#downside is whenever i remember something dumb and find something in my rewatch that puts things into better perspective | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

austinpanda · 3 years

Text

Dad Letter 032821

28 March, 2021

Dear Dad--

Happy Sunday to you! It’s been an uneventful week, because the casino people still have me in hurry-up-and-wait mode. They were doing the background check and the pee test. Both tests should have come back with boringly predictable results; I have no criminal background, and I have no crimes in my whizz, either. They gave me a packet of information about the pee test, including lists of what they test for. They seem to test for alcohol, which is weird, but I guess the test is to determine if you have a lot of it inside you at that moment. Because if you can’t sober up for an 8:00 a.m. pee test, I suppose it indicates a potentially interesting personal life…?

So I’ve been spending my time cleaning all the things that don’t normally get cleaned, in case it’s a long time before I can clean them again. For example, I scrubbed the bathtub, cleaned the light bulbs in the bathroom, and waxed my car, Beige Lightning. I probably wouldn’t worry about keeping a 13 year old Hyundai waxed and shiny, except I own some Turtle Wax, and what the hell? I can watch the rain water bead up on the hood while I’m quarantining. I don’t wax the whole thing, just the upward-facing surfaces, like the hood and roof and trunk lid. Waxing the doors feels too fastidious for me. My thinking is that if you wax the parts where the rain will bead up, people will just assume you waxed the doors, too. Now I just need it to rain, so I can watch all the beads forming and feel like a proud motorist.

If it seems like I’m already straining to come up with a topic of conversation, I must admit, I thought I’d be working by now, so I didn’t plan much over the past week. I’m still unvaccinated, but the process seems to be accelerating tremendously, and it’s beginning to look like I’ll get my shot within maybe a week or two? With Zach getting his shot no more than a month after that. Downside of marrying someone of an earlier generation: I qualify as “old enough to get a vaccine,” while Zach does not. We can’t exactly start partying with our friends until we both get the shot, but it sounds like it’s going to be a glorious day when everyone we know has been vaccinated. I miss restaurants, and buffets, and movie theaters! Life returning to normal, kinda.

Oh, I made pad thai! I get the impression that there was a period in the past when making pad thai was more popular, like the fondue sets of the 1970s. I’ve always liked pad thai, no matter which restaurant made it, but I never attempted to cook it myself, because it’s a complicated dish. It has a lot of ingredients, including a few that I’d never buy otherwise, like bean sprouts (stupidly perishable), and fish sauce. Fish sauce is the most disgusting-smelling thing I’ve ever had in my kitchen, or my nose, for that matter. I was not looking forward to spending money to get an ingredient that I’d otherwise consider about as edible as enriched plutonium. But, I appealed to my inner Vulcan, and logic told me: Fish sauce, while repellant in every way, is present in every pad thai recipe I’ve found. It suggests that fish sauce has always been included in the pad thai, so maybe I should just trust the recipe and buy the stupid nasty sauce. My deduction was correct! You add fish sauce, but you also add rice vinegar, soy sauce, and brown sugar, things that ameliorate the smell of the fish sauce, and make it just another delicious ingredient.

When I had completed making the pad thai on Wednesday, I’d have to say it was a partial success. I had included too much pasta, and the flavor was a bit bland. But it was okay. The thing is, when I was packaging up the leftovers, I grabbed a big handful of the noodles and threw them away. Apparently, this made the leftovers exactly perfect, and Zach and I ate the leftovers with more zeal and yummy noises than we had the first time around. Now I want to make the dish again, because I know how much pasta (rice noodles, aka rice sticks) to use, and I can get all the ratios correct from the start. Kind of exciting, because I always viewed the dish as too lovely and complicated to make myself. Now I don’t need a restaurant to make me pad thai, because I found a recipe that allows me to do it at home.

I saw a good documentary about a plane crash lately! This one was a plane full of French people, which disappeared over the open ocean a few years back. Some wreckage came to the surface and was gathered up. Then they started doing searches underwater to find the plane, which took a long time. Eventually they found it, and found the two black boxes. Because I’m a plane crash nerd, I know that the black boxes are actually bright orange, to make them easier to find amid plane wreckage, and they’re not even boxes. And there’s two of them: the flight data recorder, which keeps track of plane and flight data, and the CVR, the Cockpit Voice Recorder, where they can listen to what everyone was saying in the cockpit.

After years, when they finally found the plane under water and got the two black boxes, they figured out what had happened. This, really, is the part of the generic plane crash story that grabs my attention and makes me want to learn more: when they piece together all the evidence and come up with a detailed timeline that shows everything that happened, and everything that went wrong. What happened this time? Well, a little probe thingy that sticks out of the fuselage and measures something (maybe airspeed?) got coated in ice and started giving shitty data. The plane recognized this and took itself off of autopilot. The flight crew, not knowing what was going on, and in possession of shitty airspeed information, put the plane in a nose-up attitude, but didn’t give it enough power. We all know what happens when you run out of power while going uphill in an airplane, right? Stall! The plane stalled, which kind of doomed their dumb asses.

Because it was at night, and because the pilot and the rest of the flight crew didn’t figure it out in time, the plane stalled. This means it stops moving forward like a plane, and just starts dropping like a rock. But as it drops it still maintains the same nose-up attitude, and because of that, and the fact that you’re obviously still moving, it can be hard to detect that you’re in a stall. This is where I need to learn more about this accident if I don’t want that part to bug me, because they stalled the plane, and then they just flew along happily, dropping like a rock, until they hit the ocean. Did no one notice that the altimeter was showing the plane falling to the earth with invigorating speed? Was there no audible alarm saying, “Stall! Stall! Do something, dumbasses! You're in a stall!” The good news about flying happily into the ocean, however, is that it’s unlikely that everyone died in a terrorized panic. Plane’s still pointed forward, still moving through the air, no worries. Beats getting sucked out of a hole in the plane and falling to your death, am I right?

I have recently rewatched a made-for-TV movie that used to scare the bejesus out of me as a kid: The Ghost of Flight 401. Remember that? This plane crashes into the Everglades. (Why did it crash? They focused so much of their attention trying to diagnose what was actually just a light bulb problem with their landing gear indicator light, that they experienced a brief period of, “Oops, no one’s flying the airplane,” and they crashed.) In the made-for-TV-movie, one of the flight crew was Ernest Borgnine. And after the crash, they recycled some parts from the crashed plane and installed them in planes still in service. Then dead Ernest Borgnine comes back and starts scaring the shit out of everyone in the planes that got the flight 401 plane parts! All based on a TRUE STORY.

It was the ghost of Ernest Borgnine that used to scare the hell of me. And the movie was spooky as fuck, and it came out in 1978 when I was nine years old, and for a made-for-TV-movie, it was really well done! If you recall, because I know we watched this when it aired originally, the movie ends when some of the people affected (including an Asian flight attendant woman, who’s stood out in my memory ever since) get together and have a seance to encourage dead Ernest Borgnine, and anyone else listening, to move on, and stop haunting our airline passengers, pretty please. You know, you can watch this whole thing on YouTube for free, whenever you want? I find it less terrifying now that I’m 52 years old, but it’s still refreshingly creepy.

Okay, time to wrap this up. Perhaps by this time next week I’ll have started my casino job! Either that, or at least heard back from them to bring in my gaming license application and get my ID photo taken. Hope the spring has sprung! All my love to you both!

0 notes