Part II (the part where Eric is food poisoned, begins to explore and buys a bike-- BONUS RECIPE INCLUDED)

II. The Introduction of Me (the part where Eric is food poisoned, begins to explore and buys a bike -- BONUS RECIPE INCLUDED)

So far, this story has mostly been about observations that I have had. I have been present in it, and you have seen the world of Omaha through my eyes, but I have still played a passive role. My only action was in seeing and transcribing. That is often the way it is when you are in a new place. But there comes a time when you begin to need to take an active role if you want a story to continue. And this is where I come in. This is where the story stops being about Nebraska and starts being about my time in it.

My first night in Omaha, I had a dream. Not a significant one, with a meaning or a message. Mostly, it was a replay of the “A Taste of Omaha!” festival. Only I was working to feed people instead of buying food. And instead of any of the food that I had consumed, I was feeding people a strange type of corn-on-the-cob and meat sandwich. The corn-on-the-cob was overcooked and I couldn’t understand how people would eat a sandwich with the cob inside of it. But I did as I was told and kept serving them. The content of the dream is not interesting. It the fact that I dreamed it. In the eighth grade, my science teacher Gary Dreiblatt taught us about dreaming and sleep and told us to keep a dream log over our spring vacation, in which we wrote all the dreams we had. I was nervous because I didn’t (and still don’t) dream all that often (and when I do, it is rarely all that interesting; my conscious self is much more interesting than my subconscious). Anyway, I expressed my fear to Gary, and he said I shouldn’t worry, anytime we experience a change in sleep patterns or location, we tend to remember our dreams more. And, that first day of spring vacation, when I got to sleep in, I did remember my dream. Ever since then, I have had the most vivid dreams at those liminal moments that mark separations in time. Maybe that’s why Jacob had his most vivid dream as he slept alone, about to meet his brother in the land of Israel.

I woke up late and knew that if I were to survive, I would need supplies. So I showered, put my sneakers on and headed east, hoping that I would hit a grocery store. I walked down Leavenworth, knowing that I would eventually hit a grocery store. Kept walking, past the bars built into the hills, past the blue collar uniform stores, past the gas stations. Nobody else was on the streets; eventually I reached a grocery store, a giant supermercado called Avanza.

Avanza is the most terrific of grocery stores, with the cheapest fresh produce and the greatest Mexican sodas. I roamed the aisles, planning out what I would eat for the next weak (mostly pasta, potatoes and tuna melts… it all got pretty old pretty quickly), picking up the greatest spices I have ever seen along the way. I reached checkout and was pleasantly surprised at just how low my bill came out to be. So I paid, walked out, and then realized that I needed to carry all this food home, back the way I had come. So I started off, each arm leaden with bags of groceries, going block by block, closer to my new home. It was a hot day, and by the time I finally reached my home, sweat was dripping down my face. So I sat down, popped open a jarritos and hoped that the food would put itself away. I realized that it wouldn’t, so I painfully got up and loaded up the refrigerator, which was already packed with my food.

That night, I cooked as I never had before, planning to make food for my lunch for that entire week. I roasted the potatoes I had bought, caramelized the onions, made pasta with a special sauce I had created from the spices I had gathered along my trip through the aisles, and was generally pleased with myself. I sat down and began to eat my glorious first cooked meal of the summer.

It was then that the second of my roommates I was to meet came in. Paul is a slight man of 25, someone out of college and waiting for the next stage of his life to take off. He works at sears and is generally awkward, but somewhat congenial. He lives on the ground floor of the house along with this Matt, who is 28, looks rather like Paul, and has generally less direction in life than him. Jess and Caprice (another one of my roommates I was to meet later) would talk about how they haven’t seen him do more than leave his room in the six or so months they’ve lived with him. I exchanged pleasantries with Paul and engaged in amiable small talk. He was cooking some ribs. He let me know that. I told him that I could see and they looked very good. I finished my dinner, packed it neatly into little Tupperware containers and put them in the refrigerator upstairs. I would later come to regret that.

My other roommate is Yasmin, she is 23, very thin, from West Africa, and mostly speaks French (and loudly at that). She is a student, and like my other roommates, in her off time works at some crappy service job.

The next morning I got up at 6:45, realized that I would have to do that for the rest of the summer and found myself oddly amused at what I had done to myself. I showered, got dressed in my ‘business casual’ attire, made some eggs-in-a-basket, garnished with zahtar (the spice I use in most everything I want to be savory), and ran out the door, on my way to work.

I had been planning my route to work for months in advance, ever since I started looking for a home in Omaha, so I kind of knew exactly where I was going. Still, it was odd to finally be walking the path that I had seen so many times on a google map. I got to the National Indemnity (I’m working at National Indemnity—and a little bit with geico, national reinsurance and Berkshire homestate companies, which are all part of the core insurance business of Berkshire Hathaway. The way Berkshire works is Warren Buffet makes money from insurance and then uses it to invest in crazy schemes that more often than not work incredibly well) building and was greeted by Elizabeth from human relations. I had had many conversations with Elizabeth on the phone, but again, just like the path I had taken to work, it was odd to finally see her in person. That would be happening a lot through the day.

The people who work for Berkshire HR are all pretty silly. They are all women, and range from interns to women of about 65 years old, who need to hold onto the wall as they walk down the hallway. None of them have left Omaha, and they try so hard to represent their company well. All are proud.

Something I’ve realized about Nebraska: people always say that people from New York (and the east coast in general) are unfriendly, and they find people in the Midwest a lot nicer. I suppose in some ways they are correct, most people in NYC will not say hello to you as you pass them on the street, and in NYC you get the feeling that people in Human relations don’t really like interacting with humans. I wouldn’t say it’s a difference in character though. More a difference in situations. When walking in NYC, you see thousands of people; it’s impossible to say hello to every one of them. So people don’t. Conversely, it is such a rare occurrence for a shop in Omaha to get a customer that the people seem to be nicer. But they aren’t really.

That being said, the people in HR were very excited to see me, and after a powerpoint presentation on the company, they bid me adieu and sent me down one story to the people I would be working with, the pricing department!

The people in the pricing department are also silly. Actually, now that I think of it, that’s a good word to describe many of the people I’ve met here. Pricing is pretty self explanatory, it is the job of the department to look at the data that comes in, all of the numbers about losses and whatnot, and determine the amount of risk that the company is holding, and what a legitimate price would be to charge as a premium. I am working directly with two men, Marty and Steve. Marty is tall, fairly lanky, and, like most people who look like that, fairly goofy. As a matter of fact, I have taken to judging people quite quickly from their outward appearances here. Maybe it’s just the fact of meeting so many new people, or maybe there really is something to the pseudo-science of physiognomy. Anyway, the other man I work with, Steve, is shorter, hipper (his desktop background is a painting by Van Gogh!), and generally more bitter. When I went out to lunch with the group that day, he would make sarcastic comments when his peers would jokingly say something stupid. I immediately liked him. He was serious and wanted business done correctly, but acknowledged the absurdity of modeling abstract risk all day. When he was initially training me and getting me acquainted with one of the systems, we began to look through old policies. To make them more interesting, we would look up the more ridiculous people we insure (beaver exterminators, alligator wranglers, fireworks operators) online. We came across an article from a local newspaper a man whose company we insured down in Texas who had been murdered about a year and a half ago. We both looked at each other, unsure which one of us would laugh first.

I left my first day of work, content with the work I had done, and made a tuna melt for dinner. I have a secret recipe I made up for the greatest tuna melts in the world, and I will now share it with you:

1. Take a can of tuna fish

2. Put some mayonnaise in it (the only time its legitimate to eat mayo)

Watch till the very end: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgztF8Fp160&feature=player_embedded

3. Now comes the tricky part, grade some cheddar cheese and mix it into the tuna!

4. Put some zahtar in there for good measure

5. Put the whole mixture into a tortilla and grill it like a quesadilla

Anyway, that’s what I cooked for dinner. I briefly thought about my chances of mercury poisoning from eating tuna, but decided that I would throw caution to the wind and eat it anyway. You’re only young once.

The rest of my first week went pretty much along the same lines, with little details changing. One day I went out with two of my coworkers (Ian and Gina, two of the weirder ones in the office—Ian is the floor safety monitor and finds a Dwight Schrute-like type of solace in that title) to go play ‘Pitch’, a Nebraskan card game, at the National Indemnity office down the street with some of the company’s programmers. As we walked to the other office, I saw a police officer beside his patrol car, standing perfectly still, looking perfectly ahead, not acknowledging us as we passed. He had a hook for a left hand. None of my co-workers seemed to notice him, and they kept on walking.

The next day, I had a meeting with one of the Senior Vice Presidents of the company talking about one of my projects for the summer. He has a deep authoritative voice and commands the type of respect that no one else in the office does. Also that day, the intern from HR called me to interview me for the company wide “Friday Facts!”, a weekly newsletter in which all new hires are interviewed. I said some silly things to her and they published them.

The week was going pretty well until Friday came along. It began as any normal day; I got up, washed up, packed my bag up with my lunch and headed out to work. Once at work, I dove right into what I had left off the day before. Things progressed as normal until lunch came along, and I took out my pasta and put it in the microwave. I went back to my desk to eat it, hungry because I had missed breakfast that morning. I got about halfway through it, when suddenly I had a great urge not to eat anymore. I put my fork down and my food away. I also had a great urge to make myself tea. So I did, and got back to working., modeling risk for airplanes. About three hours later, things began to take a downward turn. I started to feel not so well, but figured, I only had an hour left of work, so I should just get it over with. I was tough enough, hell, I was from New York! I went back to pricing and actually started to feel better. 15 minutes went by, then 30. And then, I started to feel extremely cold. I stayed at my desk for another 15 minutes, at which point I decided that the last 15 minutes of work weren’t really worth it and I snuck out the backdoor and headed home. I thought the fresh air would feel good, but when I started walking, I realized just how woozy I had become. I stumbled out of the building, and started walking through the park on my way home. I was surprised at the number of people outside (I guess that’s what Friday afternoons are for), and wondered what they were thinking of me as I faltered, went to the side of the road and vomited in the bushes. I immediately felt better, walked another thirty or so paces, at which point I again proceeded to vomit, this time next to a tree. After that, I really did feel better, and when I reached my home, I went to the dollar store across the street and bought a box of cheerios and some apple juice; the only medication I needed. I went to my room, ate the cheerios, drank the apple juice, and lay down. Five minutes later, I was back in the bathroom, vomiting again, this time for the last round. It turns out, I was not supposed to use the refrigerator upstairs (there are two in the apartment) for storing food (what I was supposed to store in it, I have no idea), and when I put my pasta in it, I was in fact taking my life into my hands.

That night, all of my roommates got drunk (except for Yasmin, who doesn’t drink) and caused a general ruckus. Because of my afternoon, I couldn’t join in, and looked on sadly. I helped the drunken roommates change a light bulb, which they decided needed to be changed immediately.

I woke up early the next day, and went out bike shopping with Jess and Caprice, who were surprisingly not hung-over or tired at all. We went to all types of stores (it was my first time in a wal-mart!), and I ended up with a pretty cheap bike. Now I will finally be able to fully explore Omaha.