Dear Moron,

I guess when you get to a major turning point, it's pretty natural to think about where you came from. Or maybe it's just that I'm in the process of packing up, and I found a few mementos from my high school days. Either way, it's related to the fact that I'm about to get married, move away, and start working for a living as opposed to doing mostly fun stuff for a living.

I was fifteen once, interestingly enough. Frankly, I was ill-prepared for being a fifteen-year-old male, which is probably why I did a pretty crappy job of it. The bottom line is that at fifteen, life, generally, sucks. There really isn't a claim you can make to the contrary. I know for a fact that every time my parents told me that "these are the best years of your life" (we've all heard it) my general reaction was "oh, shit."

So I've been realizing lately that the face looking back at me from the mirror is no longer fifteen years old. He's seen a not insubstantial amount of the world, and he's lived a rather interesting life.

Didn't seem like it was going to turn out that way at fifteen, but then it never does, does it?

At any rate, I was wondering recently what I would write if the laws of physics could be bent, slightly, for just a moment. What if I could write to the fifteen year old I used to be? What would I say?

Dear moron,

I figured this greeting would be the best way to convince you that I'm you. I mean, who else would greet you that way? Of course, if you want more proof, look up on the very top shelf of your closet. You'll find a shoebox labeled "playboys" (brilliant hiding place, by the way). In that shoebox, you'll find a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, a package of double-edged razor blades, anywhere between two and six sterile gauze pads, and a roll of surgical tape. Nobody but you knows about that, right?

While we're on the subject, cut back a little (no pun intended). I'm not going to tell you to quit just what say that instead of three or four times a week cut it down to, say, two or three? You're not going to quit any time soon. And you're going to try (and fail) to do so a number of times between now and the time that you're looking at my face in the mirror, and the truth is, those blades helped you through a lot of rough patches in your life. As coping mechanisms go, you could do worse, I guess.

Okay, depending on when you're getting this, you've either just flunked a math exam, or you're about to. That'll be a first for you, won't it? You'll deal, and you'll be stronger for it. Take my word for it, it's not the end of the world. About five years from now, nobody's going to give a rat's ass what grades you got in High School. Believe me, you have a lot more school to go through before you're done. High school is gonna get lost in the flurry long before you're done.

I know that right now you're thinking that you're going to be a doctor, and that's all there is to it. Well, you're not. And interestingly enough, that's a decision you'll make after being accepted to med school. I know, weird, huh? The point I'm trying to make is that life has a nasty habit of never working out quite the way you plan for it to work out. If I were to tell you now that your first three publications in a scientific journal would be in astrophysics, what would you say? What if I told you that the next three would be in the American Journal of Physiology and the Biophysical Journal (times two)? Exactly.

If you're fifteen, you also just got dumped for the first time, or you're just about to. Sorry for the spoiler. It hurts. A lot. But you'll survive that too. Maybe you need things like that to happen. Maybe it's things like that that make you stronger. All I'm going to say is just wait 'till you meet your future wife. You've read Romeo & Juliet as well as all of the classic romances who talk about that one instant when they find that one person and they just know that their life is never going to be the same again. You don't buy all that bullshit, do you? Trust me: you will.

Don't worry. Let things fall the way that they should. Let them fall the way that they will, and don't freak out when they don't quite fall where you want them to. The only constant in life is that it's never what you expect. It's always moving, always changing, always persevering.

Oh, and when dad tells you that these are the best years of your life, you can call bullshit on that one. You're nowhere near the best years of your life. Not yet.

Keep an eye out for me. I'll be the one looking back at you from the mirror in about fourteen years.

Sincerely,
Drew

How much floor space does $300 of liquor take up?

So I got a few bottles of cognac today.

A few.

As in: three.

My Kung Fu master likes Cognac. And as a direct consequence of having met him, I've acquired a taste for it that I didn't possess before.

Anyhow, there's a big celebration and banquet coming up during which I happen to be one of three central figures. This is not a minor event, although very few people outside of thos who actually practice Kung Fu seem to realize just how non-minor it is. I'm being accepted as a disciple to an art which dates back 500 years. In short, it's been decided that I'm one day going to carry on the legacy and pass the knowledge I acquire on to someone else.

Yeah, this is a big deal.

So, traditionally, one gives the master a gift which he would enjoy. He has a great love of Cognac. Cognac, it turns out, is not cheap. Especially if you get very nice cognac. Cognac which has been aged many years to smooth it out; and if I'm going to be taught things that have only been taught to a select few throughout history, I'm not gonna cheap out on it.

Now, this cognac I got my hands on was not as expensive as some cognac out there (I saw a bottle which cost $7000), but it's not exactly a cheap acquisition, and it takes up less than a square foot of real estate on my floor.

Anyhow, I don't want to write about the price of cognac in Canada (title notwithstanding), but I guess I'm feeling a little introspective as the New Year has passed, and as I'm about to take a couple of big steps over the next few months. I'm becoming a disciple to a remarkable martial artist, I'm receiving my PhD. after four years of work. I'm taking my infinitely-better half to Europe for six weeks (a place neither of us has ever been). And throughout that time, I've had a constant companion in the martial arts.

I really wish I had the eloquence to explain what this means, but the truth is that I don't. The best way I know how is to say how it started.

Four years ago, I was in a bad place. Not that things weren't going well for me, mind you. I'd been accepted into a Master's program (the switch to PhD would come about a year later), my research was going well, but the bottom line is that I wasn't happy. A friendship had just ended under unpleasant circumstances, and I was dealing with it badly. I'm not generally prone to emotional outbursts, but frankly I spent about three months walking a very fine line between uncontrolled rage and deep depression. You'd be surprised how close together those two can be.

So I needed something to replace the hours that I was spending feeling sorry for myself. Hey, I'm not proud of it, but without going into detail (which I omit to protect the guilty), you can trust me that it warranted a little wallowing. I'd toyed with the idea of taking up a martial art before. I'd given Aikido a try while I was at UBish; a loooong time ago (picture a 12-year-old Drew in a white uniform and a green belt), I'd tried Tae Kwon Do; a mere few months before the events which lead up to this, I'd tried Kendo. All of which, it should be mentioned, are admirable martial arts. They just weren't for me. Tae Kwon Do, I'd done because I thought it was cool. Aikido, I took up because my significant other at the time had suggested it. Kendo, well, I don't know why I decided to try that one. It looked cool I guess.

The bottom line is that I was sick of feeling sorry for myself and decided I needed somewhere else to focus all that feeling-sorry-for-myself-energy, at least for a few months. Kung Fu seemed as good a place as any. One of the students I shared an office with ran a Kung Fu School; or rather he helped his brother run a Kung Fu school in his spare time, and three questions later, I was learning the White Tiger Style of Kung Fu, along with two buddies from High School.

My life improved rather sharply. I'm not sure to this day whether the two were related. But I was happier, I was healthier, I lost weight, and my endurance and strength increased beyond what I thought was possible. For the first time I could remember ever I realized that I could say that I was happy without a little voice in the back of my head saying no, you're not.

Some time after I came to that remarkable realization, I met April. To say that the two of us hit it right off would be both a cliche and an understatement. I'm not prone to romantic language, but in her I found a half of myself I didn't even realize was missing. Ugh, that sounds so... ugh. Not untrue, mind you. But... ugh.

Like I said, I'm feeling a little introspective, so bear with me.

So we're at now minus three years or so, and I'd been studying the White Tiger Style of Kung Fu for about eight months. I was learning a lot. I ascended quickly to the Blue sash level, and was working on the Green Sash forms and techniques. I managed to pass my test for the Blue sash while doped up on decongestants. An accomplishment I'm actually kinda proud of to this day. It had taken me almost two years to get to that point. I wasn't an asskicker by any description of the term, but I had learned a lot in those two years.

And somewhere in there, the completely unexpected happened. Suddenly, Kung Fu wasn't a crutch anymore. It wasn't something I did to smooth the wrinkles of my life. It wasn't something that made my life easier. It was just something that was there. It was something that just felt right. Like it belonged in that one spot in my life. Like it had always been there.

Keep in mind, when I'd started, I'd intended to keep with it for a few months at most. Now I was going on two years.

October, 2005.

The White Tiger school my two companions and I had been studying at was closing its doors. The young man I'd studied under directed me at a Grand Master of a different, but related style of Kung Fu, and that's where my pursuit of Bak Mei began.

I'm not going to go so far as to claim that it was a moment that changed my life, but I will say that it was a moment that I still use to describe it. It was one of those moments where we describe all the others as "before this," and "after this." This was one of those moments. I started learning this style of Kung fu in a cold basement in the middle of Chinatown. A tiny little building that I'd never have noticed if not for the fact that I needed to climb down into the basement three times a week to learn a style of Kung Fu that I'd never even heard of a month ago. I know, it's weird when I put it that way, but the fact is that for the last almost-three years, Bak Mei has been a dominant positive force in my life.

And I learned. Under the steady tutelage of a Chinese Grand Master and his two existing disciples, I learned the art. I learned to Lion Dance. I Taoist philosophy and somewhere, something was unlocked. Another piece of me that I didn't even realize was missing was added, and suddenly I found myself wondering how I ever managed without it.

Again, I draw your attention to my lack of eloquence. I don't want to say this sounding as if Kung Fu was just a crutch for me. The best way I can put it is that it's part of me. It isn't something I do anymore. It's part of who I am.

On March 10th, I take another step. I'm taking it with the same two companions that have been with me since the beginning. The people who shared the same journey. I'm taking it with April, and I take it surrounded by other students and by the man who got me started on it all.

There are worse ways to spend an evening.

GET ME THE HELL OUT OF DENVER!!!!!!!

You'd think that I would've learned from my experiences last year not to travel through Denver, Colorado ever again. You'd think I'd have picked up a little wisdom during my seven-hour drive from Denver to Durango last year that I would've given a second thought to taking a connection through there again.

You'd think. And you'd be wrong.

I woke up bright and early on Wednesday, December 20th to catch a flight from Calgary to Denver. Three and a half hours crammed in a tin can punctuated by approximately one hour in an even smaller tin can at the end of which, it was promised, I'd be safely in Durango, Colorado.

That was the plan, anyway.

I arrived at the ticket counter a good two hours ahead of time, got my boarding pass and made it through customs in record time. The guy behind the customs desk barely even glanced at my passport. Kinda surprising since the last time I tried to cross the border I was informed that I was on the terrorist watch list. This time they barely even looked at me. I'm at a complete loss to explain that one.

The flight left at 6:55 am on Wednesday morning. The skies were clear and dark (the sun hadn't risen yet), but the weather in Calgary was pretty much ideal. The temperature hovered around freezing, the terrorism alert was yellow, and all in all, life could've been a lot worse.

The plane took off less than five minutes late (so, pretty much right on time) and turned south, cruising towards the distant, invisible runway at Denver International Airport.

I didn't even have any idea that anything was wrong in Denver until we were about an hour out from Denver, and even then the only notice was "some flights out of Denver have been cancelled." I wasn't really worried, since there are a dozen flights to Durango from Denver, and even if mine was cancelled, I figured my chances of getting onto one of them were pretty good.

And, to be fair, they probably would have been pretty good, if any flights were leaving Denver at all.

Now, I should mention that the descent into Denver was one of the most uneventful landings I've ever experienced (and I've experienced a few); except for the fact that we couldn't see the ground until we were about a hundred feet above it. Due to some minor delays enroute, we arrived at the gate approximately fifteen minutes before my flight to Durango was scheduled to leave. I thought I'd dodged a bullet. I figured if we could land in this weather, we could take off, as long as we took off before the weather got any worse.

I know, it's a vain, delusional hope, but it was something for me to cling to... for about thirty seconds, right until I saw the monitors and found that pretty much every posted flight out of Denver (including two to Durango) had been cancelled.

And that was pretty much the high point of my day.

I actually made it to a window that gave me a real picture of the weather outside. The weather was horrendous. The snow was falling so thick that from the large window, I couldn't see the airplane parked right outside it. And it was falling sideways. Brutal winds blasted the dry snow into thick snowdrifts which piled around buildings in piles several feet thick. I later found out that they were describing this as the fourth most severe blizzard to hit Denver ever. How, exactly, they quantify these things is a bit of a mystery to me, but I'm not about to argue the point. I've lived in Calgary for twenty-seven years (not counting five that I spent in Quebec), and I've seen a bizzard this bad exactly once in my life. And I was seven at the time.

I landed at 9:45. By ten, every outgoing flight had been cancelled; by noon, every incoming one. Some flights still arrived into the afternoon because United Airlines is being run by a bunch of monkeys, but as of noon, Denver International Airport was closed for business.

Which meant that I had to find a place to stay for the night.

Someone was walking around handing out these little pink slips which provided a good rate for a hotel that night... provided that we could get out of the airport. Something, it turns out, that was easier said than done. Getting a hotel room was actually the easy part. Getting to the hotel, on the other hand, was going to take a little work.

So I called my folks. On my cellphone. Long distance. Roaming. I couldn't get through to United Airlines to get a flight to Durango; or anywhere, for that matter, so I had people in two different cities try to get me a flight to anywhere. As long as it was out of Denver. From there, I figured I could make my way to somewhere that was in striking distance of Durango.

It was coming up on two o'clock in the afternoon at this point. I'd been standing in line for a little over three hours, only to be told that they weren't reserving any more flights, and that they weren't letting me get my checked bag out of the system. So it looked like I wasn't going to be able to change my clothes until this was all over. United Airlines' stock was in freefall as far as I was concerned.

I ran into a airport employee and showed him my ticket. He looked at my ticket with a confused expression on his face.

"Why did your flight leave Calgary?" He asked me.

I looked at him with a somewhat flabbergasted look on my face which is universally recognized to mean "why the hell are you asking me!?" But aloud I only said "what do you mean?"

"Well, we sent out word at 4:00 am that no more flights were to leave for Denver. That's three hours before your flight left," he told me, as if I wasn't able to do the math myself.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, I wasn't already pissed off at United Airlines, that pretty much drove the last nail into the coffin. If they'd mentioned just once before I got on the plane that getting out of Denver might be a little difficult, I could've waited and got onto another flight to somewhere else.

Anywhere else.

But I digress.

So... getting out of the Airport. Believe it or not, that would be the largest challenge I would face over the next 48 hours. I knew I had a room reserved, and would at least have a warm bed, assuming that I could get out of the airport.

Shuttle busses were coming, infrequently, to the airport and let me just say that I saw something of a wide spectrum of human behaviour during my time waiting for the bus. I saw people elbow others out of the way just to get onto the bus, and I saw a crowd stand aside to let by a woman with a baby. As you'll see in a moment, I'm not exactly in a position where I can huck stones around, but I felt it important to point out that human beings are fickle creatures.

Around 4:00 pm, I looked at the (huge) crowd around me and came to the realization that the vast majority of them weren't going to get out of the airport before the highways closed. I turned to two guys I'd spent the afternoon with and told them that if we wanted out of this, we were going to have to short-out the lineup. Taxis were already starting to bypass the airport and try to get back into town before the highway closed. So we decided that we had to do something stupid. We hiked up the shoulder of the highway, in zero visibility, in snow that was driving into us and freezing our eyes shut. We flagged down a taxi, and between the three of us, we offered a $120 "tip" on top of the fare to get to the hotel.

Yep, we bribed a taxi driver to get out of the airport. I'm not proud of it, but it did the job. I should point out at this point that normally, the ride from the airport to the hotel is approximately 20 minutes. The three of us piled into the taxi at approximately 4:13 pm. It was just after six when we arrived at the hotel. I'm no stranger to blizzards, but this one scared the bajesus out of me. Visibility was functionally zero. Cars had been abandoned on both sides of the highway, and you could see people trying to hike along the median to safety. We stopped to help jump-start two cars, helped push another one out of a snowdrift, and we carried another person to the hotel we were going to, mostly at my insistance; my attempts to atone for leaving a bunch of people stranded at the airport, I guess. At any rate, the (now four) of us made it to the hotel and we gave the taxi driver his payoff (with an additional $40 contributed by the person we'd picked up). I think we probably set the record as the single highest fare he got year. It's also worth mentioning that as we were driving away from the airport, we heard over the radio that the highways into and out of the airport were closed; so I'm pretty sure that we were some of the last people actually get away from DIA.

Like I said, I'm not proud of it, but it worked. It sure as hell beat being stranded at the airport.

I checked in at 6:12 pm (I feel I should direct your attention to the time at which my flight landed at DIA, a few paragraphs north of this one).

I slid into my room and crashed pretty much immediately. I needed some sleep.

I'll jump forward a couple of days here, since not much that was particularly noteworthy occurred for two days other than being told "no, Denver International Airport is not opened yet," repeatedly. I did manage to get a reserved flight on the 23rd from Denver to Salt Lake City, standby; then from Salt Lake City to Durango, also standby. To use a sports metaphor, it was like fumbling at the four yard line, being pushed back to the thirty, than attempting a touchdown when all of my receivers have broken ankles. For two days, we couldn't really leave the hotel until the snow plows cleared the roads, and even if we could, there wasn't really anywhere to go. I hung out with a fellow pinko liberal at the hotel bar discussing at length how much we both hated Bush and his administration. He was a nice guy. He bought me a couple of drinks. Turns out that he was also a fan of the Crown Royal and Coke; my drink of choice, when I'm not buying.

So, we had nothing better to do for two days than sit at the hotel bar and have a few (dozen) drinks.

I tried in the interim to show up uber-early to the airport and get on an earlier flight to Durango on standby, but it didn't work out. They were telling me at the time that the earliest they could get me out of the city was the 29th. Fortunately, I had my Denver-Salt Lake City-Durango ace in the hole.

So, the 23rd rolled around. I want to take a moment to point out that that day, exactly one year prior, I was also stranded in Denver International Airport, and I ended up driving from Denver to Durango (for seven hours) with three strangers I ran into at the airport; arriving at 3:00 am on Christmas Eve.

But I digress again.

DIA was a madhouse. It was a state of organized chaos. At 8:00 am (ten hours before my flight was scheduled to leave), the lineup to get to the ticket counter was 2.7 miles long, winding its way all over the airport. I know this because the woman standing two spaces behind me was wearing a pedometer.You can see a picture of the lineup to the ticket counter here.



In an act which could be considered cruel, in one of its meanderings, the lineup for the ticket counter overlooked the security lineup, which was just as bad; and that's where we were going next.



The guy who helped me at the ticket counter (two and a half hours after I got in line) was pissed off, not that I can really blame him. He'd spent the last couple of days talking with really pissed off people, I guess it rubbed off on him.

So after just shy of three hours standing in line to get a boarding pass, I stood for just shy of two more waiting to go through security. That line was longer, but it moved faster. I attached a picture of the lineup for security as well.

I made it to the gate my plane would be leaving from, and waited. I had another four hours before my flight left. I had an hour and a half connection in Salt Lake city, so as long as my flight left roughly on time, I would make it to Durango after a long day of traveling, but I'd make it.

Notice the qualifier.

I watched as the flight from Denver to Salt Lake City announced that the flight, instead of leaving at 6:00 pm, would be leaving at 8:30 pm. Unless the flight from Denver to Salt Lake was less than a half hour long (which it isn't), there was no possible way I was going to make my connection; and frankly, I was going to trade one stranding for another, since I wouldn't have any way out of Salt Lake City when I got there.

My day had just got a lot worse.

So I called my folks to let them know that they probably shouldn't bother making a bed for me, it was starting to look unlikely that I was going to leave Denver. United Airline's stock was again in freefall as far as I was concerned.

To put things in perspective, I'd now been in Denver, Colorado, less than 300 miles from my final destination, for 78 hours, I was tired, I'd been wearing the same clothes for four days, and I smelled like something that had died in an outhouse. I was not having a good day.

Then I had a thought.

The previous year, April had spent New Year's with me in Durango, and to get there, she had flown from Denver to Cortez; a tiny town about an hour away from Durango.

The flight was a tiny little propeller-powered Beechcraft; which departed from a small, corner of Denver International Airport; and it was a flight that absolutely nobody knew about.

So I'm pretty sure I set land-speed records sprinting from Concourse B to the extreme far end of concourse A (which, for those who are unfamiliar with DIA, is the single most distant point possible from the gate I was sitting at), and skidded to a stop right in front of the gate for a flight to Cortez. The nice grandmotherly woman behind the counter said that I was the first on the standby list, and that there was room on the flight, so it looked good. Then she said the single most dreaded word in the english language (for me, anyway, at that time): "but."

"But," she told me, "you're going to have to get a paper ticket which shows what we call an 'involuntary transfer' from Salt Lake City to Cortez."

"Perfect," I told her, "how do I do that?"

"Go to the Customer Services Desk, it'll take them ten minutes," she informed me.

She'd barely finished the sentence, before I dashed (again at a full sprint) back to concourse B (the customer services desk happened to be right next to the gate I was waiting at, which, you'll recall, is about as far away from the gate for the flight to Cortez as you can get without standing on the tarmac). So I skid to a stop just in front of the customer services desk, only to find out that United Airlines had just seen it fit to cancel four flights. The lineup was weaving back several hundred meters. There were exactly forty-one minutes until the flight to Cortez left, and there was no possible way that I was going to make it to the counter in time.

So I ran, again at a full sprint, to the far end of Concourse A (that's three sprints back and forth, for those of you keeping count) and arrived at the gate, out of breath, sweaty, and smelly, all of which combined to make me look just pathetic enough for her maternal instinct to kick in.

"Tell you what," she said, "you're first on the standby list, so I will sell you a ticket at the last minute to fly to Cortez."

So that's how it played out. Literally seconds before the flight was to leave, I forked over $270 (US), to hop a flight at the last minute to fly from Denver to Cortez.

I heaved a huge sigh of relief as I sat in my seat on the tiny plane.

The engines spun up, and the plane turned to taxi towards the runway.

Then it stopped.

It stopped dead in the middle of the flight apron, its engines spinning, waiting to lift off.

The pilot turned around and announced: "Folks, I'm sorry to announce that we've had a minor technical problem and we cannot lift off at this time. We're going to go back to the gate and deplane, and we'll see if we can get this corrected."

There's a point at which the situation becomes just absurd enough to be funny. I was quietly giggling to myself as I sat in the airport for the next half hour, watching them try to fix the plane outside. Maybe it was because I was exhausted, both physically and emotionally, but the whole situation suddenly seemed hilarious. I remember I had to force myself not to giggle uncontrolably when April called me on my cellphone while I was waiting at the gate.

The flight finally lifted off, almost an hour late, but it lifted off, and landed in the tiny airport in Cortez, Colorado, just over an hour later.

Me, I was just happy to be out of Denver.

Dad was already waiting for me at the gate when I got off of the plane. I vowed never to fly through Denver; ever again.

Now, as an addendum, remember how they wouldn't let me get my bags and as a result, I had to wear the same clothes for four days? Well, guess what, my bag arrived in Durango the day before I did. So apparently, it was more important for them to get my bags to Durango than it was to get me there.

Nice to know where I rate.

So, for those of you keeping track, I'm never flying through Denver again, and I'm never flying United.

Happy New Year, everybody.

The things I go through to see my folks on the Holidays

It's one of the little ironies of life that Airports are among the least pleasant places on earth to be stranded, and the places where you're most likely to actually be stranded.

I flew into Denver, intent upon flying from there to Durango, Colorado; where my family was waiting for me. My flight into Denver was delayed by three hours, which in and of itself was not a problem, except that my flight to Durango had left an hour before my flight to Denver landed.

The fact that I arrived at the gate almost two hours after my flight was supposed to leave, and it still hadn't left, should tell you something.

Of the six flights to leave for Durango, three had failed to depart, three more remained to leave, the first of which was four hours behind schedule (and counting) and two hundred very angry people were waiting by the gate. Combined, all three flights to Durango could carry approximately 75 passengers. They were in the process of booting people off of the three remaining flights to make room for the three flights which had failed to depart. And I was arriving late in the game.

This did not look promising. I had a confirmed ticket, but as I was rapidly learning, that wasn't in any way, form, or fashion a guarantee that I would be leaving Denver within the week. The next confirmed flight to Durango was on the 28th. April was planning to meet me in Durango after Christmas, and at the rate I was moving, she'd beat me there.

Don't worry; this story does become more positive. You know me; I'm Mr. Positive himself.

But at that moment, things were looking a little bleak. I called ahead and told my folks to start a pool on whether or not I was going to make it to Durango in time for Christmas, and to put my money on the 27th.

Life has this nasty habit of taking you in directions you never expect it to. If you had told me on the morning of the 23rd, that I'd be renting a car with three complete strangers to take an unplanned seven-hour road trip through the wolf creek pass to spend Christmas with my family, I'd probably have said that you were fricking nuts. But lo and behold, in the midst of the chaos that was Gate B61 at the Denver International Airport, four complete strangers finally said, "screw this, we're gettin' home for Christmas."

But I digress.

My brother happened to travelling on the same day, and he had a confirmed ticket to Cortez. So he was gonna make it home in time (lucky bastard). At the moment, it didn't look like I was. He asked me what my plan was. I was on standby for the next two flights; I was also on standby for the flight to Cortez. Plan C was to rent a car and drive.

That's when I met Carla.

Carla was a 38-year-old writer from San Francisco who had been waiting at the gate since about 11:00 that morning. She was flying to Durango to spend Christmas with the closest thing she had to family; a friend who lived in Pagosa Springs; a town about an hour out of Durango. She couldn't help but overhear me mentioning to my elder brother that driving to Durango may end up being my only viable option, and offered on the spot to split the cost of a car with me. I think we were both hanging onto the desperate hope that maybe, just maybe we could get out of there before the week was over.

That hope seemed only slightly less desperate when we found out that they were finally going to get a plane which could potentially fly to Durango.

That hope was dashed when the pilot grounded the plane. Normally, I suppose I'd be happy about that; but normally, I haven't just spent four hours trying to get onto a plane that I already had a ticket to get onto, at least in theory. But at 6:00 pm, three and a half hours after the plane theoretically should've left, thirteen hours more than some of the people waiting at the gate should've been waiting, we were informed that the absolute earliest that we'd get out of the airport was 8:55 pm; and even then, the odds were that we would be waiting at least until tomorrow. Maybe later.

Carla and I took one look at each other and pretty much decided on the spot that we were driving.

We decided to divide our efforts. Carla made sure that our bags got on the plane (ironically, they were going to reach Durango before we did), I was going to get a car.

First, though, I was going to try one last hail mary pass.

I walked to the gate for the last flight to Cortez to see if I could get my butt onto the last flight, leaving at 9:05 pm.

No dice.

I was walking back from the concourse that time forgot, Carla called me to let me know that she'd got another passenger for the car.

That's how I met Jeremy. Jeremy was a 22-year-old undergrad in commerce at Colorado State University, just trying to get home in time for Christmas. He'd been seeing a young woman for almost six years and was planning to upgrade that status to "Fiancee" in the near future.

So the three of us (happily) left the airport, and one by one, checked each of the car rental counters to see who would rent us a car for a one-way transit to Durango.

The fact that this was a seven-hour drive we were signing up for (it was now approaching 8:00 pm) was not lost on us; but at least it beat waiting at the gate for a plane to show up.

And that's when I met Sydney. Sydney had been trying to get out of New York for three days, and had found that to be somewhat difficult with the transit strike. She'd arrived at the airport at 8:00 that morning. She was coming upon hour twelve in the airport. The way she put it, she'd run into Jeremy in front of the gate, who'd mentioned that we were renting a car. She'd basically said that she was still going to try to get onto the next plane.

That was around about the same time that the pilot announced that he was going to ground the plane. Faced with the prospect of having to wait until at least 8:55 before she even had the remotest chance to get out of the airport exclaimed to the young woman behind the desk "Oh (expletive deleted), I'm such an idiot! What's that guy's name!?"

The woman behind the desk, understandably, didn't understand what the hell she was talking about. Her confusion deepened when Sydney leaned across the desk, and, fueled by the frustration of getting the hell out of New York; followed by twelve hours waiting to get on a plane; demanded to know where we would most likely go in the airport if we wanted to rent a car. That's when she met us and asked us, pleaded, really, if there was still room for one more in the car.

Sydney had had a rough day.

She high-tailed it out of the building to meet the three of us, just as we managed, for the bargain price of $200 US, to rent a car to get to Durango. Split four ways, and seen as an investment in our future sanity, we decided that it was a bargain.

So we piled the four of us into a Ford Five Hundred; and headed south.

It was a rather impressive encounter by anybody's standards. We took turns driving; which means that each of us would drive for about two hours at the most. Two of us could sleep; and the other would stay awake to keep the driver alert.

That was the theory, but it didn't end up working out that way. All of us were pretty wired; well, except for Sydney, who was just bushed. The rest of us were up basically trading life stories.

Consider this for a moment. The four of us had met barely hours ago, and now we were embarking on an intense, seven-hour drive to Durango. Four complete strangers unified by a desire to spend the holidays somewhere other than the Denver International Airport. And here we were, trading pretty much the stories of our respective lives.

I mentioned earlier that Carla was a writer. From her perspective, this was gravy. This was the kind of material that makes books. So fueled by her insatiable hunger for information, the four of us learned more about each other than some people who have known each other for years.

So as midnight rolled around; as the 23rd turned to Christmas eve, we were weaving our way through the Wolf Creek Pass and talking as if we were life-long friends.

I spent four hours flying, I spent another four in the airport. I spent seven hours driving from Denver to Durango.

And I found out in hindsight, there was room on the flight from Denver to Cortez.

I'm glad I didn't get on that plane.

Happy Holidays everyone.

Still breathing....

Well, April and I made it back from our little jaunt along the West Coast Trail. 75 kilometers of rough terrain designed, I'm confident, to utterly drain those hikers brave (or foolhardy) enough to attempt it.

Suffice it to say, we had a blast.

We hiked all 75 km in about six days (the last day was a real push; we had to go 12 km before 1:00 pm), hiking an average of 12 and a half kilometers a day. That becomes a little more impressive when you realize that there were some days in there that we only managed to hike about 6 km.

Once you get past the first 22 kilometers, though, the trail gets a lot easier... except for the fact that there are still 53 kilometers to hike. We averaged about 1 km/hour for the first 22 km. We averaged well over 3 for the last 53; just to give some perspective.

Suffice it to say that we had a wonderful week, and I firmly believe that the West Coast Trail is something everyone should do at least once before they die.

April and I are already starting to toy with the idea of doing it again in the not-too-terribly-distant future. Probably next year. We figured we'd pack lighter (there were a lot of things in our packs this time that we simply didn't need), and take more time (there were a few days that were more than a little rushed; we figured we'd take nine days instead of six next time).

Still, it was an adventure, and one I'd really like to repeat someday.

Acupuncture

So... Acupuncture.

I consider myself sceptical of just about anything. I guess that's why I got into science; where being a sceptical sonuvabitch is actually a good thing. Science still hasn't fully worked out how, exactly, acupuncture works; it could be just an advanced placebo effect, or there's a theory coming through the pipes called "gate theory" which suggests that by probing specific parts of the body; you can open "gates" which increase blood flow, circulation, and basically reinforce the body's own healing mechanism. The short answer is that we don't know.

And, let's face it, relieving pain by shoving needles in various parts of your body seems somewhat contradictory just on its own.

So, after we did our Kung Fu demonstration on Friday (which went well, by the way, but I was pretty dead at the end of it), our Daai Si Ying invited a few of us over to his place for what he calls quality control. Which is a nice way of saying "run a select few students through the wringer and see if they can still walk at the end of the day." The good thing is that you learn an enormous amount in a relatively short period of time. The down side is that you can't move the next morning. Usually because you've got such a buildup of lactic acid in your muscles that even rolling over in bed makes you wince in pain.

Then there are the bruises.

Most frequently, they're the natural result of some rough sparring sessions. I had a black eye for a while from the last no-holds-barred sparring session. Made an interesting conversation topic.

Then, there are the self-inflicted ones. These tend to be far worse because they're generally inflicted when you're in the process of breaking something that doesn't want to be broken.

A rock, for instance.

Now, as a quick primer: when a rock breaks, you don't feel anything. It's practically as if you sliced your hand through air.

When it doesn't break, it hurts like a sonuvabitch.

And at the moment, unfortunately, I'm at the point in my training where the rock breaks a lot less frequently than it doesn't.

In a rock-break attempt last night, I hit the rock exactly wrong, but with enough force to break it; and it hurt. A lot. For a second I was sure that I'd shattered at least a couple of bones in my hand. Turns out I was wrong on that one. But I'd definitely hit it hard enough to bruise it badly. Very badly.

So one of the seniormost students, who happened to witness the event in question sat me down and informed me that I had a bad deep-tissue bruise. Something I already knew, but it was nice to have some confirmation. I figured I was just gonna have to suck it up and deal with the fact that my hand was going to swell to roughly the size of a small canteloupe, and turn a nice, deep purple. I've had bruises like that before; they always take about three or four days until they're back to something resembling "normal," but they do heal.

He calmly grabs my hand and asks me how I am with needles. Then goes on to ask if I've ever had acupuncture. I replied, honestly, that I was somewhat sceptical about acupuncture. He replied that was okay; it would work regardless of whether I believed it.

That, I admit, threw me for a loop. One of the defining characteristics of a placebo effect is that whoever's receiving treatment has to believe that the treatment could conceivably help them. If he was right, Placebo was looking less likely. I shrugged it off and said I was willing to try.

So, he proceeds to stick me with a few needles. One in the tip of my pinky finger, two more just distal and proximal to the injury respectively, a third in my wrist, a fourth in just on the inside of my elbow, and a fifth in my leg, just distal to the knee. He left them in for a few minutes, then carefully removed them.

Suffice it to say that I woke up the following morning far less sceptical about acupuncture. It wasn't a cure-all, certainly. My hand is still a little sore; but swelling is practically nonexistent, and it's not purple. None of the typical morning-after results of this kind of injury are there.

Admittedly, one sample isn't exactly representative; but it definitely shows more promise than I'd previously thought.

Neat stuff, that acupuncture.