a staircase as I killed the penguin. Then I woke up. Ummm...where'd the panda come from?

8/30/06

In this dream I was training a small bear. One night, a huge wolf came and battled it. That's all I remember. Standard.

11/04/06

Kyle and I were becoming Power Rangers. WHAT THE HELL? THAT IS THE ENTIRE DREAM!?!?! Awesome!

11/06/06

Zombies started overrunning Tufts. Me, Jordan, and Kyle were all getting away from them and got caught up in a big crowd. Prof. Matson was a zombie, but was chatting with Kyle. All the while I kept hitting him in the head with a hammer. We all got train tickets to New Hampshire to get away (because as we all know, catching a scheduled train is a very simple task during the zombie-apocalypse). Kyle's girlfriend was going to hide in a closet, so he decided to stay. Jordan and I ran through South Hall, but every floor had zombies on it, locked inside the dorm. We ran to Medford with a bunch of zombies chasing us. Some floor mats somehow turned into zombies too, but I beat them back with my baseball bat.

12/15/06

This dream had me and my landlord, Ed, talking to some people about the house, and for some reason they gave me a bunch of money. They gave me several "thousand dollar" bills. I hid the money in a pie. However, a lot of people wanted to eat the pie, so I ran off and hid it in my medicine cabinet.

In another dream my Dad was driving me and my sister to Boston. Along the way, he bumped into one of his friends who wanted a ride to New Hampshire, so we drove there instead. My sister and I were pissed. Then my sister told me she was a lesbian. Suddenly I was a detective, and I had to stop a guy from killing a hog with a chainsaw. But this was no ordinary hog. It was destined to kill a crocodile that comes out of a shark's mouth. Seriously. What is going on here. How does my brain formulate these scenarios? I don't even understand how I do this.

Dreams from October/November 2005

It is fairly outrageous going back and reading some of my old dreams, because I can almost immediately remember what was going on in my life to produce some aspects of these dreams. I've decided that I'm going to keep what I originally wrote unmolested (not sure why, but I just got a kick out of the fact that I used the word "unmolested." Probably a good sign for my gradually-developing maturity.). Anything that I add I'll put in italics. Think you can handle that? You better, because this train is FULL SPEED AHEAD. Oh, one more thing. These entries are going to have the literacy quality of a blind chimpanzee with Down Syndrome (is that even possible?) on account of the fact that I JUST WOKE UP when I wrote these, and was most likely still somewhat unconscious. So be gentle. Plus, when I wrote these, I was still in the mindset that what I had just dreamed makes sense, so some of these sentences will make ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE because my brain was still in "dream mode." Just run with it.

10/11/05

My friends and I were badmouthing a really big spider that was behind us. (WTF DOES THIS EVEN MEAN???) It sort of looked like a red land-octopus. It shape shifted into a weird Kirby-creature that could bounce really far. We ran, but it chased me. It kept trying to bite me. Then I grabbed it off me and threw it into a plastic surgery building, where they operated on it so it couldn't shape-shift anymore. How can you even make this up?

10/12/05

Jordan (one of my good friends from Tufts) and I had several long discussions about whether or not to jump off a very high roof. We didn't do it, but came very close. When I read this, I see the two of us discussing at length the advantages and disadvantages of jumping off a roof very seriously. Makes sense.

10/14/05

In my dream, I was drunk and everyone knew it but me. I was trying to climb a parade float that I was supposed to be on, but everyone kept pushing me off. I was confused about why I couldn't lift myself back onto it.

10/15/05

I was playing dodgeball, but a lot of my team couldn't come. The other team only had four players though. We destroyed them thoroughly. I like how the most important part of this dream is not whether we won or lost, but how badly we beat the other team. Winning was assumed.

11/3/05

In my dream, I was a bunch of different Smash Bros. characters. Somehow, I was relating the entire fight to astrophysics. Obviously, my sophomore year can be summed up by my Astrophysics class and playing a lot of Smash.

11/9/05

I had a dream about calculating the r and theta forces of dodgeball. I kept thinking I was getting wrong answers. Holy crap what a shitty dream that must have been.

11/10/05

Jizz Jizz tried to finish off my last grapefruit juice. HAHAHAHA: that is the entire part of the dream! For some reason, I thought this sentence sufficiently explains exactly what was going on. You should see what it looks like, it is just a scribbled mess in between two lines on the notebook paper. I think I was still asleep when I wrote this.

In another dream, a bunch of us were trying to see all possible movies. We kept going into Philadelphia to a building with a really fast elevator. It went down 330 floors in less than 10 seconds. Lucky (my dog, who actually recently passed away) lived in it. At one point, Lauren (my girlfriend at the time) didn't think I knew about 30th Street Station, but she said it was actually 90th Street Station. It was a really nice day out, but in the morning it rained. Geoff (one of my best friends from home) didn't go with me in the morning. We stopped at Wawa and he decided not to come. There was a huge scorpion-spider walking around, and then it started to mate with another. It was horrifying. I have absolutely no idea how my past-self thought this made any sense. This is just a jumble of setting descriptions mixed in with a story about a horny monster. What the hell.

11/16/05

Kyle (my roomate that year in South Hall) and I were working on building a speaker, when I went off to go to the bathroom. I wandered into an unlocked empty room in South. I went back and told Kyle, but when we went back, it was occupied.

11/26/05

A few groups of people were either sleeping or doing homework in the building I was in. I was trying to figure out which Math assignment to do, and trying to find my assignments from previous years. I ran to Toys R Us to get away from a group of zombies. WHAT? How and when did that last part start happening?

11/28/05

In our dorms, locks were put on all the bathrooms that you had to swipe to get into. There was a masterbation calculator on it (honestly, where do I come up with this stuff?), and if they assumed you masterbated a certain amount, your GPA would go down a point and you couldn't get into the bathroom. You had an allowance of 6 for every 62 times you used the bathroom, but it was broken and said I was above the limit. So my GPA went down and I couldn't use the bathroom, which now finally had the good kind of soap. (I really hated that purell hand sanitizer stuff. Probably because it smelled exactly like vodka). Then I was in Iraq at an airport, but it wouldn't let planes fly. So I had to walk to the airport next door, where I ran into Matt Higger (one of my good friends from Tufts). This is the third time I had met him in this spot.

We also won the dodgeball tournament in Chicago. I love how I randomly throw things in at the end that have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the dream.

11/30/05

I was at Tufts and it was the first stages of a zombie attack. I was getting people ready to go to a safe place. Later, we ordered Chinese, but mine never arrived. I trained a mouse in South Hall when a new girl moved in. I just wrote three ENTIRELY different ideas in four sentences. What happened with the zombie attack? Were we ok? I guess so, because about five minutes later we were already trying to order Chines. And I was obviously PISSED that mine didn't arrive. I know my priorities here. Noting whether or not I enjoyed my chinese food is above explaining how we got out of a zombie attack. And that last sentence? What am I thinking here? "I trained a mouse in South Hall when a new girl moved in." Of course, of course. What else would I be doing to prepare for her arrival? I guess you can just make up your own reasoning for that one.

You're either going to like this or not. Either way, you're going to have to deal with it.

It may have already come to your attention, but I've actually returned from California and am currently back in Boston. This is old news for most people, and some of you may not even have realized that I left. I find that difficult to believe, however, because you are currently reading an interblag entitled "Goin' to California," written with the obvious intend to describe my time out west. I would actually be fairly blown away if you stumbled upon this site accidentally, completely unaware that I was gone.

Whatever. Anyway, I don't foresee any more company sponsored business trips/boondoggles, so the main theme for this blog is now outdated. However, with the encouragement of some friends, namely Nadkarni, I've decided that I'm going to try to actually update this with new posts and random crap somewhat often. At least more often than I currently do, which is roughly never. This may include stories (of the epic variety, most likely) of my wild antics and/or crazy adventures, random philosophical queries that my twisted-... er... unique... mind has concocted, and other stuff I guess. I've actually been writing down my dreams (or what I remember of them) in a journal (entitled "Dream Book") since 2004, and I might throw some of those in here. It's actually really interesting going back and reading what insane adventures I've come up with whilst asleep (actually, I sleep so deeply that it is medically defined as a coma). I've discovered that a good proportion, like 40-50% of my dreams, include either dodgeball or zombies in some way. And those 3 or 4 dreams that include both? Oh man. You can't even fathom, with 100% of your brain, what that experience is like. Perhaps reading what my dreams are like, you might get a better sense of how my brain functions the way it does.

I'm too lazy to make a new blog, so I'm just going to keep this one and throw whatever the hell I want into it. If you have a problem with this, you seriously need to get a life right now. You're on thin ice buddy.