10 Pages of My Life by David Harris My mom often likes to tell me that she went on a trip to Jamaica while she

was pregnant with me. So, in a manner of speaking I've been to Jamaica, too. I guess that's as early as I should start this. My parents were on a missions trip to a Caribbean island with a globally advertised slow-pace of life and an avid appreciation for music and marijuana, and I was kept away from it by time and placenta. My father described Jamaica as a pretty wild place. He told me a story about his group of American church-going missionaries riding around Kingston in a Volkswagen van. The wide eyed missionary-tourists were glued to the windows, marveling at the foreign place the'd found themselves in, when out of a small back alleyway strolled a tall black man with long scraggly dreadlocks, totally naked and obviously very stoned. I wish I was grown up for that trip, as opposed to being just a fetus awaiting birth. My father and mother, and then after my parents' divorce in 1985, my father and step-mother have been on a number of trips to various places around the world. They arrive, fellowship with members of one of the local churches, sing hymns, maybe walk around a low-income neighborhood and minister with the poor, perhaps help build a small schoolhouse. I've never tagged along on one of these trips, although I don't think I'd offer much help to my parents' cause, considering I'm not a religious or spiritual person. I find it somewhat comical the destinations my family chose to visit on their supposed missions trips. England, Scotland, Mexico, Jamaica. It looks more like a list of prime vacation spots, and it seems like a perfectly literal example of preaching to the choir. Anytime I bring this point up, my father gets a grim and defensive look on his face and reminds me that spreading God's word shouldn't be confined to the Third World. I usually chuckle and drop it, foreseeing an hours-long argument in my future if I choose to continue. Religion and politics are two topics best un-discussed between my father and I. That and anything having to do with the Free Masons will lead to a heated discussion that will only end in frustration. Atop a 101 Dalmatians comforter on my younger brother Ryan's bed, I sat, an eleven year old kid intently flipping through the K'nex guidebook trying to decide which model I was going to build. There was a dune buggy with added rubber wheels, a rotating windmill, a biwing airplane, and the most difficult and rewarding of all the models, the roller coaster. It always starts with the sharp snap of the blue rough plastic lid being pulled open, much like a businessman unlatching his briefcase and taking out files for an important meeting. If you're careful about opening the lid, the pieces don't make a sound. But, sometimes you're excited and you want to get right to the fun part, the building. So you yank the lid up in a rush and the hundreds of small plastic pieces rattle and shimmer against each another. Lift the plastic briefcase off the floor. Slowly tilt the case over. Feel your pulse quicken. And now the sweet cacophony. Hundreds of brightly colored rods, connectors, cranks, and gears cascade onto the dingy but vacuumed beige carpet. And you get to work. K'nex can be a lot of things, but the most basic components are the rods and the connectors. The rods are look like solid drinking straws with added bevels and ridges. The connectors come in a few different shapes. My favorite is the white connector that lets you join nine different rods and looks like a snowflake. Ryan had a much less conventional imagination and curiosity towards K'nex than I did. He would flippantly toss the guidebook aside and set out to design whatever model he felt like at the moment. Ryan had a peculiar habit of going through stages where he'd completely obsess over certain concepts, images, or objects. The 1991 film The Rocketeer is about a 1930's stunt pilot who stumbles across a prototype for a jet-pack and has to fight to keep it out of the hands of the Germans. The film displays swastikas in a few scenes. Without truly understanding the cultural significance and possible sensitivity linked to that symbol, Ryan became obsessed with the striking simplicity of its graphic design characteristics. He began drawing swastikas everywhere, on notebook paper, in the margins of books, on the wall of his classrooms. His bus driver eventually got fed up and told my parents what was going on. They sat him down and explained why it would be best if he picked a different symbol to obsess over. After seeing James Cameron's film, Titanic, Ryan was instantly hooked and sought out anything he could get his hands on relating to the doomed ocean liner. He would check out books from the library about the Titanic and use the book's pictures as a guide so he could make intricate drawings of the massive ship. The Titanic was also a favorite K'nex model for Ryan. He would always get about half-way done, and then decide that it wasn't quite right, disassemble all his work, and start all over again. Ryan is my half brother, and through our lives we've never been very close. I would always spend much more time with my older brother Ben than I did with Ryan. Ben and I had the same mom and dad, and we also shared a love of playing guitar. But, it just so happened that Ryan and I simultaneously developed an intense fondness for K'nex. If you can imagine it, you can build it. So says the voice on a commercial for K'nex showing two boys playing with a K'nex roller coaster that actually works. Forget that dusty ol' erector set. K'nex takes constructive building to an entirely new level with its color-coded

coaster that actually works. Forget that dusty ol' erector set. K'nex takes constructive building to an entirely new level with its color-coded building systems. Simple shapes of injection-molded acetyl copolymer plastic pieces snap together to form intricate designs of objects that, to an eleven year old kid, are awesome. K'nex offers highly creative kids the components necessary to build in the physical world what they can think up in their brain. But, for folks like me who are geo-spatially challenged, the kits come with intricate instruction books to help you build pre-designed models. K'nex is the brainchild of Joel Glickman, an industrial engineer who worked for his family's injection mold plastic business. Approaching 50 years old, Joel found himself sitting alone at a friend's wedding. Out of boredom, he began playing around with the plastic drinking straws at the table and had an idea. He could use his family's plastic business to build a construction set out of straw-like rods and connectors. Glickman brought the prototype to major toy manufacturers like Mattel and Hasbro who both didn't think the toy would be right for their companies. Lego refused to even look at his design. Joel began selling K'nex independently through local toy stores. To ensure durability, K'nex is made of a higher grade plastic than most toys. This makes it expensive. A starter kit costs around $25, and the more complicated kits can be as much as $200. This kept it out of some retailers, like Walmart. But, by Christmas season of 1993 K'nex had caught the eye of toy retail giant Toy 'R Us. That year, my parents walked into the Toys 'R Us in Tulsa, Oklahoma and bought two sets of K'nex, one for Ryan, and one for me. After that, we would both spend hours in his room crouched low to the floor, Ryan digging through piles of rods and connectors searching for the right piece, me checking the guidebooks and fixing a mistake. Once we got the models built, we'd roughhouse with them until they came apart or we got bored with that particular model and decided to build something new. To my eleven year old mind, K'nex were far cooler than Legos. If K'nex were the dark and weighty Batman portrayed by Michael Keaton in the Tim Burton films, Legos were the cheese ball campy send-up offered by television's Adam West. Legos just seemed too simple. Colored blocks? Big deal. These were colored rods and connectors. They were sleek. There was a definite sense of logic behind their construction. The basic foundation for all K'nex models is the triangle. K'nex rods come in six different lengths. The design is made so that each rod can be the hypotenuse of a right triangle whose other two legs are formed using the next shortest rod in the set. This makes it easy to build sturdy models. I didn't understand this concept at the time. I just liked the sound of snapping two pieces together. I liked opening the case for the first time and seeing all the colored rods and connectors carefully bundled in clear plastic bags, neatly stacked inside the rough plastic case. I appreciated their toughness and near indestructibility. Run over a few K'nex pieces with a vacuum cleaner and you'll see. After fishing them out of a bag of dust and grime, they'll still be intact and ready to sit in as the axle on a race car, the wing on a rocket ship, a section of track on a roller coaster, or just a widget that clips on to a whatcha-ma-call-it. I can't say that Ryan and I had the best relationship, or that we're closer than most brothers. But, I know that because of those tough little plastic pieces, I spent a lot of time with him and saw a side of him that I otherwise wouldn't have seen. And for that, I owe Joel Glickman a thank you. My parents divorced when I was two years old. I visited my father and step-mother during Christmas and summer breaks. I lived most of my childhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a mid-size city with basically everything a middle-class American family needs; good schools (I went to the same high school that S. E. Hinton, the author of Tex and The Outsiders, graduated from); baseball fields; more churches than you could shake a stick at; public libraries where homeless people could momentarily escape the cold and learn valuable trade skills like filing, the importance of maintaining a professional resume, or how to break through the city's firewall to find pornography on the internet; tunnels littered with used condoms and decorative graffiti leading under the highway; green parks with long winding bike paths and tennis courts; shopping malls; movie theaters (we still had a drive-in theater up until the early '90s); a river; a small mountain with a pond for fishing; laser tag centers; roller skating rinks; fast food restaurants; and a nice assortment of bars where you could go get drunk and listen to local musicians. I didn't find out about any of the local bars until I was 25 years old. I left Tulsa when I was 16. My mother was growing more and more frustrated of dealing with my increasing desire to drive an automobile. She and my step-dad were on a tight budget and couldn't afford to pay the extra car insurance if I got my license, which I understood but not with as much clairvoyant sensitivity as my mother would've preferred. I was constantly asking her to let me at least get my learner's permit. This, coupled with her having to watch my older brother Ben repeatedly get into trouble with the law, led her to tell me she thought I should go live with my father for a while. This was fine with me. I always enjoyed my visits with my dad and step-mom. They seemed to have a slightly more lenient hands-off approach when it came to parenting, compared to my mother's overprotective tendency to need to know every single detail about what I was doing with whom at all times of day. So, I moved down to Texas with my dad and since then have rarely been back to Tulsa. It's 11:30 on a Tuesday morning in September, and my 18 year-old self is glued to the television inside the Non-Commissioned Officers Academy on Fort Meade, Maryland. I'm eating a quick easy power lunch of M&Ms, Dr. Pepper, and Dolly Madison brand Dunkin'

Stix. That adds up to roughly 160 grams of sugar, a whopping 53 percent of the recommended daily allowance for someone like me. But, because I won't be diagnosed with type-one diabetes until I'm 19, I don't know or care about any of those numbers. My lunch is fast, easy, and delicious and that's all I need to know. I am blissfully ignorant. On some unremarkable afternoon of my childhood, my mom called me into her room and asked me to stab her. She wasn't masochistic or a glutton for punishment. It just took her a long time to work up the nerve to prick her own finger in order to test her blood sugar, so she asked me to do it for her until she got used to the idea. Once I was diagnosed, I realized that a large part of dealing with diabetes is simply getting over the natural discomfort associated with blood and needles. As a young man, I watched my mom struggle to take control of her disease. It was tough for her to change her diet, exercise regularly, and monitor her blood sugar; three key steps to managing diabetes, a struggle that would later seem all too familiar. People who develop type-1 diabetes are no longer able to produce their own insulin, a protein made in the pancreas that is necessary for the body to be able to process carbohydrates. Without insulin, glucose (the substance carbohydrates become after digestion) float around the blood stream wreaking havoc and generally gumming up the works. Type-1 diabetes is similar to rheumatoid arthritis in the regard that both are autoimmune disorders. For some mind boggling reason, the body determines that insulinproducing cells inside the pancreas are enemies and begins killing them off. So, on a cellular level anyway, it's my own damn fault that I have this disease. The first time I started noticing what I would find out are the symptoms of high blood sugar was on a trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina during biker week. My friends Daniel Bailey and John Schlosser invited me to come along with them so we could do what any normal group of young soldiers would want to do; drink in excess and make fools of ourselves in front of women. Apparently all the reputable hotels in the city sort of had this figured out already, and refused to rent us a room. We ended up finding a small dingy motel whose owners were just desperate enough to allow us to rent a room with a moldy mini-fridge,a patio sliding door that wouldn't shut all the way, and what appeared to be either vomit or blood stains in the carpet. I had recently discovered the joys of spiced rum and planned on sharing my enthusiasm with everyone I met that night. I filled a Pepsi bottle with a lot of booze and just enough soda to escape suspicion from the cops lucky enough to pull night duty during biker week. I could go on to regale you with some elaborate story of unbridled debauchery, overindulgence, drunken epiphanies, bar room fights, and broken billiards cues, but really the night was remarkably uneventful. I did, however, start to notice that I was constantly thirsty and had to go to the bathroom once every five minutes. These problems kept up until I started feeling sluggish, tired, miserable. I went back to work on base and checked myself into the emergency room. After some tests and the all too unavoidable soul-crushing prostate exam, my doctor let me down gently. He was a rough looking old guy with a peculiar gray handlebar mustache. He barged into the room, looked down at my chart in his hand, and told me with his all too knowing gravelly voice, You're lucky, kid. You got diabetes the easy way. Wait. I have diabetes? I asked nervously. A wave of despair, confusion, anger, and frustration rolled over me. This was the last thing I needed, and it would most likely fuck up any chances I had of deploying to a combat zone. Yeah, but don't worry about it, Dr. Mustache chimed in. Other than that, you're in perfect fucking health. I'm diabetic, too, he said looking down at me with a stern humored face. But I didn't find out about it in some air-conditioned Army hospital in North Carolina. I got diabetes because a NVA soldier shot me with a Siminov carbine in the goddamned pancreas in some muggy shit-pile jungle in Vietnam. Suddenly, I didn't feel so bad about my predicament. It's two years after my carefree 18 year-old self enjoyed lunches of soda pop and candy. I'm sitting in a small but tidy barracks room on Fort Bragg calculating how many units of insulin I need to give myself to cover the macaroni and cheese, dinner roll and medium Granny Smith apple that are my meal's main sources of carbohydrates. Years after first watching my mother coax stubborn blood out of her calloused fingertips, I am finally beginning to understand her frustration when meal times rolled around. Now, when I look down at my food I no longer simply think, That looks tasty. A string of numbers and their relationship to me and to one another runs through my head. That delicate dance looks something like this, Let's see. Apple equals 15 carbs. Macaroni and cheese is roughly 35, and dinner roll is ballpark 19. That's 69. It's after 4 pm and I haven't exercised since early this morning which means my carb to insulin ratio is 20 to one. 69 divided by 20 is 3.45 units. But, my blood sugar was about 25 points high so I'd better give myself 3.9 units in order to bring it back down to normal. That's just the formula to find out how much insulin to take. Arriving at the carbohydrate count for certain foods is sometimes trickier. I find that most breakfast cereals I enjoy list their serving size as three-fourths of a cup, while I like to eat an even cup. So I must adjust the numbers to compensate for the difference or I'll end up with every diabetic's cringe-inducing scourge, high blood sugar. The complications stemming from chronic high blood sugar, or hyperglycemia, make for a daunting list. Blindness, heart disease, nerve damage, amputation of toes or feet, and

impotence. And that's just a list of the worst ones. Each time I crunch the numbers, that tragic list scrolls through my mind like sinister movie credits and reminds me that each wrong calculation brings me one step closer to that foreboding roll-call. Needless to say, I'm glad I paid attention in Freshman Algebra. Sometimes, if I see a group of friends care-freely enjoying a bowl of ice cream or a plate of spaghetti without giving it a second thought, I can get discouraged by what I go through to stay healthy. At those times, I try and remind myself of all the miraculous leaps and bounds made by the pharmaceutical industry and society as a whole that make living with this disease much easier than it once was. Before the invention of disposable syringes, diabetics had to sharpen their syringes in order to re-use them. Before the wonder-substance plastic became commonplace, medical supplies were made of cumbersome glass and rubber. Before the advent of modern, portable blood sugar testing gadgets, the test was simple, yet wholly unappealing. Step one; pee into a beaker or glass. Step two; give it a taste. If it tastes sweet, your blood sugar's high, and shame on you. If not, then way to go, but you still just tasted your own urine, so don't pat yourself on the back too hard. Apart from the medical industry, our society has also made it easier to deal with diabetes. Walk down the aisles of any grocery store and you'll find the evidence. Every packaged food item clearly displays a nutrition information label. It's simple to read and easy to understand, thanks to the work of the Food and Drug Administration. Curious what you're getting into when you open a box of Triscuits? Just glance at the side of the box. You'll find that six crackers will give you 19 grams of carbohydrates, 120 calories, three grams of fiber, and 4.5 grams of fat. You'll know all this thanks to the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, and its predecessor, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Also, many restaurants have started catering to the needs and desires of their diabetic and health-conscious patrons. Ruby Tuesday, for example, shows most of the same information you'd find on a nutrition label right inside their menu. These innovations continue to make it easier for people like myself to translate complex and organic concepts like shredded wheat or Tiramisu, into easy-to-digest tables of words and numbers. An apple can be so easily summed up as 15. A 15 a day keeps the doctor away. A bag of microwaved popcorn; 56. A slice of chocolate cake with frosting; 35. Sure, one negative aspect of modern technology is that it makes it easier for fast food chains to produce, advertise, distribute, and prepare food that if consumed on a regular basis is extremely bad for you and can be linked to a vast array of common health problems, including diabetes. But, I shudder to think what my life and diet would resemble in a world without insulin pumps, portable blood sugar meters, and the information well-spring that is the internet. Mass marketed junk food may be a bastardization of the concepts and techniques perfected by Henry Ford in order to ship record numbers of affordable automobiles, as well as newer technologies. But, let's not toss out any baby-laden bath water, or spitefully relieve our dastardly faces of their innocent noses. After all, you can't have your 35 and eat it too. If you spend any amount of time in the military there are a few things you're bound to come across: poorly thought-out tattoos, ridiculous haircuts, impenetrable layers of bureaucracy, and young failed marriages. My ex-wife and I got married when we were both 20 years old. I met her in Maryland where we were attending the Defense Information School, the military's version of a liberal arts college. Jennifer and I both loved the band Cake. That's probably the reason we started dated. At early morning formations we'd both sing their ironic song lyrics and make eyes at each other. She was half Dutch-American, a quarter Japanese, and a quarter Irish-American from a small town outside of Des Moines, Iowa called Pella. We we're learning how to be broadcast journalists for the Army. It was our first time away from our families, and for me it was my first taste of freedom. It was easy to take the train into Washington D.C. or Baltimore and explore the city. After we'd been dating for a few weeks, Jen looked online and found a hostel in D.C. called The India House Too. We went there with our two older friends Christina Beerman and Matthew Acosta. It was early evening and some young backpackers and a middle eastern family were lounging in the house when we checked in. We walked through the kitchen and living room and set our bags down to chat with the clerk about getting a private room, as opposed to one of the community sleeping rooms that was just a big room with a bunch of bunk beds. He said that was fine and signed us onto the list and we set our bags in the room and headed out to look around. The hostel was on the opposite side of town from the national mall and all the popular tourist attractions in the area. It was mid November and the chill in the air rushed us into a small bar down the road. Jen had a fake id and ordered herself a long island iced tea. We sat and listened to a forgettable jazz band play to a bored crowd. Jen talked loud and laughed about the band. Her face grew red from the drink and she started to slur her speech. I was nervous because of something Christina had said to me earlier. She pulled me aside and asked if I had brought any condoms with me. Supposedly Jen and Christina had already discussed what I considered to be rather private details of our plans for the evening. Jen and I hadn't slept together. It wasn't impossible to do at the barracks we stayed at, but it was considered an offense punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, or some such bullshit, so we hadn't risked it. I guess I was upset because I didn't want to feel like my fate was predetermined by a

cackling matchmaker. Also, I wasn't very experienced in that department. So, it was almost a relief when we got back to the hostel and the clerk had given away our private room. Jen was livid, and the alcohol certainly helped her express that anger, but the clerk wouldn't budge. We had to sleep in one of the community rooms. It was uncomfortable sharing a mall bed with her and trying to sleep while a room full of loud foreigners snored in my ears. In the morning we walked around town and checked out a local farmer's market and ate at a mediterranean restaurant that served one of my favorite dishes, tabbouleh. My mom used to make it all the time and I never knew why she, who grew up in Louisiana and Kansas, was so fond of making a salad that is traditionally made in Arab countries. I told this story to Christina hoping for an interesting response because I knew her mother grew up in Iran. Christina, annoyed and humored, reminded me that Iran is a Persian country, not an Arab one. I nodded and pretended to understand the difference. She also chided me on my mispronunciation of her mother's home country. You say it like you're saying 'I ran on down to the bait shop to russle me up some earth worms.' But it should be pronounced like you're saying 'Pull that carrot out or your ear, Ron.' Conversations like this regarding middle eastern culture and proper pronunciations were th becoming more and more frequent. September 11 had happened just a little over a month ago and folks around the D.C. area and especially in the Army community were trying to brush up on their knowledge of Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Isreal, etc. I was excited to be in the Army at the time. It seemed like a guarantee that I would get to go to Afghanistan once I finished my training and made it to my first unit, video camera and rifle in hand. It turned out that I got diabetes after being stationed at Fort Bragg and had to watch everything from the sidelines. My mom told me that I should be thankful that I didn't have to go to a hell hole like Afghanistan. She said even though having diabetes was a bad thing, something good had come out of it. She didn't understand. With America's longest war in it's beginning stages, Jen and I got married in a small country chapel in Missouri. She came to live with me in North Carolina. We stayed in a small duplex outside Fort Bragg. When the artillery units would practice live fire drills, the entire place would shake from the impact of the rounds. Jen and I were both interested in movies and photography. We both liked carrying a camera around downtown Fayetteville and snapping photos of each other, buildings, cats, our friends, cars, and whatever else caught our eye. Jen quickly started getting bored off being just an Army wife. Technically, that wouldn't be a correct description anyway, considering she was in the Reserves. But, for the time she was just living in a strange town where she only knew a few people. She got two jobs, one at Blockuster and one working for a BP gas station as a night clerk. She also started taking classes at a local community college. I was proud of her drive, but it started to bother me when she was constantly busy with work or school. I buried myself in computer animation, one of my passions. I'd spend hours trying to make robots walk in circles, or animate a camera with a mind of its own. It wasn't very long before we were just two people that happened to live in the same house and occasionally had sex. We weren't really a married couple. We lived together for a solid year before her reserve unit was activated for a mission. Instead of my wife standing at the airport watching me leave for war, which in my mind was the ideal scene of a Soldier going to fight for their country, it was the other way around. Her unit trained for their public affairs mission at Fort Stewart, Georgia. I made the five hour drive down to visit her on a weekend. Her fellow Soldiers and NCO's all seemed like nice people. I helped them clean their rifles and we drank some beers and talked about Army stuff. It was a good atmosphere and I felt like she'd do well. The next time she had free before they were supposed to leave, I planned on driving down but came down with a bad flu. I felt terrible having to tell her I wouldn't be able to make it down to see her before she left, but there was no way I felt safe driving that far in my condition. Jen deployed to Baghdad in January of 2004. For the first few months we wrote each other every day and talked on the phone at least once a week. I sent her packages with little stuff she asked for or I thought she might need like packets of sugar free Kool-Ade, or wet wipes, or granola bars. She sent me pictures of what her unit was experiencing over there, and I felt weirdly jealous. Even when she told me that the windows to her office were blown out when a car bomb exploded near-by, I thought I wish I could be in Iraq instead. I wasn't trying to take her place in some heroic gesture of chivalry; I just wanted in on the excitement of being a real Soldier. Not just sitting around some base in the states doing bullshit training missions. Around May of that year I took a trip back to Maryland to attend another course that pertained to my Army job. I'd been trying to take the course, Advanced Electronic Journalism, for over a year. It's sometimes tough to get the chance to take courses like that. A soldier's unit has to pay to send them, and many times the unit will come up with reasons why they don't really need that course. I was lucky to be working in a battalion that actually needed my skills, so they were happy to send me. I jumped on the chance to go to the course, knowing that if I waited I could get sent to another battalion that thought differently. While I was away I let an acquaintance of mine stay in our house and watch our cats. The guy turned out to be a complete asshole. He found Jen's credit cards and started charging stuff to them, and he stole everything out of the house. Jen was furious that I would do something so stupid. I got home from the course and tried to patch things up. She was under a lot of stress having to deal with her bank and credit card companies from Iraq. I tried

to help out, but I was also busy working a twelve hour night shift. Ultimately, she used this as an excuse to tell me that we had grown apart and that I didn't really care about her. I was upset and was suspicious that she was involved with a guy named Sgt. Cooper. Some of my friends who had recently returned from Baghdad said that they saw the two of them spending a lot of time together. She had fallen in love with one of her bosses in Baghdad. Our divorce was finalized in July of 2005, when I was living in Germany. I found out that she had remarried a few months later when I got an email regarding an account that we still shared . It had her name listed as Jennifer Cooper. It made me angry. I wasn't mad at the fact that she was getting married to someone else. I was just upset that she lied to me about the reason for her wanting a divorce. I spent the next three years in Germany trying to forget that I ever knew her.