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epitome of incomprehensibility
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So my uncle emails me two days ago from Cambodia. He's applying to some inventor's challenge on Innocentive and he wants me to draw something for him.
I'm not sure what this is about, but I say okay. That evening he calls me about it to confirm. He says if we win a prize, which we probably won't, he'll split the money 50/50. "That's too much," I say. "You've worked longer on this."
"40/60," he says. "But that's my final offer.
"Okay," I laugh.
Interesting fact: Quebec and Cambodia's time zones are exactly twelve hours apart. So my six P.M. is his six A.M. and he's just called me at what is, in Cambodia, six-thirty in the morning. By email, he sends me picture files and a text file which explains things. That night I start editing his text file. There's a typo in which a slot becomes a sloth, but otherwise it's quite clear and straightforward.
The next day I start with the drawing. What he wants is a computer graphic, not something drawn and scanned. It becomes quickly apparent that this is going to take too long. I only have Paint on my computer and it doesn't even seem to work as well as the old Paintbrush. Unlike the whiteboard system I use for online tutoring, I can't even select and drag shapes. My worry leads me to waste time watching videos on YouTube. He wants the pictures in by six (my P.M., his A.M.) The deadline for the whole thing is Thursday, today, presumably at midnight EST.
When Mom comes back I'm upset. She drops the carton of salt she bought to make salt dough stars for her preschool kids, and it slowly pools on the floor. I pick up the container and start crying. She tells me I'm twenty-five, not two. This is true, but finding no concrete advice as to my next course of action, I call Dad at the library.
"If this were in a book," I say into the phone to Dad, "it would not be considered realistic. How does this sound? My uncle calls me out of the blue from Cambodia, after not really talking to me for a year, asking me to draw something at the last minute for some invention of his for a contest, and I say yes because I'm bored, but it turns out I can't do it..."
"Just a normal day in suburbia," Dad says.
Mom comes out of the kitchen with flour on her hands. "Calm down," she says to me, and holds one of my hands in two of hers. This is designed to be comforting, and it is, but the texture of the flour is gritty.
"Mom is holding my hand and it has flour on it," I say into the phone, with the intonation of a child and the irony of self-awareness.
Dad isn't sure what to say.
"We have a weird family," I decide, and Mom starts laughing.
After that, I try to muster up enough anger to send an angry email, telling my uncle he never follows through with things, and he's irresponsible, and why does he think I have the money to have good computer programs, it's him that has a rich girlfriend, and no wonder his daughter my cousin doesn't want to talk to him... but my self-control gets into the way. It's an annoying thing, this self-control. It also prevents me from kicking and breaking a CD, which would be momentarily satisfying. Instead I write a sensible and regretful email, saying I can't do it, I don't have the time with the program I have, but here's the edited text file and my attempt at the start of a drawing. And maybe he should have told me about this earlier. And that I wish him a good vacation and happy holidays.
That tires me out more than I'd like, and I stay at the computer, volunteering some French to English translations for the microfinance website Zidisha. It's more useful than YouTube.
This morning I find it hard to stay asleep until 8. I keep thinking of what my uncle will think of me, how angry he'll be that I ruined his project. I eat breakfast and avoid my email.
My uncle calls at around twelve-thirty. Mom, who's home from work, answers. It's her brother after all. She asks him where he is. He's in Thailand now. He's spending two more weeks in Asia with his girlfriend, who has her vacation now and not at Christmas, and then they're meeting her son (maybe in India?) who'll be on a school exchange. I sit at the table, reading, pretending not to exist in that particular place, but Mom gestures to me.
"I'm sorry," I say, and then I almost trip over the phone cord.
But it's okay. He made a comprehensible graph with another program, though he hadn't really had much sleep and sounds like it, and did I get his email? No?
So I look up his email. I'm part of his team, which means I have to "approve" his submission. Now I don't like to click on things without reading them, so I open the text document and I see that the slot is still a sloth. This isn't good, because the rest of his writing is clear, concise, and all those good things, so I fix the mistake and make a few minor tweaks and send it back to him. He doesn't answer, so I figure he's asleep.
At five (my P.M.) he emails me back. I think: Don't you sleep more than five hours a night? Especially on vacation? It dawns on me that I am the lazy one. Anyway, he thanks me for removing the poor sleepy sloth and says he's posted the corrected version. I approve. 40% of a possible prize seems too much. For what I did, 10% is fine. But there's about a 1 in 85 chance of him winning anything.
You can find Innocentive at www.innocentive.com.
You can find Zidisha at www.zidisha.org.
You can find Cambodia in Cambodia.
This program was sponsored indirectly by the choir director who randomly gave my parents groceries this week, plus the jealousy of a person (you'll never guess who) who's only been to four different countries in her life - five if you count Vatican City - and whose goal is to someday visit Antarctica, which has the added appeal of not being a country at all.
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