Blast-off!
My shuttle to the Moon launches in T-12 minutes, according to the pleasant yet firm disembodied female voice floating through the intergalactic terminal at National. David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” is humming somewhere nearby, as if embarking for two years in Peace Corps hasn’t already burdened my mind with enough anxiety. Not exactly the song you want to hear right before blasting off in a hundred ton rocket. There’s a TV just to my right; maybe they ought to show clips of Apollo 13, or better still, loop images of Challenger or Columbia blowing up. But it’s a settled point now, so why bother worrying? I quit my job, sold my car, hastily loaded all of my crap into my mom’s garage, and accepted PC’s invitation to answer life’s call. Soon I’ll be hurtling through the cosmos, preparing to touch down on the Moon and take my first unsteady steps on a voyage that will take me some 250,000 miles from home. Or I’ll be drifting ever outward like Major Tom. More soon!
The dangers of using a toilet on the Moon
Hi everyone! No, I didn’t get sucked into the dark, cold, endless void of space. Here’s a rundown of my first few days on the Moon:
We spent our first two days sequestered in the PC office in downtown Moonopolis, the capital of the Moon, enduring a moon-otonous (ka-cha!) succession of tedious power point presentations about the history of PC, the history of PC Moon, the political situation on the Moon, security concerns unique to the Moon – contingencies for, say, meteor showers, which, far from being the beautiful spectacle of nature they appear as from Earth, cause some serious shit on the lunar surface. You know, because of no atmosphere. Also, we learned that we are barred from riding Moon dragons, the most popular method of public conveyance on the Moon. Between sessions, they fitted us for our moon-suits and vaccinated us against all the horrible diseases endemic to the Moon. You don’t even want to see the needle they plunge into you for the inoculation against Neptunian brain parasite (a microscopic organism that burrows into your cerebral cortex and induces an unpleasant obsession with exterminating all life on Earth).
At least the language classes and cultural sessions were somewhat stimulating. We’re learning the Moony alphabet, and how to sign some useful phrases (Moony is silent, owing to the lack of any medium upon which for sound waves to travel). We also have learned lots of details about the differences between Lunarians and Moononites, the two predominant social castes. And we learned to never refer to them generally as Moonies. They fuckin’ hate that. Moononites occupy the “lower-tier” of the hierarchy, and poverty tends to extend wider and deeper amongst them, though in the context of the solar system at large, even the wealthier Lunarians aren’t particularly well-off.
And on the third day, PC did issue unto us our moon-suits, and gave us time to walk around outside the artificially pressurized environment of the PC office to adjust to the challenges of ambulating in low-gravity conditions. I feel like an Olympic long-jumper every time I take a step. The next day they piled us into vehicles and dropped us off at the settlement we’ll inhabit for the next twelve weeks of training, and I had my first experience using a squat toilet in low-gravity. I’m getting real fluent at signing “sorry about the mess.”
I also committed my first mortifying language gaffe during the ceremony at which we met our host families. I introduced myself to my new host mom, taking special pride in being able to sign my name. The room exploded with a riotous bout of laughter. Turns out, my name translates into Moony as “one who has conjugal relations with sheep.” Wish someone would’ve given me a heads up about that, but whatever. No doubt, more such embarrassments lie ahead.
Subterranean cheese-sick alien
I’m starting to appreciate just how difficult are the lives Moonies lead. Today, after language class, I accompanied my host dad out to a large cheese quarry. The Moon, it turns out, is indeed composed of cheese, and this provides the inhabitants of Earth’s lonely satellite with their exclusive means of subsistence. But we’re not talking about pansy-ass camembert or brie, or even good old fashioned American Kraft singles. No, no. Moon cheese is hardcore. Take a Willy Wonka jawbreaker, marry it to a pungent hunk of muenster, take the offspring of that union and roll it around in the dirt, and let it dry out in the sun for about a week, and you’ll have a reasonable facsimile of Moon cheese.
Every joint in my body aches; every muscle is screaming in agony. Quarrying Moon cheese sucks. Eight hours of hoisting a sledgehammer over your head and bringing it thundering down on a practically indestructible boulder of Moon cheese – I swear it must rank somewhere in the neighborhood of diamonds on the Mohs scale – and I was about ready to trade places with John Henry. Seriously, my right shoulder feels like I just pitched a thirty-inning ballgame.
But this demanding task puts food in stomachs. Twice each day – once at about 8 am and again around 4 pm – the host dad distributes a hunk of Moon cheese to all the people in the household. Being an esteemed guest from another planet, I always receive the most generous helping. I appreciate the sentiment, but this ends up just causing me greater pain, as it takes me so long to gnaw down the colossal hunk they give me that I’m typically still working on my morning piece by the time afternoon rolls around. At least my mouth is getting exercise. I’m going to have the jaw muscles of a saber-toothed cat by the time two years are over.
The Dark Side of the Moon
As I sit here, crammed in a storage shed with the rest of the male members of my household, my host brother’s tentacle jabbing into my chin, I realize that every day I’m piecing together a more complete understanding of Moon culture. It’s like those worksheets you get in elementary school, where a picture is segmented into various cells each assigned a number that corresponds to the answer of some math problem, and each number has a designated color, and as you solve more problems you color in more of the cells and get one step closer to revealing a picture of a tiger wearing ice skates. Remember those? Those were fun. A lot more fun than squeezing into a storage shed to which my high school gym locker was palatial in comparison with five Moony men who haven’t bathed ever while we wait for the “week of hell” as they’ve dubbed this monthly ritual to pass. I made to leave once, just to stretch my legs, and was met with a chorus – albeit a silent one – of frantically twitching antennae and a sea of horrified faces. One of my host brothers asked me outright if I was nuts.
What could possibly be so terrible that the men voluntarily consign themselves to this every month – because I have gathered that the men do this voluntarily, not by cultural or religious fiat – rather than carry on in the world outside? I’m not quite sure yet. But apparently it happens every month and has something to do with the matriarchal system that exists on the Moon. I’ve caught, with my marginal language skills, an oft whimpered phrase along the lines of “all of them at once, all of them at once” which usually precedes a bout of nervous eye twitches and hyperventilation. I hope to find out more about this curious phenomenon.
UPDATE:
Two weeks have passed since, to the relief of my olfactory senses and circulation, we quit our miserable chamber and walked back out amongst the living world. Things felt normal for a while, but I have to say, the men all seem to have been in exceptionally high spirits these past couple of days. I notice a definite spring in my host dad’s step that wasn’t there before. And the women are behaving oddly as well. Everyone’s acting like they won tickets to the “This Is It” tour. In unrelated news, I must be struggling more with the language than I thought. My host dad, a few days ago, signed to me something about the weather; I think he was saying something about an upcoming heat wave, or something like that, but he seemed positively giddy about it. And the weather hasn’t been appreciably different. I must have misunderstood.
Michael Jackson didn’t die, he just went home
Had my first night out on the town tonight in 3 months with my fellow PCTs – excuse me, now PCVs – to celebrate the completion of our training. I’m a little drunk, but that’s more because you get drunk quick in a zero-atmospheric pressure environment than because I overdid it. Moon beer, by the way, is distilled from moon cheese, and tastes like moon piss. Good think you get drunk in a hurry, otherwise the nauseating flavor would make anyone moon vomit.
We went to a bar in Moonopolis, and it was wild. A dude from Uranus bought all of us a round of drinks. I wasn’t sure if I was just totally sloshed, or if he actually did have six eyes. Then we danced our asses off to Michael Jackson’s greatest hits. Michael Jackson is a huge sensation on the Moon. I really can’t do justice with mere words to the extent to which that guy is a cultural obsession here. Every five year old can do the moon walk. Fashionable young men and women walk around sporting a solo white glove. Androgyny is chic. As is squealing “Ow!” loudly and thrusting your hip out at random intervals throughout the day. And the shirts are awesome. I saw this one just today: Michcel Jacksnn This 1s It tour 200888887.
The night got wild. Three PCVs got arrested for trying to steal one of those decorative potted trees from a restaurant next door to the bar. Most of the volunteers partnered up with somebody by the end of the night, either another PCV or a tourist or ex-pat or, for the really adventurous, a Moony. Two of my buddies spent the better part of the evening slavishly fawning over a pair of self-dubbed “goddesses” from Venus, though their persistence, as I understood it, remained unrewarded, as I think they both ended up going home with a pair of Plutonians. Now, I don’t mean to demean Plutonians, and I’m sure that underneath that thick coat of insulating fur they’re lovely people, that’s not exactly my flavor of ice cream. I ended up alone, which is why I’m writing a blog post. But on the bright side, I won’t wake up tomorrow with Mercurial gonorrhea or anything like that.
Do I LOOK like I’m from Jupiter?
Can’t Moonies EVER stop staring? It baffles the mind to comprehend how the mere sight of someone who looks marginally different from yourself provokes such constant apparent bewilderment, particularly on the Moon, inundated as it is with development agencies representing nearly every celestial body in the Milky Way.
I was out for a walk, bounding along and minding my own business, and every time I passed a Moony, he or she stopped whatever he or she was doing and gazed at me slack jawed, as if I was the most unusual sight any of them had ever seen. Their jaws hit the floor – not exaggerating, by the way. My species has been here since 1969, okay? Our worlds share intimate gravitational ties. Maybe it’s time to get over that I look different. I mean, you’d think I was from Jupiter. It’s as if I had two heads or something. Not to slag those cats from Jupiter – fuckers may look weird as hell, but they all seem to know how to have a good time.
Worst of all are the throngs of children who swarm you when they get you in their sights. Since I’m an Earthling, I must be just loaded out the ass with money I can mindlessly toss away. You would think that, anyway, based on how the kids horde around me demanding money from me, hands and antennae flapping about wildly. It also blows my mind that they can understand each other with their antennae wheeling about all hysterically. I’ll never have the mastery of the language to follow all those rapid antennae spins and flicks.
It’s not easy being green (if you’re an Earthling, that is)
Racial prejudices don’t die easily, and the Moon presents a tragic case study of just how they can reinforce cultural perceptions of beauty, and how not-so-subtle advertizing can in turn reinforce racial prejudice.
One of the most ubiquitous products on the Moon is “green-ing cream.” You can’t buy soap, sun block, deodorant, toothpaste, anything that you put anywhere on your body that doesn’t contain an added agent to turn your skin green. How does this reinforce racial biases? Lunarians are green, not dissimilar from Martians (though less scaly). Moononites, who if you recall sit upon the lower rung of the Moony social ladder, have a more violet color. Billboards, TV commercials, posters, everywhere you look, the culture is saturated with advertisements for green-ing creams. These ads feature attractive (I’m guessing) Moonies – to be read Lunarians – seductively posed, antennae sensually erect, objects of lust and desirability. And what makes them desirable? Their iridescent green skin. Bad guys in TV shows invariably have violet skin, unless they have to be Lunarian characters, in which case their green skin is depicted as a darker, moldier green, in contrast to heroes and heroines, who possess that coveted reptilian hue. The less than subliminal message: green beautiful and thus good, violet ugly and bad. Woe unto those Moononites who are ultraviolet, as if they don’t have a hard enough time of it already.
For my part, I use the green-ing cream not out of choice but because you simply can’t avoid it (if you want to bathe, at any rate). I look less like a hunky green hulk and more like a cartoon character suffering stomach flu.
The other ET
I’m frustrated. Nine months at site and what do I have to show for it? Aside from resentment of just about everyone in my community; a permanent neck cramp from our monthly sequestrations; an impressive catalogue of movies watched; and a strange oscillation between constipation precipitated by my cheese-exclusive diet and explosive diarrhea precipitated by, well, it’s Peace Corps; not much.
Turns out, bugger the mind as it might, the people in my settlement were not interested in learning how to build gardens or boil water. It’s hard enough for Moonies to keep water in a liquid form here. They don’t need any help boiling it. They don’t care about HIV, because, well, they aren’t human. I talk to people about “sustainable change” and they politely shoo me out the door. I don’t understand why empty platitudes aren’t enough for them. To make matters worse, a Martian volunteer lived in my settlement a few years back, and I just can’t hear the comparisons enough. Oh, Narglob signed Moon language so well, why don’t you? Oh, Narglob just ate so much moon cheese, why don’t you? Oh, Narglob built a nuclear atmospheric stabilizer and helped install three class-C de-atomizers, why don’t you? Narglob, Narglob, Narglob. It makes me want to pull my hair out. Thankfully I have this glass helmet encompassing my head every second of the day.
I had always heard that PC/Moon had a high ET rate, which in this case stands for early termination, not extra-terrestrial. A few of my friends have availed themselves of this built-in escape strategy, and the allure of it grows on me every day. And yet I can’t quite make myself think that it’s beyond hope, that I can’t still salvage some meaningfulness from my time here. But my endless solitary hikes around the crater are growing tiresome, as is the boredom that never abates. I’m cursed with a restlessness I can’t slake. My mind drifts to far off places. Was this all just a huge mistake?
Vacation!
Happy Holidays everyone! The first holiday season of my PC career is upon us. All the volunteers in my cohort are planning our vacations. Most of the men (and, I have to say, more than a few of the women) are taking their holiday on Venus. You know, for the good weather. And the atmosphere there keeps you at pretty much a constant buzz, or so I hear reported. I know at least one volunteer is looking into going to Mars, but it’s a bitch to get a visa for Mars. If you’re interested in exploring some of the tourist spots on the Moon, the Neil Armstrong Footprint Museum is a good bet. I’m more into the adventure scene than the bacchanalian or cultural pursuits, though, so I’m going for a trek in the Asteroid Belt. I wanted to try Pluto, but since Earth demoted it from planetary status and closed our interstellar embassy there, PC won’t let me. Bummer. Still, Asteroid Belt should be awesome!
There be dragons
As you know, PC, for safety reasons, prohibits volunteers from travelling by moon dragon. Most volunteers ignore this rule. Dragons are simply a much more convenient mode of transportation than walking or giant moon worms. Plus, it just looks badass to soar through the – is it the air? vacuum of space? the firmament? – on the back of an eighty-foot dragon with an epidermis formed entirely of deep space metallic alloys (although the badass-ity of it is slightly diminished by the fact that a hundred other poor saps are also squeezed onto its back. And clutching onto the tail. And dangling from the wings. And the mouth).
But seriously, folks. Dragons are a lot faster than moon worms, and the novelty of bounding several yards in a single step when you walk has kind of lost its novelty. What can I say? You become pretty jaded in PC. And really, they aren’t all that dangerous. Okay, so hanging from the jaw of a moon dragon poses some risks, especially on longer trips, because the dragons do get hungry, but only on the rarest of occasions has a moon dragon crashed from being overloaded with passengers. There really ought to be stricter regulations about the number of passengers that can ride a dragon at any given time, but such is life on a developing satellite.
But aside from those minimal risks, which one can mitigate and even, practically speaking, eliminate, by being selective about which dragons they ride and where on the dragon they ride, they’re totally safe. And it’s a lot of fun. My host brother just got back from Mercury, where he works construction (can you imagine a worse place to do manual labor?), for a short vacation, and has been teaching me how to break-in the young dragons. My host dad never let me because I’m an Earthling and thus don’t know how to do anything, apparently. This annoyed me at first, but let’s be real – he’s right. But I am learning how to ride those dragons. I get thrown most of the time, and have had to call PCMO (that’s our Peace Corps doctor) a few times to get treated for dragon bites, but it has been a great cultural experience.
In the event of total annihilation…
The volunteers in my region recently had to practice consolidation, which is our protocol for assembling in a single location so that PC can account for all of us in the event of a natural disaster, which typically portend unfathomable devastation. You think wildfires are bad? Try being engulfed in a solar flare. It doesn’t seem like the most well thought out plan to have all the volunteers in one spot in such a case, as it would only ensure that all of us got wiped out in a single catastrophic blow, but there we were anyway. And I appreciate PC’s commitment to volunteer safety, but it strikes me as somewhat incongruent with the aim of PC to have all PCVs abandon site likes rats scurrying for the exit on a sinking ship in the case of a natural disaster, as it usually follows that people are at their most vulnerable, and thus in greatest need of assistance, in the direct aftermath of something like, say, an apocalyptic meteor strike, or a settlement being overrun by man- and moony-eating giant alien spiders.
The consolidation was fun for about two days, until we all started to get on each other’s nerves. If there’s one thing PCVs do well, it’s drink (though we got nothin’ on the Jupiterians). So what happens when ten PCVs who have been isolated in the deepest darkest craters of the moon for two months with literally no human contact get together in a hotel with a bar? Chaos exceeding even spider apocalypse ensues. I’m too embarrassed to share the full extent of the destruction we rendered upon this poor, unprepared lunar town. Suffice to say that, at one point, a number of volunteers streaked down the main street and, ahem, well, I really shouldn’t go into too many details. I wonder what the Moony consolidation plan is in the event of an invasion by rambunctious, repressed Earthlings?
Termination shock
I finish PC service in a few weeks and haven’t yet begun the daunting task of organizing all my belongings, sorting what I want to keep, what I want to trash, what I want to give as gifts to my Moony friends, how I’m going to ship back souvenirs for my family, or the ten million other details that attend uprooting one’s life of two years and moving back across the solar system.
I tell myself it’s because the thought of leaving makes me sad, but honestly my hesitation to accept this impending reality stems more from a pervasive anxiety about going home. I don’t want to face the questions, the enormous task of finding a job, the hefty burden of gravity, the long process of recovering lost bone density. How will I learn how to walk again? How will my system adjust to fruits and vegetables and grains and water? I only recently mastered the low-gravity toilet; I seriously have to readjust to a sitting toilet that flushes and everything?
I always thought that PC would clarify my future ambitions, but all it’s done is open up new doors and stir everything into a muddle of confusion. I’m torn now between being a travel writer, which I always imagined to be my dream, and pursuing a Master in Intergalactic Health. The program at the Saturn Institute looks really exciting. Ugh. Why does PC have to end? In so many ways I long to go home, but PC ending means I have to actually make up my mind about the future.
Most of all, I think I regret a lot of things I didn’t do. But as I reflect more, I realize that the scope of PC service exceeds a mere catalogue of trainings delivered or projects completed. You don’t measure success by tractor beams installed or the number of moisture compressors you find a way to donate to your community. The PC experience transcends any lame effort to quantify it, because it is, in fact, life in its totality. This wasn’t just a job that I performed with varying degrees of success and failure. It was two years of my life. Two years spent flying on moon dragons (sorry, PC) and learning a new language and making friends and losing friends and exploring a different world, seizing upon new horizons. Literally. You can’t unpack it. You can’t walk away from it. I’ll come back from these two years of lunar-cy (I’m sure you’re all glad I haven’t lost my dorky sense of humor) imbued with memories and scars and green skin that contribute to the chemical and biological composition of who I am, that will inform the decisions I make in the future and the ultimate path my life follows.
Also, if PC teaches anything, it’s to appreciate all the comforts and conveniences of home. Like oxygen and gravity.
It’s been a zany couple of years, and I thank you all for sharing it with me. I would have to say that, while my service may not have helped pave even a small step ahead for Moony-kind, it certainly was one giant leap for this PCV.
Tremendous thanks go to my fellow PCV and dearest friend Andrea, the visionary who conceived of Peace Corps Moon and shared with me its wonders. This post owes its existence to her fertile imagination.
daal bhaat 