My Alternative Self

2008-4-13_South Beach_Tri 003 Two things this week have led me to believe that there is another Ben Collins that’s getting himself confused with me. It’s not the race car driver or football player, and I don’t think it’s the computer hacker either (which is who you’ll find on Wikipedia), because both of them are too young to fit the character of my alternative person.

At customs on Thursday I was asked if I ever lived in New york. I answered "yes" and the customs agent gave me a concerned look. We established that I had lived in Manhattan and not White Plains, then he typed for about ten seconds and handed back my passport. I have no idea what that means. Is there another Ben Collins living in New York that managed to get himself on a watch list? Maybe my cell phone is now tapped. I’m sure knowing where I plan to meet for bike rides, whether or not I plan to be home for dinner (the joys of living with parents 🙂 ), and what Dr. Michael McMahon thinks of my workouts is really interesting to some government agent, but unless they think "T2" is some kind of code, it would wasted money.

After this confusion passed without explanation, I traveled home to find a stack of mail that had come while I was gone. There were my tickets to Lunafest, some bills, and – on the bottom – a membership card to the American Association of Retired Persons. Now, it’s true that I have recently quit working as an engineer, and have no immediate plans of starting another full-time job, but I would not consider myself retired. For one thing, in order to retire you must have enough money saved to live off of. This is in stark contrast to the complete lack of money I have saved – having recently graduated from a private school education, and then blown my engineer salary on such luxuries as flying to Hamburg for a triathlon.

The only conclusion I can draw from these two identity confusions is that there must be somebody over the age of 55 named Ben Collins, who is a recently retired international terrorist.

Published by Ben

Ben Collins Professional Triathlete

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6 Comments

  1. I was going to toss the AARP stuff with the junk mail, but I thought you’d get a kick out of it 🙂

  2. re AARP invitations to join: here’s the sad news: they start coming at 49. it is beyond depressing. like an invitation to dance from the grim reaper.
    peggy

  3. Yeah, I’m going to a film festival for women, but I was told that there is a good time to be had for all. Besides, just because I’m male doesn’t mean I’m not anti-breast cancer.

    Regarding clothing: I have no idea what I should wear. I’m leaning toward jeans and a white t-shirt, with matching K-Swiss shoes. Then again, it’s really nice out, I could go with slippa’s (mainland people not living in hawaii should translate slippa’s as “flip-flops” or “thongs”).

  4. matching shoes? like white sneakers?! BEN!!! white sneakers really work best if you’re pulling the white gangsta look with baggy pants, you grew up in the hood sort of thing and yeah you compete in a totally yuppie sport but you are a skater at heart and you listen to three six mafia.

    if your flop flops are rainbows, i’d say go with them even if it’s cold out.

    also, my brother went to lilith fair back in the day and he’s still cool and the ladies love him, so if greg starts teasing you about your chickfest day, ignore him.

  5. Agreed with Courtenay. You CANNOT wear the white K-Swiss sneakers unless you’re pulling off that “yeah I used to hang in the hood” kinda thing. I mean, I grew up in the hood and I still remember learning that K-Swiss sneakers were the cool thing that all the gangsta people wore.

    Yeah.

    Go w/flip flops. Rainbows are good. I’m always partial to Reefs but maybe that’s a west coast thing? I don’t know.

    HAVE FUN AT THE CHICKFEST!!

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