The Chronicles of Balls
2022-08-14
I'm looking over occasionally from my dark mode kindle to Bekim's entertainment screen, which is playing the new Joker movie. He has his earbuds plugged in, but I can't hear the movie so I'm just trying to infer what the hell is going on. The scene comes on where the joker kills one of who I think are his friends in an apartment. Afterward he will say "that was the worst movie I've ever watched" and I agree because that shit seemed really disturbing for no reason.My balls feel fine on the plane because I chose to wear my sweatpants for the flight. Had I chosen to wear jeans or khakis I'd be fucked. We're somewhere over the atlantic ocean, flying back home from Germany to Newark air port in NYC because covid has canceled the last four months of our student exchange. I'm happy because it means my pain is over.
Seven months prior I'm climbing the stairs to the second floor of a youth hostel in Hamburg, lugging my massive, overpacked suitcase with me one step at a time. My mom thought it was a good idea to pack BOTH pairs of my dress shoes along with a full suit from that cheap store I forgot the name of. I hate both pairs and never wear them. I get along well with the other students but I get the sense that I got frequently throughout this trip, that I'm very hard to pin down. It's owed to my stress over dress.
For most of my life I never gave a fuck about clothing, and only when my balls started hurting in 10th grade or so did something have to change. I came home one day and ripped my boxer briefs off because they had given me hell the whole day. My mom or dad went out and bought normal boxers for me and those solved the problem for a long time.
It's 5:00 AM on monday morning and several alarms are going off in the hostel room. I start putting on my shoes in the dim light to join the other boys who are going on a run. I choose the FOURTH pair of shoes in my collection: orange Saucony Kinvara 10s, which I haven't tried running in before. I was with my mom when we got them at Fleet Feet a few weeks before the trip.
I just follow the group, and we start off running down the road in the fog. One of the guys looked at the Google maps for the area and found a park with a long trail, so that's where we're headed. I'm already lagging behind them and my feet are hurting pretty bad with each pound of the pavement. We reach the entrance to the park and I tell the guy nearest to me that I'm gonna head back to the hostel. He says okay and keeps going. I turn around and try to make my way back but I'm already pretty lost. I try to open Google maps on my phone but I have no 3G. I have a wave of fear because the guys I was running with are gone and I don't really remember the way back. I can't text anyone either. My phone is basically a brick. So I just pick the most likely road and go by feel, and I'm relieved when I eventually see the hostel come into view. Most people still aren't up and the hostel is quiet. I go back to our room and lay on my bed reading kindle. It feels kind of shitty to not be able to hang with the cool kids.
We're standing outside doing a headcount before starting on our trip to the city parliament building. A counselor comes over and tells me to change out of my sweatpants into something more formal. I'm sure this is a bad idea, but I also had little faith in the first place that I could possibly get away with wearing sweatpants to the parliament building. Still, I tried. But when she whispers in my ear I'm primed for her exact words, "You need to wear something more formal" so I say okay and charge back into the hostel to our room where I yank some khakis out of my quadrant of the right wall shelf, and change into them. I'm already pissed because I know today will suck ass.
What I don't know is that for several months my left testicle has been growing what I think is a spermatocele or something. It's sensitive and emits a dull pain when under pressure from sitting down. What I do know is that if I wear rigid pants like khakis instead of stretchy pants like sweatpants, my balls start hurting after like a minute of sitting. For a long time, I wrongly blame this on myself and assume that either other people feel the same pain but don't complain about it, or that I just have the wrong pants or underwear. This is the source of my pain as I waste money on clothes hoping they hurt me less and worry about my appearance in public. Germany is more formal than the US when it comes to clothing, and I am constantly finding myself in formal situations, meeting very well dressed and professional-type people from expensive homes, so I find it hard to wear my ratty sweatpants or my basketball shorts and not feel like a typo in the social equation. Eventually I learn to respect my comfort, and that my physical pain was real, had a real source, and should be taken seriously, but it takes coming home and having some crazy, life-altering experiences that I will detail in a later post. For now, we'll continue with the story:
We're walking through gilded rooms with giant kingly beds on display behind rope, and I'm fidgeting with my belt, but mostly just happy to be standing and not sitting for once. For some reason the way traditional belted pants sit on my waist is very uncomfortable to me. I like elastic waistbands. Thinking about pants 90% of the time has led to the strangest neurosis ever, where I'm looking at oil paintings of princes from 400 years ago in their tights and wondering how uncomfortable it must have been for them to sit in their courts and do all this kingly bullshit. Outside, I look towards a stone bridge over water while a bee lands on my upper lip and starts walking around, jabbing its sharp leg talons into my lip skin. A girl starts filming me as I look deadpan off to the side and just let it crawl around on my lips. Some other people gather around to watch.
I'd rather have a bee stab me in my lips all day than fucking sit with these balls in this class and struggle to focus on what is actually the best direct German instruction I'll ever receive in my life. Our teacher's name is Hardy, short for Reinhardt, and he's excellent, keeps a fast pace and does the whole lesson in German. During the lunch break I get to stand up which is a major relief and go socialize with people in the kitchen. One of the girls thinks it's funny I have a habit of bringing rolls and peanut butter with me from the hostel to eat for lunch. But when I look in the mirror next to my moldy-ass towel after a shower I notice I've gotten frighteningly thin. I get the sense the girls like my gaunt jawline, but I come off far more serious and grave than I really want to. At heart I'm a jovial guy, it's just that I'm really stressed a lot of the time now. The same girl films me as I make "my special meal" by spreading peanut butter on half a roll and then sprinkling sugar on it from the coffee station. We go out on the balconey to look down at a river crossing under a bridge. On the other side of the river someone is camping out in a tent beneath the overhang of a building.
Back in the classroom, I start leaning my chair back until it hits the wall. For some reason this takes the majority of pressure off my balls, and they stop hurting. From now on this is how I try to sit in all of the lessons. It is my genius invention and the reason I am still alive to this day.
I have less luck with that technique when I arrive at my new school in Thueringen. There's no wall to lean against. The students seem more mature than me. They have motorcycles, roll their own cigarettes and hang out with their girlfriends. I'm fucking weird in comparison and no one really knows what my deal is, other than that I talk little and frown a lot. I try to adjust myself by pulling on the crotch of my pants when no one's looking because I'm in a lot of pain. But it's basically futile. Over time I learn there is no comfortable configuration of pants and balls when sitting.
At home things are way better. I wear these ratty grey champion sweatpants I got off amazon 2 years prior. I'm sure my host parents still think I'm fucking weird but at least I'm comfortable and can mostly be myself at home. My host family is very nice and I try to be a good exchange student for them, but the stress has kind of deactivated my personality. At the end of my stay with them, the mom tells me she doesn't really know what I'm about. She was filling out a form or something and they asked her to describe my personality and she said all she knew is "I showed little emotion." Well fuk.
I start watching Eric Rosen chess videos on my laptop after school when everyone's out of the house. I buy muesli from REWE and eat it with vanilla oat milk while watching the Eric Rosen chess videos. This is a blissful period of time. I get the idea that I want to make a python program that draws a rotating 3d cube in perspective. I start watching the 3blue1brown linear algebra series on youtube and taking a lot of notes. At school, during the hour-long breaks I get each day, I think about cubes and how to draw them with a program. I sketch some ideas on paper. I fight through the pain to focus on the linear algebra we're doing in math. From the outside, I look like I barely know what planet I'm on. But then I answer a question correctly about vectors and people are like, "what?". Not that I love this arrangement of things but whatever. It's kind of funny. I really should have just worn sweatpants.
I write suicidal rap lyrics in my phone:
I just want to put my head through a glass pane
and drop my weight call it trilogy of max payne
...Not very good by my modern standards, but you get the point.I get this stupid fucking idea that I should try to make my own mayonnaise to put on boiled potatoes because I've been watching Cooking with Boris on youtube. I end up wasting like a whole bottle of olive oil to make a disgusting yellow liquid that sits in the fridge for like a week before we throw it away.
One day I decide to go barefoot running on a trail that runs right by REWE. I leave my backpack with all my valuable items except my phone in it leaned against a rock in plain view, with my flip flops next to it, and run off down the trail. As I'm coming back, more quickly now because I realize how stupid that was, I see a figure approaching in the distance on a bike. He has a grey patch on him. As he gets closer my heart sinks. The grey patch is my backpack. He jams hard on the pedals when he realizes it's my backpack, and I start chasing him. But he's too fast and I'm tearing up my bare feet on the pavement. Well now I'm truly fucked. That had my passport in it. I'm glad to see he didn't take my flipflops, with which I waddle back home in shame. I scrub the dirt off my feet and flipflops in the shower, and tell my host parents about it. We go to the police station and do a bunch of bullshit to no avail. People ask about it at school. Someone puts it in a news paper. I feel fucking retarded. Lol. I end up going through the process to get another passport with my next host family.
The math teacher hosts a chess club after school. I go in the afternoon and play a match against him. He beats me. Robert is there and we talk about this one problem from a math competition test we took in the morning. I was sitting for that test so of course that shit was uncomfortable as fuck, but I managed to solve this one problem about the volume of a 3d polygon, so I show Robert how I did it. He speaks better English than German, so we get along well. I go outside to find the bus home. I stand and watch the stops scroll by several times on the display above the bus door. My town doesn't show up. I step on one and ask if it's heading to my town. The driver says no. I get back off and go stand in the crowd of students on the sidewalk. Eventually all the buses depart. Well fuk. I try texting my host-parents. The text doesn't go through because all I have is mobile data for some reason and the texts are over SMS. Apple vs. Android texting bullshit strikes again. I try WhatsApp, which is better anyways, but that app won't even open because my mobile data is selectively disabled for it. So I go in settings, enable it, and try reopening WhatsApp. Fails again. I go back in settings only to find that data for WhatsApp is disabled again. Turns out I have the unique version of iOS with a bug preventing re-enabling mobile data for apps, but I'll only find that out later. Thank God my Google Maps app works. I route a course all the way home through backroads, somehow choosing the most obscure way back to the house possible. But it's pretty cool. Once I get off the main roads with no shoulders and cars whizzing by at 130 kmh, I get to take a leisurely walk through logging depots, forrest trails, tilled fields with tractors humming. I walked right by some cows at one point.
I try running barefoot on the track at the school, which means biking all the way there on a sunday and hoping no one is around to see me. The trip seems way easier and simpler on a bike. Someone, maybe it was the superintendant, sees me and asks me if it's my bike stashed by the gate. Yes. I do a couple laps and get nervous about someone stealing the bike, so I jam my feet in my shoes and run over to it. I'm done here and this was kind of embarrassing. On the ride back I try to kick it into over drive, standing up and pedaling hard. The chain comes loose from the sprocket and my feet shoot through the pedals. Everything goes flying and I land on the ground, scraping my left knee in a thin layer of cow shit on the road. Back home I wash the wound off in the shower, trying not to get water outside the tub because germans don't have shower curtains for some reason. Now my sweatpants look extra ratty with a big hole over the knee.
In the next school, I'm jumping hurdles in gym class like a fucking idiot and decide to half-ass the last one. My foot catches and I go sprawling out onto the wood floor. I intentionally exaggerate the fall because I'm feeling crazy. Walking back I see this dude look down at my knee, so I look down to see it dripping blood on the floor. It's the same knee I scraped in cow shit when my feet went through the pedals back in Thueringen. The gym teacher beckons me over and gets a bandaid. Putting the bandaid over my knee makes it stretch the skin on each step, which hurts, so I end up fucking with it a bunch and it loses adhesiveness. I don't pay the wound much attention the next few days, and it grows a green pustule. I'm sitting in class one day with shorts on and I accidentally bang that knee into the leg of the desk. It hurt pretty bad and when I rub the spot it feels wet. Sure enough, banging it against the desk leg exploded the fucking pustule and yellow-green pus spewed onto the table leg. I don't know if anyone but me noticed but I wouldn't be surprised if someone did. I quickly wiped it off with my sleeve.
I haven't peed since I left Germany, and for some reason don't really feel the need to, even as I sit in Newark waiting for my mom to pull up outside. They had us come through a covid screening checkpoint, where they measured the temperatures of our foreheads with a laser thermometer. I'm wearing an N95 mask that my host mom recommended. It's pretty good. My mom arrives and we start driving towards my sister's college in Brooklyn. It feels good to be back home. But damn it's also hot. Joanna and I go in and out of her dorm room, bringing a bunch of shit down several floors to the car. I find I can charge my finger with high voltage by touching one of the screws on the light switch plate in the bathroom, and then touch my sister to give her a shock. So I keep doing that for a little while. Eventually we get home and I pee finally.
Gradually I lost the ability to sit down comfortably at all, so these days I have a standing desk and I just stand up all day. My dad built it custom for me from a metal frame and some wood he found in the shop. I did end up going to the doctor for my testicle pain, but he said it would be best to just leave it alone and try to be as comfortable as possible throughout the day. So these days I try to always value my comfort and treat myself right. I wear sweatpants all the time, although what I wear is less important now because I never sit down anymore. That's the story of the weird coiled up sensitive worm thing on my left testicle. It brought me to some dark corners of my mind. The chronicles of balls.