My Random Life | Elbrecht's Corpuscle

When I had a Son

Posted on December 28, 2013 by Elbrecht

—–

Between the spring of 2012 and summer 2013, I lived in 3 different nYc neighborhoods spanning two of nYc’s five boroughs.

My third and final apartment was actually a room in a woman’s house in Jamaica, Queens. Despite the tightness of the accommodations, I’d only be living there for two months, so I was certain it was survivable. Plus, the room was furnished with a bed, dresser, desk… and the “son-I-never-knew”.

His name is Jacob.

—–

A 12-year-old with an absentee mother and incarcerated father is quick to bond with anyone who gives him attention, as I quickly discovered.

When I arrived in May, the school year was winding down, so Jacob’s hours of daily supervision was waning in parallel. Jacob was a mildly delinquent kid to begin with and his mother did not allow him to participate in any after-school activities, thus creating the perfect storm for me to become Jacob’s de facto guardian.

—–

Over the course of May and June, Jacob became my shadow… and a constant reminder of why I use condoms. Nearly 33 years old myself, Jacob easily could have been one of my own offspring.

In May, I was completing my Surgery Clerkship, which required me to leave home at 4:30A and found me returning home at 7P on a good day. Jacob would always be waiting for me. On some days, he would hide behind the front door so that when I would slog through it he could pop out and cause my heart to skip a beat. Each time this happened I imagined that skipped beat to be what it must be like to unexpectedly have a woman tell you she’s pregnant.

He would laugh and smile, which despite the soul-crushing daily commute and exposure to hubris-filled surgeons, would cause me to smile in turn.

The part of the house where he and his mother resided was separated from the upstairs rooms, so he would follow me up the stairway and ask what I was up to. Still clad in my scrubs, I would look at him and shake my head. “Give me 5 minutes, then we can hang out.”

He would dart back downstairs only to return 4 minutes later with a rap on my door.

Most nights would revolve around hanging out in my room, where he could watch Netflix on my phone or computer. Not wanting to have my medical career derailed by some scandal, I would allow him to inflate my air mattress on the floor, which propped open the door to my room, and watch some crazy shows.

—–

Typically I would inform him at 9PM that I needed to sleep because of my early morning, but I knew it would take him 30 minutes to finish up whatever he was watching, so I was never upset when he would simply nod his head and keep on chuckling along with whatever he was watching.

On Saturday mornings I would awaken at 7AM to a dull thud on my door. If I hadn’t been regularly awakening at 4AM I might have shot out of bed, swung the door wildly open, and screamed “What the hell, man!” But each time I would calmly put on some clothes, slowly unlock the door, and smile when I opened it to see him standing there, eyes barely open, hair a wild mess, and hear him mutter, “I’m bored.”

I’d reply, “No, I think you are still asleep.”

If Jacob couldn’t find a friend to shoot hoops with, he would beg me to go with him. The first time I obliged, I ended up playing two-on-one basketball with another him and another kid and narrowly avoided having to retire from the game I love by blowing a 11-0 lead only to hang on to win 21-19. I also pulled one of my glutes going for a block.

When he needed a snack, he would ask if he could eat something of mine from the fridge… after he’d already eaten it.

If he felt like scaring the shit out of me, he’d sneak out the second story window in the kitchen, climb on the roof to the window that was outside my room and beside my bed… and bang on it like a wildebeest.

—–

During the first two weeks of June, I was in Boston, but would receive a daily text message from Jacob. It usually said something like, “Poop.” Or to ask if he could eat something of mine, which surely had already been eaten.

A few of the highlights of having a 12-year-old pseudo-son:

1) Being asked what sex is like… while walking to shoot hoops… And quickly realizing this was a lose-lose question.

2) Allowing him to pick a place and time to go see the latest Superman movie… and having the time be wrong and paying $15 for a ticket because he didn’t bring his money.

3) Playing catch with him in Central Park… and then having it abruptly end when he tossed a baseball over my head and it nearly concussed a group of innocent bystanders.

—–

4) Trying to get him to stop kicking a large bouncy ball down the aisles of a CVS.

5) Having him try to jump in the Central Park Pond to catch a turtle.

Despite the innumerable incredible experiences I had in nYc, this unexpected friendship/guardianship ended up being one of the most cherished. Perhaps one day I’ll have a real son of my own. Perhaps I’ll teach him about the birds and the bees while shooting hoops. Perhaps I’ll play catch with him in Central Park. But most certainly, I won’t forget the time I did it all before with Jacob.

I Joined the Army

Posted on December 25, 2013 by Elbrecht

{I was reminded of this day during a text message exchange with an old friend last night… originally posted 12.27.08}

I never thought I would join the army, but on Christmas Day, I decided to enlist. It has always been a passion of mine to serve others through hard work and volunteerism, just like millions of American men before me.

Thankfully though, the army with which I decided to enlist is not currently deployed to Iraq. Instead, I decided to suit up and become a part of The Salvation Army… if only for a day.

Most people don’t realize that The Salvation Army is actually a religious organization with strict doctrine. So strict that you can not marry outside of the Army if you are an officer, even if your spouse dies. Imagine if the US Army didn’t allow you to marry outside of the Army… forget “Don’t ask, don’t tell”… we’re talking full-fledged legalization of gay marriage. But I digress…

My brother, father, and I decided to partake in some volunteerism on Christmas morning/day rather than sitting around my father’s dining room table, eating cereal in our boxer shorts and watching cartoons. We were hoping that our experience at The Salvation Army in Wichita would far exceed that sort of fun. So rather than that sort of excitement, we woke up early on Christmas morning and headed over to The Army’s west Wichita headquarters, suited up in Salvation Army aprons, threw on some disposable latex gloves, and joined the other early morning enlistees.

In any good army, there is a slightly psychotic drill sergeant to whip the enlistees into shape and turn them into model soldiers. Our drill sergeant was “Debbie”, a 40-something woman dressed in jeans that were too tight, a blue Hawaiian shirt, and sporting a set of black sunglasses that were perched on her dirty blond hair. She was whipping soldiers into shape when we arrived at 9:30AM; she was also definitely “on” a cocktail of some psychotropic medication and caffeine, despite the early hour.

When we first arrived, tables still needed to be set, bread put into baskets, cranberry sauce removed from the hermetically sealed containers and sloshed into a giant serving bowl, and individual serving size butters put into bowls on the tables. There were around 30 other volunteers when we arrived. It was seemingly a mix of social outcasts, families torturing their teenage children with volunteer service, old couples whose extended family did not want to spend Christmas with them, and us. We quickly went to work completing the tasks assigned by Debbie as she stormed around the spacious dining room wide-eyed and highly caffeinated. She would occasionally flip her sunglasses down from her hair to her face while responding to a question with “You don’t wanna ask me that… you really don’t!” In the kitchen, there were four guys preparing the feast and I later learned that they had been there since 4AM. Huge tubs of mashed potatoes, green beans, and stuffing were percolating on the executive size stoves. Turkey slices were warming in aluminum cookware while the sweet potatoes were being prepared on a side table. It was only 10AM, but my stomach was craving a monstrous heaping of Christmas dinner.

By 10:15, the dining room preparation had been completed, my father was exhausted from scooping out bowls of cranberry sauce, and Debbie had finished two 20 ounce bottles of Diet Coke. More volunteers had arrived and were making small talk while awaiting the people who would be coming to our locale for a great Christmas dinner. I chatted up one of the kitchen volunteers while he was taking a break and he relayed to me some of the more important and tedious jobs that would need to be completed. While standing in the window between the dining room and kitchen, he told me that he would need a few guys to be at the window at all times to be ready to dispense the clean dishes as they came out of the wash. I decided this would be the perfect job for my dad, brother, and I.

I called them over and we marked our territory by simply ordering around the other volunteers who approached the window with naive curiosity. As described by my new kitchen friend, our job would entail unloading the clean dishes and silverware from the dish rack in lightning quick fashion, transporting them to their appropriate place in the dining room, and walking the dish rack ten feet over to the poor schlubs who were scraping the dirty plates of any remaining food particles. In my mind, it was a job suitable to one person, two at the most, but I figured we had come as a family entity and should just stick together (otherwise, my dad was likely to disappear and leave my brother and I volunteering to our hearts content). I quickly decided to refer to our positions at the kitchen window as a “union job”: one man to do the work, a second man to supervise the first man’s work, and a third man to go on break.

The dinner was scheduled to begin at 11AM, and as the hour neared, Debbie called everyone’s attention to the front of the dining room through the use of a microphone. She introduced a short, balding man with grey-fogged glasses and white hair crazily streaming out of places where it remained on his head. He introduced himself as a member of The Salvation Army and the man in charge of the day’s event. He quickly launched into a quick description of the impending event that went something like this:

“We really appreciate you all coming today. Without you volunteers we wouldn’t be able to serve these people. Remember, these are people too. They are just like you and me, they are people too. They might look a little different, but they are people. Please do not touch them. Many of them do not like that. They might be confused when you touch them. But you can talk to them. And bring them food. Be nice to them, we should show them love, because some of these people have nothing. If we do that, they will appreciate it.”

I quickly glanced over to my brother and asked, “Who the hell are we serving? Convicts?” It wasn’t until that time that I had really considered who would be attending this event, but I had originally assumed that it would be individuals from group homes, potentially homeless individuals, and families who could not afford a nice meal on this blessed day. From the description provided by Salvation Sal, I was half expecting them to wheel in cages that contained half man, half werewolf hybrids who would be frothing at the mouth. Either that or convicts wearing ankle bracelets.

When Salvation Sal completed his stirring speech, Debbie piped in and explained what the ever-increasing multitude of volunteers should be doing from 11AM to 1PM while dinner was being served. Luckily, I had already secured our union job at the kitchen window and I tuned out her crazy-eyed instructions. When she finished instructing the other volunteers, she strolled by our position and stopped to look at the three of us. She asked, “What are you gentlemen doing today? You just gonna stand there and look pretty?” My dad quickly piped in, “Yes ma’am, we found ourselves a union gig, and we’re just gonna stand here.” Apparently, my father had decided to get into the Christmas spirit and feed into Debbie’s now completely evident psychosis. She gave us a crazy smile and flipped her sunglasses down to cover her eyes as she walked away. She returned moments later with a large glass bowl full of ice and four cans of Diet Coke. She looked at the three of us through her sunglasses and said, “Guard these with your life.”

When the guests arrived, it was clear that Salvation Sal must have been scarred by some past Christmas Day fiasco. The individuals were just as I had expected, not the newly released were-beasts that his description had made me envision. Other volunteers took the guests’ orders, brought them food, talked to them and made them feel welcome, and cleaned their place mats when they were finished. This cycle of life continued for the next two hours as even more volunteers arrived, seemingly only to make an appearance after having played a rousing round of Wii tennis on their newly acquired gaming system. These stragglers mostly stayed off to the side and watched the other volunteers do their thing. Our union job provided some action every 5 minutes or so as clean dishes would be brought to the window and we would unload it contents in under 5 seconds and then hand the dish rack to a guy who was dressed like he might be the lead singer of Wichita’s newest 30-something boy band.

During the lull between freshly cleaned cutlery and dishware, the three of us kept ourselves entertained with jokes about union jobs. We were eventually joined by a young boy, approximately 10 years old, whom I nicknamed Huck Finn and who must have determined we were the coolest group in the entire room. He tried to be a fast learner, but repeatedly burned himself with the piping hot silverware because he grabbed them right out of the rack, instead of emptying them into the silverware bin. Of course, in line with our sophomoric humor of the day, we kindly made fun of him for it.

As 1:30 neared, we each took turns grabbing a plate of food and satisfying the hunger pangs that had been emanating from our bellies for the last several hours. Thankfully, it tasted even better than I had imagined. Over the course of the four hours we volunteered that day, my father, brother, and I shared many laughs, performed a serviceable duty to one of our nation’s finest armies, and made fun of a pre-teen who thought we were cool. In the end, it was as fulfilling as I had imagined, but the added bonus of interacting with Salvation Sal, Debbie, and Huck Finn made it a Christmas adventure that I will not soon forget. I might even consider enlisting again next year.

To shave… or not to shave.

Posted on December 1, 2012 by Elbrecht

To shave… or not to shave… That is the question.

[originally posted on December 1, 2012… re-posted in honor of Movember 2014]

When I was fourteen, I started sprouting facial hair. Not a ton, but enough that I would have looked like a haggard vagabond or garage band scrub if I hadn’t started shaving.

In the absence of someone else to provide instruction, my mother took me aside one day and attempted to provide instruction based on what she’d watched my grandfather do. {And what I experienced.}

1) Splash some water on your face… {splash!}

2) Lather up some shaving cream…

3) Apply generously {I look like Santa!}

4) Press the razor gently to your face

5) Glide it down the side {Nick!}

6) Puff out your cheek; press out your lip {I look like a squirrel}

7) Glide the razor against the grain {oh, that’s much better}

8) Repeat until you look good again

I have used these basic and quick rules for the past 18 years, most of which I have been clean shaven. When I started shaving my head 8 years ago to counteract my increased testosterone, I applied these rules again. That is also when I should have started buying stock in Gillette.

Despite the necessity to shave my head for vanity (and genetics) and shaving my face for posterity, there have been numerous times in the past 18 years when I’ve grown a beard, goatee, fu man chu, or other facial hair styles.

This month has been a first for me though, as I’ve been keeping my tightly cropped beard and allowed my mustache to grow, unchecked, for the first time. The results have been comical.

I’d be lying if I said this was the first facial hair disaster of my life. Usually, when I let it grow unchecked, it’s been as a inner psychological ploy. My thinking goes that if I let it grow, and start looking terrible, I can shave it off and get a nice ego boost when I look in the mirror and see my handsome self again.

Or I’ll let it grow when I’m preparing for a big exam and immediately afterwards, come home, lather up and glide that Gillette down my face in a hot shower. When I step out of the shower I look and feel like a new man.

A recent experience came 15 months ago when I didn’t shave for six weeks straight. {I did trim my neck, so I didn’t become one of those weird neck-beard guys, but I let the core of my beard grow unchecked.} That was, and still is, the longest I’ve gone without trimming or shaving.

I was in the midst of finishing the last semester of my second year of medical school and preparing for our comprehensive exam. My desire to keep the beard growing was three-fold:

1) The inner psychological ploy I already mentioned

2) The lack of time I wanted to put forth to anything other than crushing my exams

3) The desire to scare the living bejesus out of anyone who dared cross my path

After four weeks, I had finished the semester and was now preparing for the comprehensive exam. I decided to study in the classroom at the hospital I would be training at for the final two weeks. By this point, the picture on my student ID bore no resemblance to the vagabond I’d become. In it, I was clean shaven and without glasses. Now I was four weeks into a “get away from me” beard and wearing thick rimmed glasses.

Within five minutes of me showing up that first day, the security guard strolled over to me and said, “Excuse me sir, but this classroom is a restricted area. Only medical students are allowed to be here.”

She was holding a photocopied sheet and I could see that it had the students’ names and pictures on it. I pulled out my student ID and pointed at the sheet,

“That’s me. I’m on there. I’m Ean.”

She looked down at the sheet and then intently at the ID I held in my hand. A perplexed look came across her face.

“Sir, wait here for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

I watched her walk across the room and then saw my friend Clarie, who was sitting on the other side of the room, stop the security guard.

The guard motioned at me and then pointed at the sheet. Claire laughed and then appeared to plead my case for non-mistaken identity.

Over the next week, several more classmates would come to study in the classroom and echo the security guard’s exasperations. The beard was now spiraling out of control. But if they were concerned about my grooming habits or were worried that studying was stretching the limits of my sanity, they didn’t say.

I definitely splashed some water on my face, applied a copious amount of shaving cream, busted out a brand new razor, and made gentle, but vigorous strokes after that exam.

In college, I dabbled in some less mainstream facial styles, including a two week old handle-bar mustache. When I showed up to a research meeting with my Primary Investigator, she gasped.

“Oh my. What are you doing?”

“Um, what?” I replied.

“You don’t have a girlfriend do you?” Her insinuation was obvious.

“Have you been going to see the 3^rd graders (our research participants) looking like that?”

I winced.

“You have to shave for Monday. Stop scaring the kids, please.”

In the past few years, I have also used my facial hair as a barometer for a woman’s openness/tolerance of my eccentricities. If she can deal with one week’s worth of neatly cropped facial hair, then she is likely to enjoy a freshly shaven face too. The opposite is not necessarily true.

One evening this summer, I happened to be in the company of a lovely woman whom I had met with my now usual one week’s worth of growth.

In the moment, she pulled back for an instant and said, “Would you mind shaving?”

“No,” I instinctively replied.

“Good. Cause your beard is a little rough. I’m sure someone has told you that before, right?”

The next time I saw this woman I had shaved my one week’s worth down to two days growth. It was hardly noticeable.

“That’s what you consider shaving?” She intoned when I stepped off the train.

The next girl I dated after her didn’t bring it up once.

For the past year, my typical facial hair growth is closely cropped and shaved down to three or four day’s worth. The addition of the mustache, growing unchecked for three weeks, is definitely one of the worst styles I’ve had. It is quickly entering the upper echelon of awkwardness combined with panic-inducing fear when I talk to strangers.

No one at the hospital has dared comment on it.

I sent a picture of my mustache to some friends a week ago. Juice immediately made it the photo ID for me on his phone, replacing a picture of me wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, while adorning a top hat and dancing with a cane. Yeah, it’s that awkward.

I haven’t tried the clean-shaven approach on a daily basis for over a year. Perhaps when I get rid of this ghastly ‘stache, I’ll start that up again. Maybe that will prevent mid-make-out shaving requests?

To shave… or not to shave.

It’s No Bromance

Posted on November 17, 2012 by Elbrecht

[Originally published on February 7, 2009.]

—–

Two weeks ago I made the 45 minute trip to Logan Airport after work. I don’t usually make a habit of heading over to Logan on a Thursday, but on this night I was picking up my new roommate.

While I waited for his plane to land, I hung out at the baggage claim with the security guards and watched inane YouTube videos on my cell phone. When the baggage started rumbling out onto the conveyor belt, I knew it would be only a few moments before my new roommate would stumble out into the unsecured baggage area. Upon seeing him, I was immediately second guessing my willingness to bring him into my home.

—–

Clad in black cowboy boots, a pair of Wrangler jeans, a crisp white t-shirt, and a Penrose drain collecting pus in a bag attached to his right hip, I shrugged my shoulders at his appearance. If I didn’t share a significant part of my DNA with this walking contradiction, I would have slowly backed my way out of the baggage area, hailed a cab, and hoped that he had forgotten the address to my house.

[Note: He’s been to my house for dinner and to do laundry on occasion, so the likelihood that he wouldn’t have been able to find the place is somewhere between slim and none.]

Instead of turning around and looking for the nearest exit, I jumped from my seat, and proceeded to meet him at the baggage conveyor. I quickly made a smart-ass comment about the bag of pus protruding from underneath his white t-shirt, to which he mumbled something about punching me in the gut. Ah, brotherly love.

In case you haven’t figured it out, my new roommate is my younger brother, Will.

—–

Dumb people think he’s older than me because he’s taller, but that actually flies in the face of our modern understanding of genetics and human evolution. Obviously, most people didn’t bother to pay attention to those subtle points in high school biology.

After returning from schooling in the Far East and some recuperation in Kansas from a fistulated colon, my brother decided to fill the vacancy in my rented two-bedroom duplex. So rather than playing house with a beautiful woman, I was staring at my younger brother’s Penrose drain and wondering what sort of “bromance” I’d gotten myself in to.

My brother and I collected his two bags, weighing over 100 pounds combined, and headed out of Logan to catch the shuttle back to the T. Carrying a bag weighing over 50 pounds was unexpectedly more strenuous than I had imagined, so I suggested grabbing a cab instead. Will flashed a wad of crisp bills and agreed to pay for the cab fare back to Cambridge.

—–

After dropping off his bags at the house, we walked over to the nearby pub and grabbed some dinner. Once seated, we were serenaded by some horrific karaoke and proffered alcohol by some scantily clad drink girls. When offered a free shot, my brother replied, “My parole officer says I shouldn’t drink.” With a look of intense fear, she turned her head in my direction. I offered to take his and mine both. She quickly placed them on the table and back peddled towards the bar. His comment made me begin to re-think my mindset about this bromance.

When we returned home, we were met with the box spring mattress I’d left in the living room, a donation from some friends’ recent move. So Will and I’s task was to reunite it with the mattress upstairs, despite my previous attempts having determined that to be an impossibility.

Unfortunately, we could not manage to cajole it through the already existing crevice in the narrow stairway, so my brother had to settle that evening for the jumbo-size, double-thick, air mattress that I had inflated in his room.

[Note: The air mattress is his; he left it with me when he traveled to Beijing, so he was really sleeping on his own bed.]

—–

Being that school didn’t begin for my brother until the following Monday, I returned home from work on Friday evening to find him hanging out in front of the TV. In my seat. Having lived by myself for the previous 2.5 months, I found this intrusion into my space alarming.

[Note: The TV is his; so he was probably just having flash backs to his old apartment.]

I promptly seated myself to his left and laid down the law: when the captain is home, he sits in the captain’s chair. My brother raised an eyebrow, my charming analogy completely going over his head. Or being completely ignored. I decided not to push him out of my seat, as he would have likely landed on his drain and I didn’t want to be responsible for performing emergency surgery. Or possibly surgically removing his fist from my face.

—–

My brother and I last lived together seven years ago, the summer before my senior year of college. He had just finished his freshman year at Miami University and didn’t want to go home for the summer. The stories of debauchery I had shared from my previous summer in Oxford had obviously seduced him. And the prospect of heading back to Lexington, KY or Wichita, KS paled in comparison. In an act of what can only be described as self-sacrifice, I offered to forgo my personal space for the summer.

I lofted my bed so that he could use my futon as his bed. I cleared a corner of my room so that he could set up a desk for his computer. And then, he took full advantage.

—–

While I was working two jobs that summer, he worked 20 hours a week. When I left in the morning, he was there sleeping. When I came home from my first job in the middle of the afternoon, he was there computing. When I came home from my second job in the late evening, he was there eating/sleeping/computing or some combination thereof. My personal space was eliminated, my sanity challenged, and brotherly love was transformed into pure hatred.

—–

With Will sitting in “my chair” that Friday night, I began to consider the possibility that I had made the same mistake all over again. Only this time, I imagined I would wake up in the morning wanting to take a shower, but he’d have already used all the hot water. Or I’d come home from work and he’d be half-way through the movie I wanted to watch that night. Or I would be awoken early on a Saturday morning because he was vacuuming the stairs. I wasn’t excited by any of these scenarios, but I decided I could avoid them… by not pushing him out of the chair and instead pointing out to him that the “co-pilot” seat had just as good of a view of the TV.

With disaster narrowly averted in the first 24 hours of our bromance, the past two weeks have been relatively positive. Despite my flashbacks to that summer in Oxford we have managed to co-exist in a near stress-free environment. Of course, I’ve had to take on the big brother role a few times by letting him learn from his own mistakes rather than pointing them out beforehand. I thought it was the least I could do.

—–

The best example was our first trip to the grocery store. [Note: the grocery store is 2 miles on foot, so without a car for the last 2.5 months, I have gone through my own trial and error efforts in successfully transporting one week’s worth of food back to my house (2 hands = 2 fully loaded bags).]

I figured he should go through his own trial and error period, so when he offered to bring his fashionable grocery cart that is all the rage in the big city, I let him know I wouldn’t need it. He took that to mean he wouldn’t need it either. So he decided to buy two gallons of milk along with the rest of his groceries, brought one big bag rather than two, and therefore had to stop every 100 feet to readjust his grocery-carrying pose on the trip home. I only stopped at the intersections to make sure I wasn’t flattened by oblivious drivers. Lesson learned? We’ll see.

—–

On the whole though, it’s been a fairly fulfilling experience, and not just because he’s gone to Target twice to buy things I hadn’t bothered to replace when my ex moved out (toaster, dish-drying rack, silverware, paper towels, baking sheets, etc). It hadn’t taken him long to notice that the only room that was fully furnished in the house was my bedroom. So he offered up this gem: “Besides your room, it looks like someone is squatting in a vacant apartment.”

While our bromance might be a little unconventional, our genetic propensity to laugh at the same stupid people and lame jokes, our interest in cooking as a means of sustenance, and general approval of women dancing in night clubs, I think this could turn out to be the best roommate situation I’ve ever had…

—–

Unless you consider living with guys named Juice, Rusty, and Wacky Matt to be better than living as an adult with your own brother. Despite two years of college hi-jinks as a solid comparison, the current living situation is beginning to grow on me. However, that could change depending on the number of cold showers I take in the upcoming months, the number of times we go shopping together, or the first time he decides to do his laundry the night when I have run out of underwear and have somewhere to be.