Ramblings

A lot of people are talking about the election these days, which is all very well and good, but maybe some of you are tired of hearing about it. Instead, if you want, you can read a long, rambling, and somewhat incoherent story about the time I accidentally put hydrogen peroxide into my eye.

Ron and I met when our girlfriends started living together in 2004, which was also an election year, but we met in the summer when nobody was talking about voting yet. Both of us ended up spending a lot of time at their new place, partly because our own apartments were in such shambles.

My real apartment, the one I actually paid rent to inhabit but never spent any time at, was shared between me and two other guys who were pretty big slobs. I don’t think I ever saw the bottom of the sink the entire time I lived there since no one ever washed the dishes. It was the kind of apartment where if you opened up the fridge, the only thing edible inside would be some ketchup and, maybe, a couple of cans of beer—Burger Beer, probably, a brand that although it’s cheap and common throughout the Midwest, people never seem to even be aware of its existence. If you were lucky there might have been some old, crusty pizza.

There were two bathrooms, which was nice, especially since a week after we moved in one of my roommate’s brothers stayed the weekend with us, drank too much rum and whisky and beer, and threw up all over the floor of the smaller bathroom. Nobody bothered to clean it up until we moved out a year later—we just kept the bathroom door closed and pretended it didn’t exist—a testament to how dedicated all of us were to our own sloth and filth. Needless to say, it was hardly a place I felt like rushing home to after a long day. It was all very depressing.

My own bedroom was also little more than a closet and, besides, I didn’t own a bed and slept on the floor. One time a friend of mine got crabs so bad, he dragged his mattress outside and lit it on fire, just to make sure he wouldn’t get reinfected with his own pubic lice. Luckily, nothing like that happened to me. What could I have done? Ripped up the carpet I slept on every night and thrown it out the window? Then I would be in an even worse situation: infested with crabs, out of a security deposit, and sleeping on hardwood floors.

Sleeping on the floor for long stretches of time, like for over two years like I did, actually isn’t all that terrible and you really do get used to it—certainly better than sleeping on a rock, which I’ve also done, which is only slightly better than sleeping on a pool table, which I’ve also done and was probably the most uncomfortable I’ve ever been—but nowhere near as nice as a big, comfy, girly bed with lots of pillows.

Ron’s place, which I never saw, was equally as dumpy in my understanding, but also infested with fleas. He spent even less time at his place than I did at mine.

The apartment of our girlfriends was better—I mean, what couldn’t be?—but only marginally so. On the day they moved in I found a bat hanging off the towel rack in the bathroom. It was pretty creepy, and at first I thought it was dead, and wondered if bats could still retain a decent grip with their feet even after they had expired. I felt manly capturing and releasing it outside, even though I’m pretty sure it was just a baby. But, our girlfriends, thankfully, weren’t stereotypical bachelors, which was important. It’s definitely one of the reasons I liked both of them so much.

That summer I somehow managed to get an overpaying teaching job where, if I lived frugally enough, working twenty hours a week provided me with a surplus of cash. Ron was living off a research grant with the goal of finishing his thesis by the end of the summer, but he wouldn’t get it done until the next year, mainly because it was pretty hot that summer, so we had to spend a lot of time drinking beer without our shirts on so we could cool off.

More importantly, Ron and I had our own project we were working on. I won’t bore you with the details, other than to say it involved a lot of Super Street Fighter II on the Super Nintendo. Only a 7^th grader in 1994 would devote more than a half an hour to this game, but here we were, two young men on the cusp of adulthood, wasting our summer playing antiquated video games. Looking back, in a lot of ways it was the least productive summer of my life, but also the best.

Anyway, Ron wore hard contact lens, which I don’t even think exist anymore. I’ve never worn them, but they seem awfully uncomfortable, like letting a glass plate contort the shape of your eye, which I guess is basically what they do. At night you have to soak and scrub them in hydrogen peroxide to get all of your eye crud off before you can rinse and wear them again. If you take good care of them they can last for a long time, but the entire process just seemed so time consuming. No wonder he wasn’t making much progress on his thesis.

I used to use a lot of hydrogen peroxide in a lab I used to work in, but I was sloppy and constantly spilling the stuff all over my hands and wrists, bleaching the hair completely white. It was almost as bad as the time I spilled silver nitrate all over my hands, which turns skin black on contact, and made it look like I had terrible frostbite and that all of my fingers should have been amputated.

The lab had a huge gallon jug of hydrogen peroxide that was always sitting next to this other chemical, which I never used, but one of the Chinese grad students told me that if you stuck your finger in it you would taste battery acid in your mouth. He gave me a long explanation that I didn’t completely understand about how it gets into your nerves and messes up your senses. Before long, he told me, everything tastes like battery acid, not chicken.

“But don’t taste it, even with your finger” he cautioned me, as if I was curious to try it. “I’m pretty sure it’s also a brain carcinogen. I had a friend in Beijing who died of brain cancer, and he worked with that stuff everyday.”

I didn’t want to get brain cancer, so I moved the hydrogen peroxide to another shelf, far away from that other chemical, the one that causes brain tumors, but the next day my boss told me to move it back and not to mess up his intricate shelfing system again. I didn’t like that job anyway, so I quit. Eight dollars an hour is hardly worth waking up every morning to a breakfast of battery acid, only to slowly die as a tumor expands in your brain.

The summer ended and classes resumed, my last semester of college, and Ron and I were still mooching off our girlfriends’ apartment. Ron still hadn’t finished his thesis, but with my help he had made great advances in the field of Super Street Fighter II, and I was proud of him. At the end of the semester we threw a party, mainly for me because I was graduating. I don’t really remember much of it, but my brother was there and he fell sleep on the heating vent and burned his face, and another one of my friends threw up off the balcony. Too much Burger Beer and Jaeger will do that to anybody.

The next morning I had to go to the graduation ceremony, which meant putting on a suit. Putting on a suit when you’re hungover isn’t very fun, and to me it seems very contradictory. Suits are for people who are in control and know what they’re doing, and here I was, young, stupid, hungover, blind with a headache, and I had overslept and hadn’t had time for a shower. I didn’t deserve to be wearing a tie.

For some reason I decided to wear my contacts, and this was when I reached for Ron’s bottle of hydrogen peroxide, which looked exactly like my bottle of saline solution. I washed both of my contacts with the hydrogen peroxide, unknowingly, and then put in the left lens and immediately knew whatever was in that bottle wasn’t meant to go on your eye. I’d had plenty of chemical irritants spilled on me before, since I was such a klutz in the lab, but never was I clumsy enough to actually spill anything on my face. I couldn’t see, and the pain was terrible, completely engulfing the entire eyeball. Even worse, my contact was already on my eye, so I had to scratch it out of there with my peroxide stained fingers.

I screamed and honestly thought I was going to have to go to the hospital. I spent the next twenty minutes washing out my eye in the sink, which helped and soon my vision returned. I was pretty happy about that. Of course, I looked even worse now—my eyes weren’t even uniformly bloodshot anymore.

Maybe one day I’ll write about something important….9,099 out of 10,000.