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The Onion's Defense Mechanism 3
This is also continued from last week.
So my plan had been to take myself, Ishmael, down to the sea, and take passage on some boat or another, spend some time at sea, working a little bit to pay my way across the seas (all seven of them, if I could), and just see stuff. And 'blog it, if I could.
I'd brought my laptop so I could do just that. Unfortunately, I noticed a setback quite early on in the game when I landed in Nantucket and popped into a Starbucks.
My iBook had either been harpooned or those dogs hadn't been properly de-clawed, the way I believe dogs in cars should be. At any rate, being harpooned/clawed made it slightly less effective at wireless networking, so I sort of put it back in its bag and got to sipping my tall cafe mocha and pondering my next course of action.
Well, I knew my next course of action, I'd seen the advertisement in Hyannis, down by where you boarded the ferries. There was a ship setting sail in the in three days called the Devil's Dam, headed out to some research project, which I figured would be a good place to experience the sea. And possibly get my iBook fixed, as the advertisement claimed it was "Made with a Mac" and those scientific types always seem to know what they're doing around computers. So I could still chronicle the whole adventure on my laptop. Or at least check my email. Which would be cool.
This is the sort of stuff I pondered.
Also, somewhere along the line I started practicing holding my breath.
I don't know why, it's just something I've always associated with the sea -- a lack of air. Breathable air, anyway. Or is air taken for granted to be breathable? I don't know, anyway, you can't breath underwater.
I started about halfway through my mocha. I was idly thinking the applicants for shipping with the Dam might be getting tested on our breath-holding ability when we showed up, and gave it a shot.
The first go I only got fourteen seconds.
I sort of gasped through a few sips of mocha while I thought about that: I couldn't just have gotten only fourteen, I must have counted too slow, erring on the side of caution. It made sense, I only counted one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve-thirteen-fourteen... and not the more traditionally accurate one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand...
So I tried again, counting in the more traditional method.
I got ten.
This was mildly depressing.
The next time I didn't even really stop to take any coffee on, I just dove right into it. Better, I got almost twenty. Well, fifteen. Which was better than twelve, anyway.
I began thinking that was the trick, so I tried again straight away, and got twenty-two. Well, twenty-two and I had gone back to casual counting, as I was beginning to think of it.
I was doing well after probably around six minutes (that's a guess based on the fact that managed to hold my breath for 25, 19, 30, 29, 28, 28 and a little bit more... like a twenty-nuh..., 34, 36, 17, 25, and 37 seconds). Real well. I was hitting those thirty numbers pretty consistently. I even waved my arms around a little bit, to simulate swimming motions, because I figured it was all well and good holding your breath, but you'd have to move your arms to get back above water again. I'd probably preface my test with that little comment, just to show them I knew what might be involved, and that I didn't just know the theory and not the practice.
I made my mistake when I tried sipping some coffee while on the last attempt after six minutes or so. It might have been cockiness, it might have been a disconnect between my brain, which saw the coffee getting cold and my body, which was just hitting six seconds of holding its breath. Any which way, I spluttered for a bit, and somewhere while I was doing that some guy in a green apron escorted me out of the building, patting my back as we walked. It wasn't until we were outside that I saw he was checking to make sure I was all right and handing me my bag.
So I had a few hours to kill. A few days, actually. Initially. Thankfully, it turned out to be a good deal less than that.
I set myself right and began to search about the town for an internet cafe.
To be continued...
disclaimer:
Man, you know what? We missed the damn upgrades again!
Amazing, isn't it?
Anyway, we're afraid of what we might find now, because our systems administrator is still back in that room, trying to fix stuff, and there are some strange sounds coming from the server closet, I tell you.
So we keep trucking, anyway, on the old servers, hopefully getting an upgrade this week. Probably. Definitely maybe.
I hope everyone's keeping well out there, and enjoying themselves.
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