Team Leader: Okay, I guess we’ll just wait another five minutes to see if Noor shows up, but if not we’ll just start without her.
(AWKWARD SILENCE)
Me: Well, I think it might be a nice way to kill the time if we each told one another a little bit about ourselves.
Team Leader: This isn’t required so nobody has to participate.
Me: My name is Michael Murray, I stand nearly six feet four inches tall and live in Toronto with my wife and our Miniature Dachshund. When I was a boy Iron Fist was my favourite superhero. He could summon and focus his chi into one amazing punch and was teemed with the super awesome Luke Cage, who was known not to take any jive.
Person #1: My name is Cindy and I live in Ottawa.
Person #2: Tom, in London.
Person #3: My name is Beth and I live in Kingston where I’m a student, and I guess I my favourite superhero would be Lara Croft.
Me: She’s not a superhero. She’s a video game character.
Person #3: Oh, I didn’t realize that Iron Fist was a real person. I’m surprised I haven’t heard more about him.
Team Leader: Hopefully Noor will be here very soon. We’ll just give her two more minutes and then we’ll get into the material.
Me: Team Leader, is there any sort of dress code we have to abide by when we’re doing our work?
Team Leader: Well, as you’ll be working from home, of course not.
Me: Great, because it’s a straight up fact that I do my best work when I’m not wearing a shirt.
Person #1: Gross.
Team Leader: Michael, we don’t need to know that. You’re over-sharing and making us all a little bit uncomfortable.
Person #1: Look, I’m not a difficult person, but I think this is sexual harassment.
Me: I think you hear what you want to hear, Cindy.
Person #1: What does that mean?
Me: You sound like somebody who maybe wants to get sexually harassed, you know?
Team Leader: Okay Michael, you are way out of bounds here and if you don’t apologize immediately and stop this conduct, you will be terminated from the project.
Me: Our Dear Leader makes a persuasive argument. Cindy, I am very sorry, I was just making stuff up and trying to be funny, lighten things up a bit while we waited, but I see that I was creepy and inappropriate, and I am really, truly sorry for that.
Person #1: Fine, but I still feel like I need a shower.
Person #2: I think we all do.
Noor: Hello! Sorry I’m late, did I miss anything?
Me: We were just talking about taking a group shower.
Team Leader: Michael, you’re fired.
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Here are three:
Dear Mike,
I have just read a novel in which an Englishman sees Spokane, Washington for the first time from a window of an airplane. It reminds him of Northwest Pakistan. Do you ever look at a place or a thing and it reminds you of something on the other side of the world? The first time I saw Athens from the air it reminded me of a coral reef deep in an ocean where I had never been.
Dear Mike,
Do you think you would ever be able to remember everyone who ever asked you the time? The only instance I remember very clearly was when I was 18 and sitting in the airport in Milan. An Italian man in a suit said something to me and pointed to his watch. I was terrified and shrugged and waved my watchless wrist at him. It became a habitual gesture. People ask me the time and I point to my wrist, whether I am wearing a watch or not.
Dear Mike,
The first time I saw the Milky Way I was seven years old. We were driving home to Chicago from my grandparents’ house in Lorain, Ohio in the middle of the night and my dad pulled the car over in a place where there were no streetlights and showed it to me. I remember the feeling of crouching as I looked at the sky.
After this, as a means of contrast, Rachelle and I watched Commander Hadfield’s return to Earth. For those of you who are not Canadian, Commander Chris Hadfield is a Canadian Astronaut who has spent the last 5 months on the International Space Station. It was here, through his use of Twitter– where he accumulated nearly one million followers—that he became something of a folk hero.
Avuncular, proportional and competent, Hadfield seems like a really, really nice guy. A Canadian guy. His moustache is friendly, like the sexually non-threatening moustache of a well-liked high school teacher, and his manner is sincere, thoughtful and fun, but still, you know this guy is operating at a very high level. You want him as your next-door neighbour. He would know what to do when the power went out and you thought you heard something funny in the basement.
Attached to a parachute, the Soyuz space capsule drifted down from space into a field in Kazakhstan like a child’s toy. A bunch of unofficial looking Russians then went over, as if farmers inspecting something that had fallen from the past rather than the future, and pulled the astronauts from the capsule. This was done without the least trace of urgency, like something they were practicing for in their street clothes rather than the main event.
The first out was the Russian and he looked hale, hearty and ready to start tossing a Kettlebell around. The next to follow, the American and Hadfield, looked small, pale and a little worse for the wear, like space travel extracted a physical toll.
They were all put on what looked like unmatched lawn chairs and gave the cameras the thumbs-up. Our CBC commentators were giddy, gushing about how robust and great Hadfield looked. It was surreal, like watching some weird variation of a Soviet propaganda film.
Regardless, what Hadfield did on his mission was utterly wonderful. From his photographs, videos and tweets, he shared with the public a suggestion of what might be considered the divine. The world is stunning in its beauty, and by extension we, all just brief, tiny organic outcroppings of the same living entity, are beautiful, too.
There are many who think that the International Space Station is a huge waste of money, one that doesn’t provide sufficient scientific benefit, but Hadfield, (his Space Oddity video was the most watched on YouTube Monday) showed us that data is perhaps secondary to the opportunity to see ourselves through eyes never imagined.
