Free Falling

When I was 13 years old, I had a terrifying experience on an amusement park ride. While on a class trip to Sea World, I had a moment where I was certain I was going to die. I think it remains the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me.

Here’s what happened:

It was on our year end class trip. Everyone was feeling pretty good because summer was about to begin. The weather was hot and sunny, and couldn’t have been better for a day at Sea World. And hey, get this, some skanky girl on the other bus flashed her boobs out the window. Boo-laka-shah!.

But that’s not the story here.

The story happened on the ride “Journey to Atlantis”. It’s a water ride with a big drop. You get in the car and pull the bar down across your lap. You go through a few minutes of themed “story” sections, similar to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, then you get to a big drop. It’s probably about 60 or 70 feet, and it ends in a pool of water, like Splash Mountain. Your basic water roller coaster type drop.
About halfway through the ride I realized I hadn’t pulled my lap bar down. I thought it would do it automatically.

So here I am, and let me tell you, I don’t remember one damned thing about the story sections of the ride, because all I am thinking about is how the hell I am going to bail on this ride. I’m completely unsecured in a car that’s going to hit about 40 mph while falling more than 60 feet, and if the drop starts in darkness, I won’t even know when to prepare myself for it. I thought about abandoning the car but there really isn’t any way to do that. The ride is on a sort of flowing river, and the themed scenery is raised up high so that if you to jump in the water you wouldn’t be able to get out. There’d be nowhere to go since all the scenery stuff is too high up for a person to get a hand on anything. And it’s not like I could just swim back to the start or something. The current would have taken me to the drop anyway.

This whole time I didn’t say one word about my predicament to my friends. The cars are two-seaters and there were five of us. I was alone in the third car. I could see them (and that their lap bars were secured right over their thighs) but they couldn’t see me unless they turned around. They had absolutely no idea that while they were having a good time, I was growing increasingly frantic worrying about what would happen at the drop.

I came up with nothing.

Finally, the drop came into view and I realized what I had to do. I had to stand up so that I could get a good grip on the lap bar, push my feet down as hard as I could, and just hold on to keep from flying out of the car. So that’s what I did. I white-knuckled my way to the bottom, crying out in absolute terror.

I decided not to buy the picture of us on the ride.

Looking back on it, it’s really strange that I never said anything. Even after the ride, I didn’t mention it to my friends. I was weak-kneed and bleary eyed but I stayed quiet about it. I was afraid I’d sound like a pussy. In retrospect, that is completely insane, but it’s exactly the kind of decision I’d make back then. I was such a nervous sort of person. The fear of being on the ride was over, but I still had to fear of people finding out that I had been scared. Bizarre.



Anyway, after that I was kind of soured on rides with big drops. The next year our class trip was to Islands of Adventure, and while I had fun riding The Hulk roller coaster, which uses a fast accelerating boost start rather than a big drop, I couldn’t bring myself to go on the Deuling Dragons, which starts with a huge drop. Later that day I went on another water ride similar to Journey to Atlantis, something with a Jurassic Park theme, which also ended with a drop just like the one on Journey to Atlantis. I felt nothing but fear on that drop. The loops and curves of The Hulk were great, but rides that take you down, down, down were just out of the question.

Now, here’s what happened yesterday.

The most popular water theme park in Korea is Ocean World, part of a larger complex called Vivaldi Park. During summer days it is swamped with tens of thousands of people packing every corner as they try to beat the heat of Korea’s notorious Junes, Julys, and Augusts. Our party added six more to the endless crowd.

As we entered the park, the first thing we all noticed is, a lot of the lines were incredibly fucking long. I mean, like, whoa. Some of these lines were the stuff of legend, wrapping around the ride itself and out onto the walking paths. We jokingly started to call the place “Line World”. “This line is famous—it’s the longest line in the world!!” Oh, we’re such jokers.

Anyway, if you’re going to wait in a long line, it might as well be for something awesome, so we found ourselves heading to the far side of the park where its two most famous attractions awaited. Since early spring Ocean World has been running ads EVERYWHERE featuring two beautiful women, one in red clothes, one in blue, who represent one of two rides spectacular rides that are right next to each other. The red ride puts you and another rider on a little inflatable tube and sends you down a very long twisting, coiling slide. Its biggest asset is its length. The Big Red Slide is a journey.

The other ride, the blue one, is called Super Boomerang, and its biggest asset is an absolutely insane drop. We chose Blue.

Here’s the scoop on Blue:

Super Boomerang is a ride in which a whole group boards a circular raft, which the staff then sets spinning, for some strange cryptic reason that I’ll never understand. The raft is pushed onto a slide, which takes you around a little bend, and then straight into Armageddon. The slide gets very, very steep and you have about a second or two of insanely fast acceleration before the raft gets to the wall. Oh, right, the wall. You see, this isn’t a simple case of going DOWN a big, fast slide. The Boomerang also takes you UP a big, fast incline. Your raft slides up a wet wall till you’ve got at least fifty solid feet of air, and then, finally, it’s time for the big drop. Down the wall you just came up, your momentum carrying you away from your starting point and onto a new path, picking up incredible speed, then over one last bump and finally careening into a calm pool at the bottom. The line actually passes by this pool area, so you can see the reactions of riders as they get out. Most are deliriously happy. One woman, though, had to be helped out of the raft, like she couldn’t stand. Daaaamn.

I’m a pretty passive person in a group. I don’t really like to make the decisions. I mean, sometimes I’ll step up if the group is being really indecisive and it seems like no one else wants to decide what’s going on, but generally speaking, I’m happier just leaving it to someone else. I like being along for the ride. I find I like my outings better when I don’t really know what’s going to happen next. And, I’ve got to say, it worked out great for me on Saturday, because there is absolutely no way in hell I would’ve chosen the blue ride, but it ended up being fantastic.
I wouldn’t have chosen it because, frankly, it looked damned terrifying. When you first get in the line, you’ve got a great view of the Wall. You can’t see, from that angle, the rafts coming down the slide that starts the ride off, but you can see them as they go up the Wall, and then back down. We were already standing in line, already committed, as a group, to going on this one, when I first saw a raft go up, up, up, that huge wall. Not only saw it, but HEARD it. The raft has enough speed that you can hear the shlick sound of the water under the plastic from two hundred feet away. And that sound is mingled in there with the screams of the riders. And the damn ride goes UP A WALL. Before stopping from the force of gravity and falling back down a full fifty feet, most of that at nearly a ninety degree angle! Are you SERIOUS, Ocean World? Are you SERIOUS?

When I saw that first raft going up that Wall, I immediately felt my stomach drop. I could not believe I was going on this ride. I couldn’t believe this was actually about to happen. But this time, when I decided not to say anything to my companions, I was making the right choice. And I knew it. You can’t let one bad experience ruin something for the rest of your life, no matter how bad that experience was. It was time to get over the fear and have some fun.

Needless to say, the ride was awesome. I managed not to think about what was coming all through our long stay in the line, which was maybe an hour or so. It only hit me as we were boarding the raft, and it hit me hard. For about five seconds I thought about bailing, but luckily the line was long enough that I could never have justified it. I went along, and before I knew it, I was screaming my head off—in a good way. Down at the bottom, in the calm pool, before the anxious onlookers going through their own hour long wait, I watched myself, as though it was someone else entirely, babbling away about how great that was, and how it was worth the wait. I hadn’t waited an hour. I’d waited ten years.

Good night folks. Much love to everyone.

Karaoke-fu

In Korea, they don’t have “karaoke”. They have “noraebang”, from “norae” meaning song, and “bang” meaning room. Song-room. I’ve decided, though, for the purposes of this writing to use the term “karaoke”. Karaoke means something to people. It’s more than simply a word to describe a machine. Rather, it describes an act. You do karaoke. Foreigners over here don’t refer to “doing noraebang”. We say “going to a noraebang”. The act of singing along to ridiculous reproductions of popular songs while the words flash on a screen, either to the joy or the despair of present company will always be “karaoke”. So to any of my fellow waygooks who might be reading this, consider that an explanation for my use of Japanese nomenclature.

Conventional wisdom states that being successful at karaoke is all about confidence. Throw yourself into the performance with all the gusto you can summon and you’re sure to win the crowd. Show them your swagger and never look back. Bonus points for singing without looking at the lyrics. Pick songs that people think they’d have a hard time doing themselves, then belt them out without a trace of nerves, and that, in a nutshell, is what a great karaoke performance is all about.

For the most part, I agree with all of that. I have a couple of quibbles with it, but in general, that’s all true. Karaoke, like so many other things, is an activity which is easy to take for granted, but can speak volumes about people. You’ll get a pretty good picture of a person’s confidence level by doing karaoke with them. It doesn’t take long to spot it, either. You’ll know the karaoke pros by two things: their energy and their level of comfort. Comfort-level is the really telling sign. An unconfident person who’s seen a few good performers might be aware that he should put in as much energy as he can, and that’s good, but it’s a hundred times harder to fake being comfortable in your own skin. When you take an energetic perfomance, and add visible discomfort, you get camp. Camp can be fun, too, but whenever I see it (or catch myself indulging in it), I feel like the performer would rather be showing his or her sincere emotions—that is, to be rather than to seem confident—but just can’t quite make it happen. So the quest to deliver a great karaoke performance becomes a challenge where you must triumph in battle over yourself.

One other thing worth noting here is that you should always remember to play to your strengths. If your falsetto is your best voice, sing the Bee Gees, sing Mika, sing Queen, sing Scissor Sisters, but please please please, don’t even consider Marvin Gaye. It’s not a failing of confidence and character to steer clear of your weaknesses. In fact, a false denial of those weaknesses would be the real failing of confidence. To be a good performer, you must know just what it is that you do well. Then, learn to do it even better.

I’m not sure whether, or to what extent, all of this is applicable to other aspects of life. I have a feeling that it’s relevant, but not so much so that it’s worth thinking about all day. I do feel that having regular experiences in noraebangs throughout Seoul has served as a sort of barometer of my self-confidence over the last eight and half months. When I’m all set to belt ‘em out all night long, things must be going alright. And you know what? That seems to happen more and more lately.

Good night, world. Happy 4th.

Randy