My building sits in Salt Lake City’s gleaming new commercial development, City Creek Center.  Just kidding.  My building sits on the precipice of a huge hole in the middle of a city whose busy urban life is on a four year pause.  The hole functions as the center of gravity for the city.  That is, it is the center of gravity in much the same way as a black hole is– it sucks the life and pride and human dignity out of everything in its orbit.  It turns out it’s very hard to maintain your dignity as a person when you live in these conditions.  It’s not exactly Nazi-era Warsaw or 1970′s Saigon or anything like that.  But it’s not exactly any better than those places either.

When I took this job five years ago, construction was just starting.  My first week there were three major power outages.  It was a nice way to get to know people, standing in the darkened hall under the weak backup light with three or four super angry lawyers who just lost a couple hours work on a document they’d been drafting, or who had been cut off in the middle of a deposition question. It seemed like people loved to calculate the money lost to the firm in billable hours for every half hour of darkness.  Somehow, every time someone added it all up it was in the trillions.  I didn’t follow the math, exactly, but it felt like trillions to me too.  After a few hours, they’d get the power back on and you’d go back to work, sapped by the half-holiday-half-tragedy feel of something like that, and you’d save your work every thirty seconds in case of another sudden outage.  After the worst week of these outages, building management distributed one dollar coupons to McDonald’s to each person in the building.  Honestly, I thought there would be literal rioting in the halls.  It was ugly.

The building would shake frequently.  You’d look up and see your door swinging back and forth.  The sound of demolition penetrated your office and made you mis-type words, just from the vibration.  Water lines got cut.  We had to take an elevator to the ground floor, walk across the block and use a little bathroom that was still being built for future customers at the future mall.  People started getting stuck in elevators.  You got a fateful feeling when you stepped into an elevator with more than four or five people, like you were taking your life into your hands.  I escaped the elevators for a while, but one day last year it hit, on the way to lunch with eight or so colleagues.  I’m a pretty patient guy, but after about an hour, I was losing it.  We were connected with some management person on the little emergency phone, and he literally just kept telling us over and over, for an hour, that someone was on his way.  “Someone is on the way,” he’d say.  “Someone is on the way,” again.  But no one came.  Maybe “someone” was on his way from elevator HQ in Switzerland?  He didn’t say.  We ended up shaken, paranoid, but with several dollars credit at any Temple Square eating establishment.

The dehumanizing machine

After several years of this, people on that block walked around a little dazed, less human than they had been before.  I remember the moment I almost snapped.  It was after a tenant appreciation day, which is where they set up a room in the construction zone with some free pie, and everyone who no longer has any pride left walks slowly down, picks  up a piece, and is instantly filled with self-loathing in contemplating how easily they have been subjugated by the construction overlords.  At the end of the day, a crowd of people was on the ground floor heading for the exit.  There was an empty trash can in the middle of the exit corridor, right in front of all the foot traffic.  I absently threw my empty cup into the oddly-placed trash can and kept shuffling.  “Sir,” came a voice from behind me.  “SIR!”  I turned around.  There was a small, pinched man in a building management uniform.  “Sir, this is not a trash.”  I stood and tried to understand what he wanted from me, while the crowd moved past me.  “This is not a TRASH,”  he said again, pointing down at my cup, alone at the bottom of the receptacle.  He tilted it up and pointed the top over toward me.  He wanted me to reach in and pull my cup out of this trash can that had been sitting in the middle of this big public area, because it was not a trash.  The enormous weight of the indignities I had faced washed over me.  I experienced a rushing burst of rage incomparable to anything I had known before.  I bristled and shook and gritted my teeth.  And still I submitted to this ugly man with the ugly accent who had this inexplicable authority in his dominating demeanor.  I retraced my steps against the exiting traffic, reached down into the trash can that was not a trash, and picked up my cup.  I tried to kill him with my eyes.  He didn’t look away from my stare.  He knew he was the master.  I walked out the door and dropped my cup in an actual garbage can, which was indistinguishable from that man’s trash can.  If I had come across a bunny right then, I would have kicked it so hard.

Time has helped me cope with life under the oppressor.  I am less volatile now, more used to the abject subjugation that is expected of me every day.  Last week’s bomb threat would have made me angry a few years ago.  But I’m different now.  I save my work, walk down the hall, head down the elevator and wait in passive disgust for building management to give me the all clear.  A few weeks ago, I discovered a pleasant place in this war zone.  They’ve completed a nice patio out overlooking the pit, tucked away behind my building, where no one ever goes.  It’s the only place you can go within a few city blocks to get some fresh air on a nice day.  There’s no place to sit down there yet, but a few warm days I grabbed my lunch and a book and headed down to eat sitting on some big planter boxes- a rare moment of dignity and enjoyment in this chaotic mess.  Then one day I walked down to my sunny new place and was met with a scene I have seen thousands of times before.  Yellow boundary tape had been wrapped across most of the patio, warning that it was not safe for anyone to be there.  The planter boxes were now restricted.  There was nowhere else to sit.  Improbably, I spied a little white plastic chair alone on a corner of the patio.  It was filthy, but I moved it to the little part of the patio that hadn’t been taped off, and tried to enjoy my lunch in the tiny remaining space.  After about three minutes, an orange-vested construction worker ten years my junior walked around the patio corner and saw me sitting in that little plastic chair.  He said “sorry, I need that chair.”  I looked up from my sandwich in mid-bite and blankly stared at him.  He needed the chair.  The only possible thing I could sit on out here.  “Yeah, the chair, I need it back.”  It took me a minute to put my lunch back in the plastic sack and gather my book and papers.  I stood up and walked in off the patio while the construction worker appropriated the dirty white chair for his important authoritative uses.  Back at my desk, my lunch uneaten in its sack, I stared at my computer, doing nothing, hitting save every thirty seconds.

That characteristic became a little exaggerated in later tellings.  I wasn’t ever very tough by the standards of most people in the world.  And the contrast with my siblings (of whom, let’s admit it, our older sister was actually the toughest) helped my toughness profile considerably.  But whatever my success in staring down pain, it did instill in me an impatience for whining and theatrics when it comes to plain old suffering.  I haven’t always been successful in passing these prejudices onto my kids, but it’s not for lack of trying.

Anyway, last week I had to take Rex and Molly to the hospital for some blood work.

They both have some serious food allergies and it was time for an analysis to see if they’re getting better or worse.  We scheduled it on a Saturday so Macy wouldn’t have to do it, as I have an easier time restraining screaming children through painful medical stabbings than she does.  As we left for the hospital, Lucy came out and told Molly not to be scared, that it’s “just a pinch and then you giggle.”  Molly is two and a half.  She had no idea what was coming, but she conjured some scenario that would make her giggle.  I let her hold onto her fantasy.

“. . . Actually, Molly, it’s much more likely that you’ll scream in terror and pain when the needle enters your arm.  But yeah, you might giggle instead.”

At the hospital, Rex, who is seven, volunteered to go first, to show Molly how to be brave when a large hollow needle is stuck in one’s arm.  I went to sit in the victim’s chair and hold him in my lap, but he declined, opting to sit there all by himself as an added show of bravery.  The phlebotomist jabbed the needle into him and I took in a vicarious sharp breath.  Rex, knowing that Molly was watching, minimized his reaction and stared straight ahead while the tube running out of his arm ran dark viscous red.  In a few seconds I was holding a cotton swab on the gusher and it was Molly’s turn.

Rex was feeling a little too nervous to stick around for Molly’s turn, so he quietly excused himself.  I sat down in the chair and grabbed Molly to pull into my lap.  She said “no, Dad, I wanna sit in the chair by myself.”  I knew she couldn’t possibly mean that, so I persisted.  So did she.  But I wasn’t going to let Molly just sit in this big chair all by herself, free to flail around once the needle pierced her chubby arm.  We argued to an impasse.  She was very firm with me, and it became clear that if we were going to get the blood, I needed to let her win this one.  What would possess a toddler to do that?  The phlebotomist quietly said “well I’ve never seen this before,” as Molly climbed into the big blue chair by herself and volunteered her forearms across the padded bar.

I sat beside her, a little useless, but with my arms wrapped around her shoulders, holding both her arms for the crisis to come.  Having watched Rex, she was fully aware of what was about to happen now.  I saw Rex peek his head tensely through the doorway and then withdraw.  The lady readied her needle and I grabbed Molly’s head to turn it away from her arm, toward me, so she wouldn’t see the needle sliding into her flesh.  She shook me off and stared at her arm.  Poke.  The metal tube slid into her soft tissue.  I tightened my grip.  We all waited for the response.  Molly kept staring, and I felt a slight flex in her shoulder.  That was it.

But we didn’t strike a vein.  So the needle probed around in my two year old’s arm.  Both Molly and I stared with scientific interest as the metal pivoted around in the hole in her skin, looking for a vein.  It took around 30 seconds of feeling around, severing fat and skin, to finally hit a line.  Molly didn’t react.  Not a word, not a sigh, not a sound.  And not a hint of a movement or recoil as she watched the whole grisly process.  As the blood slid into the bottle at the end of the line, she exhaled a little laugh– just a tiny giggle.  It took a few minutes to fill the bottle, but she sat perfectly still the whole time.  Then we put on the band-aid and walked out of the room.  Rex had wandered in surprised when he didn’t hear any crying.  He and I just sort of exchanged incredulous looks as Molly toddled out under her own power.  Rex made me go back and ask if there were any treats for the victims, but there weren’t.  Then we walked out of there with two shiny new band-aids.  I almost felt a little cheated not to have had a single tear to wipe away, or even a shudder to stabilize.

I don’t know what makes a kid do that.  She could have just as easily decided to make a huge painful production of it all, and on a different day she probably would have.  But for some unfathomable reason, she decided she wanted to be tough that day.  Something made her kick me out of the chair, and made her hold in her breath when she got stuck.  I would so love to know what it was that made her do that.  But whatever it was, I tried not to overpraise it too much.  I love that she’s tough, but I don’t want her to feel like she has to be for me.  But still, now I know I got a tough kid.  It’s not the most important thing in a kid.  But I’ll take it.  Especially in a chubby two year old girl.

Tough Guy

Besides, the odds don’t matter in my case. That’s because this is a problem for me. ‘This’ being getting really painful things in my eye. It’s one of the Dumb Things I don’t not do, I guess. About six months ago, I was in the office of one my colleagues at work. He has a cactus there, and that’s obviously the thing a person is going to start playing with when he’s trapped in that office during long conference calls. People who just sit in a chair and listen during conference calls may not know this, but when you poke a cactus with a straightened paper clip, it bleeds this thick milky white sticky stuff, pretty profusely. After seeing that a few times, it’s honestly pretty hard to resist poking the cactus, just to watch it bleed.

Turns out one of those times I got the cactus blood on one of my fingers. A few minutes after that, back in my office, I rubbed my eye with that finger, and then I had to check to see if my finger had lemon-juice razors on it. Because my eye was screeeeeeaming in the most awful pain I had ever experienced. I rushed to the bathroom to flush water into it. In the nexst 20 minutes I returned to the bathroom two more times. But cactus blood is non-water soluble, and is made out of wasabe and bee stingers. My eye had turned into a fountain of pus and tears, and I was honestly wondering if the pain would ever stop, and what I’d look like with a glass eye. When I saw Macy an hour later, the pain was just barely subsiding. She looked at me sympathetically and asked me why I had been crying. I told her it’s because I had been attacked by poisonous cactus milk, and then she stopped being so sympathetic, which just added to the pain. It was a very, very unpleasant episode.

But it didn’t end there. A few months after that we were sitting around my mom’s dining room table after a funeral, chatting. I was playing with a bouquet someone had sent over, which was cool because it had a few little clusters of real peppers in it. I broke open a few to smell them, and instantly began to feel a burning sensation around my nostrils, though it wasn’t horrible. The sensation reminded me of my run-in with the cactus juice, so I began to tell the family about that experience. As I touched my eye to demonstrate where I had put the cactus juice, a burning streak of pain shot throughout my whole eye, spreading pepper juice all over that poor beleaguered eyeball.

So there I was, in the middle of my story about how awful the cactus juice had felt, only to find myself in perfect position to demonstrate in real time exactly what I had gone through. I think the audience was very appreciative of that level of commitment to story telling. But it stung like the dickens. Davis and Christian kept telling me to put milk in it for some reason. That sounded awful to me, mostly because the last milk I had put in my eye had been from a cactus, but also because the only milk in my mom’s house is powdered. (People who have learned to be wary of what substances they put in their eye just have a natural aversion to putting powdered milk in their eye. I don’t know, just sort of a sixth sense maybe.) Left without any good options, I just sat down again, to wait out the pain, again.

So this morning’s toothpaste event was only my third chemically-induced-ocular-agony accident in the last six months. Tomorrow I will re-set the little ‘_X_ consecutive days without a chemically-induced-ocular-agony accident’ sign in my bathroom. This time, though, I’m really going to get it to 100.

I’ve had that sign for a little while now. Since July 24, 2007, to be precise. That’s the date when this video was taken.

Ryan mentos explosion from Eliza Thompson on Vimeo.

(That was black cherry Shasta you just saw being propelled into my eye with the force of ten giga-mentos. And it was carbonated. I still see the world through the taste of black cherry Shasta. EVERY DAY.)

Never forget.