Voting is now closed for round two, bout two of the Ministry of Minor Perfidy’s Biggest Dork competition. Johno's tale of Space Camp dorkery proved victorious, bringing the round to a 1-1 tie. We now move to the final and deciding dork fight - stay tuned.
Welcome to the latest round in the Ministry of Minor Perfidy's Biggest Dork competition. Please read the following tales of supremely dorky behavior and leave your vote for biggest dork in the comments. Then tell your friends: it's so much more fun when the jeering is done in groups!
An as yet untested Buckethead came out swinging in his first bout against me for the title of Dork Supreme, and hit hard. Amidst light voting, the concensus was for his live-action gamedorkery over my tale of winter woe in the Boy Scouts. Consequently, I find myself down 0-1 and facing elimination in this best of three contest.
I am down to my last option, the final out, fourth and long, my last dry powder. If I'm going to stay in this thing, I have to bring out the big guns.
Lt. Commander: Sir, you can't mean...
Johno: Yes, Commander. I do.
Lt. Commander: You can't!
Johno: I must. We both knew this day would come; this terrible conflict must be brought to an close. Joe, I want you listen very carefully. This is the last order I will ever give you. I hope you've made your peace with that which troubles you. We're not going to have much time. Are you ready?
Lt. Commander: Sir. I'm... I'm ready sir.
Johno: Commander, it is time to exercise the nuclear option. Prepare the Space Camp Story.
Lt. Commander: ...
Lt. Commander: ...
Lt. Commander: ... yes, sir.
J. Haldeman and Wizards of the Coast present in stunning surround-o-vision the latest installment of The Forever Dork saga, In Space(Camp) No One Can Hear You Scream
When I was about twelve, I decided that I wanted to spend a week of summer vacation at Space Camp. Most of you will remember Space Camp only from the supremely silly movie of the same name. I never even saw that tripe; I wanted the real deal, a week pretending to be a Space Shuttle Astronaut and learning about rocketry, space science and other related geekery at the very teat of the National Air and Space Administration. In truth it was not NASA at all but the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, but I didn't care. Rockets! Planets! Freeze dried ice cream!
Twelve was an awkward age for me. It was the darkest days of my dorkiness (as detailed at agonizing length in prior posts) and I was just barely on the cusp of realizing that behavior I considered perfectly rational might strike others as strange and off-putting. However, unlike at school where math, biology, and the like came easily, I didn’t really have a firm grasp yet on the niceties of social interaction. I was like a like a nine year old who’s just been told about the birds and the bees and understands in his way that A (sex) causes B (babies), without having any idea at all how A (sex) really works. Meditate for a moment on the myriad ways a nine year old could misconstrue how doin’ it actually gets done, then do please read on.
I will say this for Space Camp: they tried hard. The Huntsville facility had a really cool museum, a water tank for weightless training, a huge hangar space with a few model spacecraft and an activities area, and access to top-notch research sites in the area: The University of Alabama, rocket and component design companies, and a company that had a space with a perfectly flat floor necessary for certain weightless simulations. I got to meet, speak to, and be enlightened by astronauts, astrophysicists, rocket scientists, and other assorted people in charge of making huge things hurtle into space at stupendous velocities. Every day we were kept busy with activities and seminars; every night we trooped into the IMAX theatre to watch giant footage of moon landings and Shuttle takeoffs while patriotic music blared in quadrophonic sound.
As cool as Space Camp was in theory, it was peopled in fact by one cross-section of adolescent society: dorks. My particular group, Europa Team, was composed of about eight boys and two girls, and it wasn't long until I found myself drifting to the bottom of the pecking order, the dork of dorks. As I mentioned, I didn't really have the whole "social interaction" thing down pat yet (“wait... so the man’s hoo-ha goes in where?!?!”), so this is no surprise in retrospect. While I did get along well with one or two of my teammates, most of them didn’t seem to take to me no matter how hard I tried to be cool, funny, and friendly. I hadn't been there 24 hours before I came around a corner to find some of them adopting my slouching posture and imitating my reflexive greeting – “Where is everybody else?” ("No... wait... in the la-la?! That can't be right...)
I became determined to win my fellow dorks over; to make them like me. In an effort to be funny, I kept talking long after I should have shut up. In an effort to be outgoing I barged into conversations. I let myself be talked into making an awful mess on my cafeteria tray and leaving it on the table for the staff to find - an artifact that provoked furious screaming from the kitchen staff as we snuck out the nearest door. But despite my best efforts to be liked, matters only got worse.
My contribution to the team's model space station - yet another dorky team event I failed to prevail in (see the Boy Scouts, below) - was a space telescope, on the theory that out in space, there's no atmosphere in the way. While perfectly true, compared to some of the other ideas such as the complicated and plausible long-term air/water recycling system contributed by a teammate, it dawned on me that my big idea was in fact fairly small. When the time came for our team to present our space station to the other Space Campers, I attempted to dress my telescope up with a dramatic delivery (“an onboard radio telescope will let us look out at the stars”) accompanied by a sweeping hand wave to express the wonder and vastness of space, only to register vaguely bemused looks from certain of the audience and irritation from the better part of my team.
I grew desperate. One night they brought in McDonald's for dinner for us to eat outside on the campus grounds, and in another attempt to raise my stock among my dork peers, I knelt down and ate a few discarded pickle slices off the pavement.
While the pickle bit garnered a few laughs and briefly raised my hopes for acceptance, what happened next probably explains why I remained a virgin until I was old enough to get drunk (legally) and forget my past. A few members of my team cooked up a plot to convince me that one of the girls on the team - a girl with whom I didn't seem to get along terribly well - had developed a crush on me. Over the course of two days they egged me on, telling me that she liked me.
Who was I to question their wisdom? She was a female and therefore of an alien and unknown species whose mind and motivations were utterly unknown to me. Moreover, she was pretty cute and I was impressionable. I mulled it over in my preadolescent mind. I slept on it. I fretted. I sweated. Finally, I came to a decision. Measures must be taken! I began to screw up my courage. I was going to do it.
That night, there was a presentation on something or other, maybe the composition of gas planets. The conspirators had (of course) managed to get me sitting next to her and had taken residence in the seats directly behind. I made up my mind: the time had come for action. I remember sitting there with a buzzing in my ears as my heart pounded in my chest. I remember getting all hot across the eyes and having trouble breathing normally, but after that things get fuzzy. I remember I turned to her, gulped and said...
What did I say? I can’t quite remember. I said something that was either “I like you too” or “I don't know if I like you back,” but the actual content of my utterance doesn't matter; her reaction was all that counts. As the conspirators looked on, she regarded me as if I'd just dug a fat booger from my nose and smeared it on her cheek, and said in a voice dripping with pained confusion and disdain, “I don't know what you're talking about.”
The culmination of everyone’s week at Space Camp was a simulated Shuttle mission into earth orbit and back. A captain, a co-pilot, a navigator, and a couple specialists would ride in a Shuttle simulator that actually tilted and shook, and would manipulate the levers and lights that would determine whether they lived or died. For the rest of us there would be various Mission Control assignments. Everything was laid out for us in a script.
When it came time for the team to choose up roles, I ardently hoped I would score a coveted spot in the Shuttle simulator. What I got was the part of Science Officer. The Science Officer‘s job was to wear a headset and sit at the end of the Mission Control row in front of an imitation computer display with a couple blinking lights. While the rest of the team launched the shuttle and got it into orbit, it was my duty to sit quietly and wait for two lines in the script, (I think they were, "Experiment 1 is go" and "Experiment 2 is go") and then say those two lines into the microphone. I might have had to push a “start experiment” button as well. Then I sat quietly again while the rest of the team landed the shuttle.
As I left the red earth of Alabama behind, I didn’t reflect much on my stay at Space Camp. It had felt a lot like school, and therefore there was little to consider. I had taken my first trip out of Ohio, made my first extended stay among strangers, and had stuck my hoo-ha in where I thought it ought to go: a job well done. Right?
It was only some years later when I found some old pictures in my parents’ closet that it all came flooding back and I realized how far I had abased myself in the futile hopes of winning the esteem of a group of other dorks. Space dorks.
Pictures survive of me posing proudly in my official NASA blue astronaut jumpsuit (some taken later when I had clearly grown too large for said jumpsuit). There is a picture of me as Science Officer in a Space Camp T-Shirt and serious face, wielding headset and script and waiting to say “Experiment 1 is go.” There are a few pictures of teammates: a couple are smiling; others openly glower at the camera. There has also survived one Polaroid of me strapped into the “Moonwalk Harness” trying to bounce across the floor with the same aplomb as my better-coordinated teammates. Yes, gentle reader, those are prescription aviator lenses, and yes, they are tinted. And yes, my shorts have ridden so far up you can almost make out each of my testicles.
[wik]The unbearable likeness of being
I don’t have a summer camp story. Certainly not a summer camp story that is even remotely in the ballpark of Johno’s humiliating experiences at that black hole of dorkdom, Space Camp. While I went to summer camp every year (sometimes more than once) with the Boy Scouts, my experiences there were largely non-scarring. To keep with the general theme, I will offer two experiences. One happened in the summer, at a park, the other involving the Boy Scouts, which run summer camps. Both of these incidents happened in my fifteenth year on this Earth.
Lack of Merit Badge
Being without a driver’s license is typically a license for dorkitude. Unable to use a manly mode of transportation, the young dork is forced to rely on other means. In my case, this was a used schwinn ten-speed, painted a lovely pastel turquoise. The name of the manufacturer alone sould give you an idea of how goofy my bike was. Added to the manifold goofiness of the name, there was the fact that over that summer, I had undergone a painful growth spurt – over four inches of additional height. My bike, unfortunately, was not capable of matching my growth. Cranking up the seat to its maximum height made the bike barely usable, but it was uncomfortable and embarrassing to ride.
As I mentioned, I was a boy scout. I was pressing hard for my Eagle, and to get it I needed merit badges. For this merit badge, the counselor was the owner of the local hardware store, located at the heart of the historic public square and about two miles from my home. On that particular mid-August day, going from outside into a steambath would have felt like stepping into a meat locker on any normal day. I packed up my materials, ready for the counselor’s signature, and set forth on my trusty steed.
I got to within a block of the hardware store when I realized that, like the dork that I was, I had forgotten to grab my backpack. All the paperwork was neatly packed and resting on the table at home. I turned around and headed back home. Furiously calculating ETAs and average speeds on my casio calculator watch, I figured that if I really hurried, I could get home, get my stuff, and get back downtown and only be a couple minutes late.
Pedaling furiously through the steamy summer, I reached my un-air conditioned home. Not stopping for water, I threw on my backpack and leaped back on my bike. As I approached the public square, I had by this time ridden almost six miles in hundred-plus temperatures, under the broiling sun, with no water. I was less than a block away from the hardware store, approaching the last intersection when nature, dorkish hubris and monomania and the limitations of human physiology all collided. I passed out just as I went off the sidewalk and into the street.
I woke up sometime later, my hands were bloody. My chin hurt, my head hurt and my chubby legs hurt. Blood was everywhere. I found a bloodless section of the back of my hand and felt my chin. It came back bloody. I kindly stranger stood over me, asking, “Are you all right? We called an ambulance. Do you know where your parents are?”
To these sensible questions, in my dazed state I could only say, “I need to get my Merit Badge.”
The kindly stranger, nonplussed by my apparent non sequitur, could only ask, “What merit badge?”
Full consciousness rushed back as I realized just how stupid a thing to say that was. But I was a Boy Scout, and I couldn’t lie.
“Safety Merit Badge.”
Share the road, assholes!
A little while later, I got my learner’s permit, and commenced the arduous process of learning to drive. My parents were patient and able teachers. (Well, mom was patient.) And I took to driving like a lead brick takes to water. My very first time behind the wheel, I nearly drove my grandfather’s ’76 Toyota Celica off a dirt road in southern Ohio. But by the time I was almost sixteen, six months of constant practice had made me a very good driver, considering that I was a spastic dork with only six months experience driving. I wheedled and pleaded to get every minute of possible driving time. Late in the spring, my family had a picnic at Salt Fork State park. It was a lovely affair, with family fellowship, excellent food, beautiful scenery and my cousins insisting that we play touch football just to watch me squirm when they made me be on the ‘skins’ team.
It was mid-afternoon as we packed up our things and prepared to depart. My mom, my favorite aunt, my grandmother, my cousin Chris and I piled into our brand new Suburu DL station wagon. I was at the wheel, and my aunt Susie was in the passenger seat, the rest crammed into the back with the debris from our picnic. As we set forth, I decided that it was past time to test the handling on the new car, and what better place to do it than the maze of twisty passages, all alike, that make up the roads of the park. As I urged the laboring four-cylinder engine to ever greater speed, my family began to be concerned. When I started taking corners at speeds which the wizened Japanese engineers had never intended the car to go, they became upset. Ignoring their cries, I kept hurtling around the corners and over the hills, imagining that I was Mario Andretti in finely engineered racing car, not a dork in a rice wagon.
As I topped a low rise, I saw a pair of bicyclists unwisely riding on the side of the road. I had miscalculated the degree to which the road would turn after the hill, and as I desperately attempted to both stay on the road and avoid splattering the cyclists on the windshield. They say that God favors drunks, fools and the United States of America. I was certainly the second, could be included in the third, and by the time it was over, I wished I had been drinking, because at least then I would have had an excuse for poor driving.
I managed to avoid the fitness freaks and stay on the road. I got a huge adrenaline straight to the heart, and I saw the world with that peculiar clarity and brilliance that oft accompanies near death experiences. I might have spent a moment savoring that eldritch feeling but for the screaming of my passengers. “You almost killed those people!” “You almost went off the road!” “Slow down!”
My grandmother, (who was everything a nice grandmother should be) saw my distress, and seeing the abuse being hurled at me leapt to my defense:
“Well, he has good reflexes.”
It only takes five words to transform abuse to laughter. And lord knows they weren’t laughing with, or even near me. They were laughing at me. My life flashed before my eyes. It was bad enough that I was being yelled at, and that I had nearly killed two innocent velocipedists. Now, my grandmother’s misguided attempt to help would sear this incident into the collective family memory forever.
And they kept laughing for the next forty-five minutes that it took to get to my grandmother’s house. Occasionally, it would simmer down to scattered giggles; then someone would say, “Good reflexes!” and it would start all over again. After a half hour, even my grandmother was howling along with them. When I pulled into the driveway and stopped, Chris fell out of the car, still laughing uncontrollably. Susie and Mom ran with him into the farmhouse to tell everyone else.
From that day to this, not one visit to my family fails to see at least one person making a crack about my having ‘good reflexes. One moment of dorky exuberance, two decades of abuse.
March 2005
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