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Frostlion
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Country: Netherlands
Birthday: 1/18/1986
Gender: Male
Interests: The usual, and not-so-usual
Expertise: Expertise? I'm supposed to be good at something? Darn, why didn't anyone tell me?
Occupation: Student
Industry: Education/Research
Message: message me
Member Since:
12/10/2003
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| "What? Butter-side down again?!?"
Another victory for Prok, the God of tiny miracles that can be easily explained away.
Yeah, I've been too busy to write.
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| My trip through the World of Warcraft started more than two years ago. Back then, looking at my addiction to Diablo 2, I knew it would be a good idea not to get into it, so I didn’t sign up for anything and didn’t buy anything. Then one day my brother had a spare beta account and asked me if he should pass it on to me or cancel it. Well, when he put it like that...
Of course, after I started, it was too much fun to turn back. I played the beta a fair bit, and was then able, with the help of bone, to get a permanent account just days after the game was released in the US. The game was released around the Christmas holidays, so playing over 300 hours I got to the maximum level (60) in a month (Yes, that is 10 hours a day.) That made my hunter the third alliance character on the server to hit top level, the second to get an epic mount etc. out of thousands of players. Which goes to show, I’d basically played the game obsessively.
Once I hit 60 I had to make the choice: Do I want to push this aside and focus on my schoolwork again? Or can I afford to spend more time having fun here? I decided my time in the game was too good to give up. I’d tone down a bit and make sure I got my work done also, but I wouldn’t be putting WoW to the side. From then on, I played regularly, but not in crazy amounts.
I was one of the founding members of the guild “Demonhunters.” My brother set up the guild, originally as a sort of chatroom for all the level 60 people who knew each other to get together (and maybe get some group play going.) We were a group of about 15 people then. Over time we got some more people into the guild and at some point, the decision was made that we were going to aim for high-end content. Soon after that, we merged with two other guilds. Recruiting a few more members and beginning an alliance with a third guild, we had enough people to tackle the high-end content. We started to get 40-man raids together for the most challenging encounters in the game. The guild was doing great, the epic weapons and armor were rolling in and we were without a doubt the best raiding guild on the server.
I had been an officer in the guild almost from the start and I found out all about growing pains. We had a lot of problems getting big, we had our bad apples, we had our cliques and we had our fights over loot. As an experienced officer of my current guild once put it “There may not be an ‘I win’ button for running a guild, but there sure is a minefield full of ‘I lose’ buttons.” In the end though, from talking to others and hearing about other raiding guilds, I feel we did incredibly well. We solved our problems, got loot rules set up, got a slower semi-closed recruitment going and got rid of most of the bad apples. We were on the edge a few times (even though most members didn’t know about it) but through an incredible effort from the officers and the members we pulled through every time. In the end though, one fact remained that I could not ignore: we were a group of people that raided together now, not a family. Or, as I wrote in my goodbye post:
“Great people, great guild, great accomplishment… but not [i]my[/i] guild. This may sound strange to some of you, but over the last few months I’ve found that raiding as a number one priority is not what I am looking for in a guild. Sure, it’s nice to kill a dragon and I can’t say I didn’t have fun getting some of our server firsts, but at the end of the day, I found what I’m really looking for is just a small group of friends to hang out with. And though I have friends in Demonhunters, in the end it’s a guild of accomplishments.”
I first got to know a few people from my current guild simply as skilled party members in a number of high-end encounters. They were always fun to play with and talk to, but I had no idea then about what the guild meant.
I only really started knowing Knights of the WhiteWolf when they became part of the Demonhunters effort to beat high-end content. When I saw people passing on an attempt at the greatest dragon out there to help guildies get a few levels, I got my first glimpse of what the guild was about. I was excited about this attitude, but I soon found that a lot of Demonhunters were less than thrilled about having anyone with a different tag under their name along. After we got down that big dragon, the first question that was asked was “So, when are we doing this guild-only?”
I was frustrated that day by the lack of respect people showed for the people who’d helped us long before we meant anything… I almost left that day, to hopefully join KoWW, but luckily I didn’t. The alliance didn’t last long after that though. After talking about it, KoWW decided to end it themselves, instead of having it drag on.
But as I said, I didn’t leave, even though I felt that day that Demonhunters wasn’t for me. Instead, I tried to find out if I actually wanted to join KoWW, or if I was just looking for something, anything, that was not the raiding craze. Over the next few weeks I talked with a number of people, inside and outside KoWW about it. I got a chance to play with a number of them and I joined in on a few guild raids. I finally got a feel for what the guild was all about. And I found out that, yes, KoWW is exactly what I wanted to be a part of.
You see, KoWW isn’t a World of Wacraft guild at all: It’s a family, which happened to be playing WoW at the time. And as a family, you look out for each other. You know everyone in the guild to some extend and if you meet another Wolf, you know it’s a good guy. You don’t join a family to play with them for one game; you join a family for life. That also means a long and strict recruitment policy, where just one guild member not wanting you in keeps you out. After all, it’s their family they’re looking out for. Already doing great with the people they have, every time you take a new person in, it’s a risk and a big choice. If someone gets in, he’s part of the family then, that’s not a choice made casually.
Before I joined, I was warned that I’d be “wasting” a lot of my time helping lower level characters catch up with the people who played more. And I still feel the same way about this as when I first heard this: If you’re playing with good people, with people you actually care about, with family, then it isn’t wasting time at all, it’s having fun. The loot you could be getting instead is nothing in the end. Ten years down the road you’ll still have those people you helped to kill some goblins, but you won’t be giving that nice sword you found back in Everquest another glance. (Well, maybe if it was a *really* nice sword ;) )
So I joined. And one of the most striking things was I found a lot of similarities with the things I liked from the offtopic / neoforum community. But here we had the game and the guild activities as a constant way to keep things fresh and to keep everyone together. Some members may decide to pass on a game for a year or two, but when the next game comes along, we’ll be waiting.
I’m happy to see the guild is not a unique group in that though. Coming back to this blog, the forums and the chatroom after two years myself; I’ve found my fair share of forum friends still around and happy to catch up.
And I didn’t even need a new game to get me back on here.
Next up: travelling the world (and meeting Rocza!)
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Anyone remember that
meditation course I wrote about taking years ago? Well, it led to something I
hadn’t expected. During one of my chats with the organizer, he mentioned that
they were looking for a new editor for the student magazine the church published
and that I sounded like a good fit. So I said I’d come take a look and decide.
So I came to take a
look. And I decided.
And so I was suddenly
part of a core group of four people running the magazine, with another four or
so helping to keep things running. I loved the work and found I was good at it.
The person who’d mostly been running stuff had since gotten his master’s degree
and was really too busy with other things to keep spending the time to keep
everything running, while I just kept liking it more and more. So it was that
just over a year after I started, I was running the student church magazine.
Some of you might be
wondering when I became religious? The answer is, I didn’t. I’m still as much
of an agnostic as ever. The trick about the magazine is, it’s a student’s
magazine first, and a church magazine second. So what does it have to do
with the church? Well, they expect the following:
- The back three
pages of the magazine to fill with announcements. Such as times for mass
and activities the church is organising in the coming months. Considering
they’re paying for the magazine, as long as it’s clearly separated from the
actual articles, that’s fine by me.
- the other pages
filled with in depth articles, that deal with fundamental issues that student’s
deal with. Their goal is to offer students something unique and
valuable. Luckily, this has never been an issue, because that’s exactly what we
are looking for ourselves. Over the past years, we’ve covered - among other
topics - obsessions, trust, the crowd, spirituality, loneliness, homecoming and
fear. We’ve had no holiday specials and we haven’t covered sex as a main topic
(unlike just about every student magazine ever to exist. ;) )
The interesting thing
is though, we never really based our choices on what “the church expected.” For
example, we actually did discuss sex as a topic, because we felt it was an
important part of student life and something worth writing about. The reason we
decided not to pursue it was simply because we didn’t have enough in-depth
stuff to add that hadn’t been covered ten times already in other magazines.
And that’s it. Other
than that, we can basically do whatever we want with the magazine, for up to
8,000 euros (~$10,000) a year. Though of course if we started filling it with
pornography, they’d probably put a stop to it. I think the farthest we could
probably push it would be an issue about “The evils of the church.” If the
articles were good enough, we could get that one published.
So here I have a
budget, a group of enthusiastic people with a ton of connections, a reader base
of thousands and basically a carte blanche on what to do. From there I’ve
really poured myself into it. We’ve found people from all around willing to
help in more ways than one. We’ve grown from “a collection of articles” into a
full-fledged magazine with our own identity. We’ve found national - and
occasionally international - experts to write on the topics of their
specialization. We’ve found student’s willing to talk about some of their most private,
great or shocking experiences and we’ve spent many a night awake getting our
own articles just right. With another few nights awake thrown in after that to
design the cover, to add illustrations and for all the finishing touches that
make everything fit together.
And I am happy to say;
we made it work. To give you an idea of what I mean by that; a picture of me on
a bike ended up in the issue about obsessions a while ago, and since then I’ve
had random people stop me in the street to congratulate me on the magazine and
to thank me for the inspiration they took from it.
It’s incredible to
really invest yourself in something and see it actually work. To know that it
was your work that brought a smile to people’s faces or inspired them. To have
your hard work result in more than a high mark for a test or a pay check. To
actually realise you’re good at something and you can use that to do something
worth doing.
Even without that
though, it’s simply a ton of fun.
Next up: the World of Warcraft Age
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| Though of course it looks to most of you like I've been gone for a long time, I have always felt like I never really left. I just didn't get around to posting for a while, and once you stop posting, the barrier becomes higher and higher to start again. And the number of stories to tell keeps mounting, making the task of writing a life update seem ever more daunting.
I have been reading and keeping up through the years though. I read about the children being born left and right (you all have been busy!) Saw Ozzy and angel's sunglasses movies, followed Alastor's attempts in DnD, poker and relationships, kept checking out Durf's crazy links and pictures, followed Anyee's departure (and possible return, yay!) and so on.But of course my having read that doesn't really help any of you. So maybe it's about time I started bugging you again for real.
I'll finally be updating my blog with what I've been doing for the past few years, and hopefully get the chance to come back and catch up some more. After looking at my massive block of text in progress, I decided to go against all my principles and try something new: cut it into smaller pieces. So expect a bunch of posts in the next few weeks. Today: organising a symposium.
Starting where my “who are
you?” post left off, I got through my first year of physics with a cum
laude ‘propedeuse’ (what you get for completing all your first year
subjects) and with one really good new friendship. Crispijn has been
the guy I’ve been hanging out way too much with for a while now and
we still haven’t gotten on each other’s nerves enough to start hitting
each other over the head with a club… so we must be doing something
right :).
During my second year of uni
I spent a lot of time organising a symposium dealing with the future
of physics. Not in the technical sense but in the sense of what limits
there are, societal, financial, technical and fundamental. Questions
to think about were things like “We are spending billions building
an accelerator to find ‘the higgs boson,’ why do we want to find
that particle and wouldn’t that money be better spent in healthcare,
security or aid to third world countries?” or the more fundamental
“There are fundamental limits and constraints to what we can know
put upon us by physics. Things like chaos theory and the uncertainty
principle. How close are we to hitting these impassable boundaries in
our research?” We set it up to have two difficulty levels. Some shared lectures
and then split lectures where the high school students and bachelor
students got a different talk from the masters’ students and scientists
attending. According to the well over 150 people who came (which gave
us a bit of a scare because we hadn’t expected that many and could
only barely fit them all in :) ) it was a great success.
(pictures at http://www.marie.science.ru.nl/cgi-bin/index?menu=foto/constitutie04&location=script:foto&album=symp2005 )
Next up: becoming a magazine editor
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| I know this post is going to be a jumbled mess, but I'm just writing down the things I remember, as I remember them. If there's too much detail somewhere, it's because those were the details I saw. If there's a blank somewhere, that's just because I hardly remember.
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It was the last day of our two-week physics trip to India and we were at the Bombay University. A nice place with huge lecture halls. It was after the physics talks were finished and the students running the trip were discussing with the people from university the best way to get to the airport. We already had our bags along, our plane would be leaving very early the next morning and the people from university were advising us not to spend the night at the airport. I remember most of us were just standing or sitting around when we heard - and felt - a huge bang in the distance behind us. I remember glancing at the window, though it looked out on the wrong side of the building, and not seeing anything strange.
Soon after, someone came in to inform us that we should stay there. We were perfectly safe here and even if someone had attacked the main dome at the top of the building, they wouldn't be able to get us here because we were facing the inside central square of the building; we were not at the outer side of the building facing the street. "Even if" sounded worrying, but whatever else he said, staying here sounded... just fine.
I looked out of the window again, just to confirm to myself that we really were facing the inside square, and I felt a lot more relief than I'd expected when I realised we were. But at that point I glanced at the road running past the entrance to the central square and I actually saw a tank passing by. I don't remember too many details of what it looked like, I didn't actually study it, it was just a glance. But it was greenish, it had a long barrel (maybe as long as the tank body itself) tilted slightly upwards, with a wider section somewhere along it. It had a top that could rotate independent of the bottom, which was maybe a factor three smaller. The whole thing had no obvious big circles or domes or anything, but it didn't look like a big square of metal either. Maybe it just had rounded edges, but though it didn't seem sleek, and seemed more like a WWII kind of tank than the modern stuff you see now, it definitely had some small amount of... grace... to it. Maybe not grace, maybe just a lack of the huge blocky bulkiness you'd expect from a tank. I remember checking that the barrel was actually facing forward and not turned towards us... As it passed out of sight we actually heard an explosion kind of sound coming from that direction, and a fainter one farther off a few seconds later. I don't know if it was true, but I remember thinking then the tank must have fired on something.
Only a few seconds later another tank passed by, but this one actually did have its barrel pointed towards us. Of course it would be absurd to think it would actually fire on us, but I felt a kind of knot in my stomach all the same. I didn't have a great feeling about India as a whole almost from the start, and I guess that made me queasy even then. It wasn't that I'd ever seen Indians be aggressive or dangerous towards us, but when you feel uncomfortable in general, I guess it's easy to assume the worst, and fear danger where none exists.
And then it fired. The tank actually shot at us while driving. Maybe it missed because you're not supposed to shoot to the side while driving like that; maybe it was aiming at something else. I'm sure someone must have thought long and hard about it and must have known about the risks, but at that moment, it just seemed such a... casual action. "Just passing through here, might as well blow up some students while going down this road. Not sure if I hit them, but whatever, I'll just keep driving."
Even though he "missed" us, the impact couldn't have been more than two classrooms to the right from us, and there was actually a blow and a lot of dust from the side wall and I remember the people standing close to it being blown to the floor or sent staggering. I think nobody got badly hurt there, but I can't be sure.
At that point, things are... hazy... for me, but though I don't remember that we did, we must have gone out and gotten down to the bus - a pink “Sri... something or other... tours”, 23-person bus - to get out. The bus driver, a local, who was a fair bit older than we were, but didn't speak English, apparently knew what he was doing and was going to get us away.
If you'd asked me a day earlier if I would expect him to do anything when people started shooting, let alone if I'd trust my life to him, I'd have given you a solid no. He was the scrawny little guy with back trouble. His greatest achievement in life was ending up with a crappy old pink bus that wasn't even his and driving around tourists. And he wasn't even too great at that, because he'd gotten us lost a number of times. He didn't speak English, he was of a low caste, so he kept back and kept conversation to a minimum. But, looking back on it, I could have known he had street smarts. He knew how to drive around the roads and where to go when something was broken. He had friends everywhere where he could get a drink while we went down to some more fancy and expensive place he "didn't feel comfortable" joining us. Yes, he may not have been a physics major, but he definitely knew the things that mattered.
But I didn't think about any of that right then. I was thinking: thank God there is nothing I can do. It was out of my hands, I knew nothing, someone knew something and he was doing the driving. I just had to sit there and that was more than enough to deal with for me.
I was sitting at the back of the bus next to Crispijn, one of my close friends from uni with two other friends (Bart and Erik) on the other side of us. I suppose the chauffeur would have told us to get on the floor or something if he'd had time, but he was busy doing the driving, and none of us had the wits to do anything right then. We just sat there, target practice, and actually looked around.
Looking back now, I know we couldn't have been seriously attacked during the first part of our drive, because considering we were sitting ducks right there, someone would have gotten hurt. But with the chaos and armed people running all around us, the wild driving and - most of all - the constant sounds of combat, I felt right then like people were constantly shooting us and trying to take the bus down. It put me in mind of those high-speed pursuits you see in Bond movies, but without any of the thrill. We just trusted our lives to the driver and tried not to think of what might happen. It's surprising how little we noticed the bumping and shaking from the wild driving during that trip.
I remember actually telling Crispijn at some points that when we flew back, the expense wouldn't be a problem. Even if we missed our flight, surely my parents would cover it. Crispijn responded, grinning I think, that everything in India was way cheaper anyway, so booking a ticket home would be a steal. It was the other half of the trip we’d paid so much for. I don’t think I grinned back.
One time, I know we did get attacked by a soldier. That is, a young guy - maybe 25? - with a machinegun and something resembling a uniform, actually jumped - shooting - in front of the bus, trying to make us stop. I remember seeing him being hit by us and the bus driving over him. I remember the bumps of the front, then the rear wheel, going over his body. And in my mind, I actually saw the bus driving over him and the cracking of his bones happening. I looked through the back window and saw the mangled body lying there on the street, quickly getting smaller. I know that is one picture that will stay with me forever.
I was on the point of sicking up then. I actually felt the acid taste in the back of my throat, but I didn't actually sick up. I think some people to the front of the bus did, but I'm not sure. I always had a tough stomach for throwing up; I never had a problem with roller coasters. Maybe it has nothing to do with it, and they are totally unrelated, but that's what popped into my mind then... roller coasters.
I know I took out my mobile phone at some point to send my parents an SMS message just saying, "We're alive." I figured they might hear of the university being attacked, so they'd be worried. But I think, more than that, I myself needed the confirmation; I needed to have that text written down and the message sent. Like somehow our getting out of that building alive wouldn't matter if my parents, or at least someone out there didn't know. They had to know we were alive enough to type it out. I fumbled with the keys trying to write out the message. I believe it was my own body and feelings betraying me that made it take so long, way more than the bumping of the bus. I know I pressed C (my phone's backspace) a whole lot trying to get that simple message down.
Crispijn, looking along over my shoulder pointed out at some point that I had no connection at that moment, so I couldn't send the message even if I wanted to.
And there I have a memory, I know it can't be right and it doesn't make sense, but it's what's there. I looked at the info in my phone about the connection and in my mind I remember a page there saying, "sometimes, the signal can be jammed by military signal-jamming devices" and Crispijn actually replying that he'd seen a "your signal is being jammed" message on his phone before. I know that can't have been what happened, it doesn't make sense, and besides, I don't think jamming can actually work like that. They must have taken out the mast, or we were just in a bad area, or my phone broke with all the bumping or whatever. But still, somehow, that memory wormed its way into my mind. Maybe it was my mind’s way of making sense in that chaos of why my phone wouldn't work, when it always had in big cities in the past. Maybe I just couldn't accept something so obvious breaking down for a none-bizarre reason right there. Maybe I just needed some securities. "There may be shooting going on all around us, but at least my mobile phone, with it's awesome G3 network, still works everywhere."
Having the phone in my hand, I activated the camera. I don't know why, but I decided I'd take some pictures. I had nothing better to do anyway and something sure was happening out there. Strangely, it was only when I started filming that I got a first feeling of how vulnerable I was and I actually crouched down then, with my eyes and the phone only just peaking over the edge of the window. I guess I didn't actually understand the danger, or I would have gotten down altogether. Maybe it was just some automatic thing to do, "When filming people shooting, get down and hide as best you can, that's what people do."
I remember thinking I had better get some good shots, or people would never believe we'd been in all the fighting. I remember being frustrated that the loading when switching from video to picture mode took so long and a fight behind us was already so small when it was done that the picture was nothing like what I'd hoped it'd be. I remember having the bizarre thought that I should have had my camera out when we drove over that soldier; that would have made a spectacular picture; that would have proven to everyone at home we'd really been through something traumatic; would have made us special somehow.
The mind, I guess, does weird things at a time like that. But one thing I know was, during that time I was worrying about the pictures, at least I was not worrying about anything else. Maybe we were going to die or not coming home or getting captured, but I could do nothing about it anyway, I was just snapping pictures and not worrying about the rest.
At some point on the road a larger and more fancy bus came speeding along the same road heading the other way, towards us, with no room for the two busses to pass each other without one going off the road. Our chauffeur just stepped on the gas: ramming course. The other bus swivelled out of the way at the last moment, almost fell on its side, and then stopped dead on the side of the road. We just kept going full speed. I don't know how - or if - our driver knew that would happen. If he'd been in this situation before, or if it'd been a 50/50 bet, with at least his life on the line. But it did feel like the same certainty with which he'd handled traffic everywhere and gotten us through rush hours or over dirt roads when we all thought it was suicide going in there.
The second time I know we were attacked was when we came to some kind of hastily constructed checkpoint-like-thing on the road. There were a few sacks and wooden bars on and around the road and maybe six armed people to the sides. It didn't look built "by the book," but it looked like the people who had set it up knew what they were doing. No one in this group was stupid enough to be in the middle of the road. The bus just sped up and they opened fire. One of the students at the front of the bus got shot in his leg. The soldiers stopped shooting at us soon after we'd passed.
At that point it made perfect sense. The driver knew what we were doing; this was just a "level boss," something of a harder obstacle. We wouldn't actually fail. One person got hurt? Well, obviously, it was a boss, wouldn't have been much of one if we all got through unharmed, would it?
It was only later that I realised a barricade like that is made so nobody can get through. If we'd been a normal car, we'd have been toast before we even reached the barricade, and we would have been too low to the ground to get over it, even if we'd reached it. If we'd been scarier looking, they'd have shot us from far away. If we had been anything but a pink, harmless looking, but high off the ground tour bus with a driver like we had, things would probably have ended right there.
It was only after someone had gotten shot that one of us uttered the suggestion that we should get down. And in the little space we had, we tried as best as possible. Somehow it seemed silly; after all, the one person who had gotten shot was shot right through the side of the bus (though I suppose that might well have been the reason it wasn't as bad as it could have been.) But silly or not, we huddled, figuring at least we'd not make too obvious a target, they might not even notice there was anyone in the back of the bus at all...
I still heard the sounds and kept feeling as I'd felt from the start, that we were constantly under attack. I sat huddled there with the dread that every moment it could end. I was stupid enough to sneak a look over the lower edge of the window at some point and saw soldiers with bazookas on the side of the road. I was filled with a dread that this would be the end, mixed with a weird question if maybe this was just another boss; if the driver would have some awesome trick up his sleeve to deal with "the bazooka guys" and how many people - other people, surely not me - would get shot in the leg in this particular fight. But they didn't shoot at us. Apparently they were on our side.
At some point I noticed an armed vehicle trailing behind us, covering us it seemed. It had the look of a military vehicle, but it was only a sort of truck with no roof and the back open as well. Besides maybe 4 or 6 normal soldiers in there, someone was sitting in the middle of the truck with a heavy mounted - but turnable - machine gun facing backwards. I wondered how long they'd been trailing behind us. I had the idea they'd been there at the barricade. I supposed I would have seen them there, but then, it had been such chaos, couldn't they have been there? I don't know if they were, but that was the first thing I thought when I saw them.
At some point we drove up to some low walls, with a huge pretty flat stretch of sand, surrounded by more bits of wall and some bits of building, at least the base concrete of it. And another, seemingly much more whole bit of building at the far end of the sand. At that point, with all I'd seen, I figured it was a ruin of some blown up building. But looking back on it, there were no rough or crumpled edges, it was all solid stone and concrete, it must have been a construction site instead. I saw someone spotting us in the far building and people fanning out. I remember thinking someone was coming up to surround us and they might be the enemy, so I called back to the people in the truck, trying to give count and directions as best I could, from my "vantage point" in the back. It never occurred to me that if they'd really been trying to ambush us, they'd surely have gone about it differently, and not been so obviously spotted by a random guy on the back seat. It never occurred to me that if there were enemies here, we wouldn’t have gone in and stopped at this place. I didn't get a response from the soldiers; we just got out of the bus.
The soldiers came towards us, and a bunch of them walked past me, but I just fixed my eyes on one. I knew nothing about uniforms, but he had a picture of the Eifel Tower stitched on his jacket with "Paris" written underneath it, he might be the proof that we were safe. I remember thinking we might still be in enemy territory; he might still be an enemy. Maybe someone who'd just been to Paris on a holiday long ago and taken it along as a souvenir. So, oblivious to what was going on around me, I started talking to him, hoping to get a reaction from him; to have him confirm that he wasn't the enemy. I never even realised the commander, one of the guys who'd walked past us, was talking, in English, to the leader of the truck that had followed us, with most of our group crowding around there hearing what he had to say. I just kept mumbling at the Eifel Tower guy, and with no response I felt a fear and dread creeping into me that he could not understand me. He was the enemy and this was the end of the line. I felt angry at the driver and our escort, how could they have driven right into a trap like this? I even tried to warn them. I thought they were competent, why didn't they listen when I told them we were being circled?
Then the Eiffel Tower guy did speak up, to reassure me. It earned him a quick rebuke - and a look - from the person who seemed to be leading things, just coming back up from behind me. Apparently he'd told them not to speak to us until he knew exactly what was going on.
And then he asked us to tell our story. We told the story, sort of piecing it together as we went. I, as a pretty comfortable English speaker and - I suppose more relevantly - the guy who happened to be standing closest to him, did most of the talking as we walked to their "base of operations." I told him how we were a group of students, the building had gotten shot at, then our room, this was a physics study tour by the way, it had been our last day, the driver took us here, we drove down a man. I tried to summarize, and I was pretty quick about it, but for every piece of relevant information I threw in something he surely would have no use for. Just spewing things that were floating in my mind, but trying at the same time to make it as sensible as possible. A military officer was debriefing me; he was a busy guy. Surely he didn't have time to listen to me chatter on about how it was to have been our last day in Bombay today? I felt slightly embarrassed after I was done. The kind of embarrassed when you hold a talk in front of a class and you know you'll get a C+ and pass, but really it sucked and you forced your classmates to listen to boring crap for 15 minutes, while you were hoping to make it a good talk.
As we walked in somewhere and I lay down on one of the spring bunk bed's he told me. "It makes sense. A group of American schoolchildren would have been better, but twenty innocent Dutch physics students is the next best thing." He must have been talking about the best way to draw attention or something. Getting my thoughts together I realised I thought he was wrong, because of the casualness with which the tank shot at us. If it had been planned like that surely they’d have been more thorough. Then I realised that casualness was something I hadn't even mentioned to him. I remember thinking "It wasn't his fault he got it wrong, I just explained it badly." But it never crossed my mind to tell him about it or correct him. Instead, I slept.
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And then I woke up.
From what must have been the most clear and vivid dream I have ever had. I know it makes no sense to base things on a dream, of course it's all total bull and it's nothing like the real thing. For Christ sake, it's a dream... please. And yet somehow I feel I do understand better now. And it feels like the horror of war has somehow gotten closer. Yes, it's crazy and it makes no sense, but I really will forever remember the sight of that nonexistent person who got crushed under our bus in a dream of a war that never took place. | | |
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