My Crazy Uncle Roger
Last night brought us an unexpected visit from my crazy Uncle Roger - my mother's younger brother. Kris always says I know a disproportionate number of crazy people. The thing is, I can't help it because they are mostly in my family. The nice thing about Uncle Roger is that he is Good Crazy, unlike several of my other relatives who are not (let's just leave it at that, shall we?). Uncle Roger is only crazy because he is basically a nomad and he is a Perpetual Bachelor...these two qualities combine for endless, vastly entertaining stories.
Uncle Roger is a fisheries economist. He contracts himself out to different countries' governments to develop plans to sustain their underwater ecology. Basically, it is all an elaborate scheme to use his PhD to go scuba diving 2-3 times per week in exotic locations. Growing up, Maryn and I often found ourselves the lucky beneficiaries of his travel spoils, which included:
Just your average, run-of-the-mill Christmas gifts from Uncle Roger.
Uncle Roger just returned after a four-year stint in Tarawa, an atoll in the Pacific Ocean and capital of the Republic of Kiribati. You know it's remote when your mom sends him a package and the postmaster tells her "I have worked here for 25 years and have never sent a letter to this place." Here is what I learned about Tarawa from Uncle Roger:
He also claims to have visited us to meet Saya (and he did indeed bring her a lovely stuffed sea tortoise), but he took very little interest in her. I am not offended because he (as I mentioned before) is a Perpetual Bachelor and kids are Not His Thing. When I asked him whether he thought she was cute, this was his reply:
"All babies look the same."
And that is why my Uncle Roger is crazy!
Uncle Roger is a fisheries economist. He contracts himself out to different countries' governments to develop plans to sustain their underwater ecology. Basically, it is all an elaborate scheme to use his PhD to go scuba diving 2-3 times per week in exotic locations. Growing up, Maryn and I often found ourselves the lucky beneficiaries of his travel spoils, which included:
- Cannibal forks from Fiji
- Giant grass skirts from Palau
- Shark tooth knives
Just your average, run-of-the-mill Christmas gifts from Uncle Roger.
Uncle Roger just returned after a four-year stint in Tarawa, an atoll in the Pacific Ocean and capital of the Republic of Kiribati. You know it's remote when your mom sends him a package and the postmaster tells her "I have worked here for 25 years and have never sent a letter to this place." Here is what I learned about Tarawa from Uncle Roger:
- Alcohol is very expensive there.
- The island runs out of gas completely for days a time.
- The once weekly flight to Tarawa was recently canceled. Now the only way to get there is on a boat which travels there 3-4 times per year.
- Every morning, 6-8 people would poop on the beach in front of Uncle Roger's house (thereby squashing his dreams of early morning ocean swims).
- His experiences in Yap, where the women go topless but it is a big no-no to show any thigh.
- His trip to Abamama. Apparently the rite of passage for boys is that they must perform you-know-what on a variety of both young and old women and then be judged on their skills. Talk about performance anxiety!
- The time when he was living in the Virgin Islands and his employee tried to kill him by running him over in a boat while he was scuba diving.
- Judging how hot the women are in Bahrain, where he lived for eight years. This is difficult because they are in head-to-toe burkas. He developed the following scientific method for answering the age-old question, "Hot or Not?"
- Is she wearing a gold ankle bracelet and fashionable shoes? (If so, this is a good sign)
- Does she have a bounce in her step? (If so, this is a good sign that she is young)
- Does she have fat ankles? (self explanatory)
- Is her kid ugly? (also self explanatory)
- The time he was scuba diving for work in the Caribbean and came across thirty giant barrels floating in the water. They were all packed completely with fresh marijuana - worth about $2 million. Apparently the ocean was a dropoff point for trafficking. Of course he was terrified that he would be killed by a trafficker before he could swim away.
- His secretary in Yap. Every day she bought a bottle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes. When she got to work, she would cut up the cigarettes into little pieces and stick them into the bottle of vodka. Then she would shake the bottle until the cigarette pieces absorbed all of the vodka. She would take one of these vodka-soaked cigarette pieces and one betelnut (also a buzz-inducing carcinogen), sprinkle them with burnt coral (apparently to create some sort of caustic reaction), wrap them in a leaf, and chew on it to get a good buzz going. This caused her teeth to become completely black and she spat red juice constantly. Apparently she chewed 30-40 of these betelnut-burnt coral-vodka cigarette leaves a day. When we asked about how this affected her productivity, we were told that "she was EXCELLENT" but that she somehow (shock, shock) died by age 40.
He also claims to have visited us to meet Saya (and he did indeed bring her a lovely stuffed sea tortoise), but he took very little interest in her. I am not offended because he (as I mentioned before) is a Perpetual Bachelor and kids are Not His Thing. When I asked him whether he thought she was cute, this was his reply:
"All babies look the same."
And that is why my Uncle Roger is crazy!
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