Teenagers, Part 2

I still do not like Douglas.

Madison has been spending time with him every day after school this week, and I am sure it cannot be just for this chemistry lab they are working on. Madison can do these equations in her sleep. She could work out cold fusion in her sleep.

Perhaps, that is it. He must be onto us in some way. I would not be worried if the government was after some secret of ours. They already have anything useful, at least anything they could wrap their minds around. But this boy, he is too curious. I do not believe he is, as my sister calls him, "a nice guy." No, he is up to something. If he has not figured out who we are, I fear he soon will. And then what will he want?

She is supposedly seeing him again tonight. It is not a date, she tells me. She said she is going out with friends. However, I am sure this boy is involved. I can hear that little hidden excitement in the tone of her voice. She has only been in this human school two weeks, and already it is happening.

This is a date. With Douglas.

I do not like that boy.

Teenagers

My sister brought a boy home from school today. I did not like him.

His name is Douglas… something. She said he was her lab partner or something, and they had to study for class. I do not see why they could not do this in the library at school instead of in her bedroom. And studying advanced chemistry helped by listening to music meant for dancing?

He is a very curious boy, this Douglas. Kept asking questions—How did we like the neighborhood? Where did we live before we moved here? Isn’t it impressive that Madison is the youngest person in their school taking AP Chemistry?—this last one was more of a statement. I wanted to tell him it would be impressive if my sister was a human teenager, but if he could comprehend that she had the brainpower to map his DNA… but then we are trying to blend in here.

Madison insists that Douglas was just being polite and trying to make friendly conversation. The conversation would not be so friendly if he knew, I had my phased plasma rifle polished and charged right where I could get at it easily. My sister of course thinks I am being foolish, that Douglas is just a nice boy in her class. Nice. What does that word even mean?

Yes, Douglas is far too curious. I shall have to keep an eye on him.

False Alarm

For a brief moment today, I thought we would be going home.

I got a ping on my com device. I thought it had stopped working. The link to any inter-space communication had long since been severed, and yet it pinged. I had given up getting any signal with the com-link, so I put it away with the secondary protocol tools in the garage, and it took me some time to get to it when I heard the ping. It could have been pinging all day for all I knew.

Once I did get to it, I did not take long to realize it was a false alarm. My sister must have been playing with it. Despite adapting very quickly to being a human teenager, she’s still my kin, which puts her intelligence and skill well above any human. It looked like she had been trying to fix it. In a way, she did. It was fixed enough to perform along the same lines as these so-called “smart phones” so many earthlings are so enamored with.

I will admit, the device does have some useful and entertaining features, so I can see the appeal, but I could not help but be disappointed that the ping was not from the homeworld or rescue or someone else from the lost mission that we may have overlooked. The ping was from Madison, it turns out. She was testing to see if I had gotten her gift, and she let me know she’d be staying late after school.

I am sure she meant well. I had resigned myself to being on earth for quite some time, content to send these messages out into the void hoping someone from home is picking them up. I still hold that hope, but I did not realize until now how much I truly miss home. When Madison returned from school, I had not the heart to tell her how I now knew I felt. She was quite enjoying being here on earth, and she was excited by the smart phone she had created for me. She said it would help with my sociological research, understanding human behavior. And she added there were some “pretty neat” games she could get for me as well. This did sound appealing.

I suppose we are human now, and this is our home. I only just realized it.

Naps and Noisy Neighbors

I am still getting used to this human body. I keep forgetting the necessity to sleep for 8 out of 24 hours in the day. Madison adapted to that more quickly than anything else I think, and will sleep well past the sunrise. Yesterday, to celebrate her completion of her first week in high school I made a Denver Omelet, a breakfast delicacy I saw prepared by a cheery woman on the Food Network. It was already getting cold, and I had to threaten to dispose of it before she would get up. She said it was the weekend, and she was “sleeping in,” but I believed this is more of that human teenager behavior she was picking up.

Why not be awake for every hour of every day if you could? There is an entire world to learn about out there. That’s how I’m approaching things, but Madison says I’m exhausting myself and I need to relax.

The work I do for income is not very demanding and I can set my own schedule, which at least initially was meant to maintain a low profile. It leaves me more time to continue my research on earth life, which in still so interesting to me, I forget I need to rest. This led me to pass into unconscious for a short time yesterday afternoon.

It was the most unsettling feeling I’ve had since arriving on this planet. I was disoriented, weak, and in darkness. The worst of it was I was panicked that my previous comments about the Martian battle fleet had precipitated an interplanetary incident because I surely was hearing the War Drums of Mars from my back yard.

Fortunately, before I could enter my emergency evacuation protocols, my sister stopped me. She assured me that all I had done was taken an afternoon nap and slept till sundown, and the drums were merely coming from our neighbor’s house, where several of her classmates were having a very loud gathering that she had not been invited to. She seemed upset that she had not been included, but she would not admit that to me.

Though it would have broken protocol, I was tempted to use my plasma ray to “break up the party” as they say, but Madison assured me that a simple call to the local law enforcement reporting a neighborhood disturbance would do it.

She was pleased with that. She was particularly pleased that this particular classmate of hers had not gotten his parents’ permission to have this party, and apparently they were quite angry at him for this.

Once the party had broken up and all was quiet, I decided to try out another one of these afternoon naps, and I awoke an hour later to find myself more refreshed and alert. And I was motivated to attempt another recipe from this book of cooking I acquired this week. Perhaps, I will try more of these naps.

- POSTSCRIPT -
Madison starts her second week of high school this week. She still has not had anything to report to me about it, but I wonder if this is because there is nothing worth reporting or if she does not want me to know.

Barbecue

Living as a human might not be so bad. I had a remarkable new experience this weekend. Our neighbors invited us to a social ritual feast that is apparently some kind of celebration of the non-working day. They called it a barbecue.

I have never experienced such a delight of consumption of sustenance. You must understand of course, that the biology of my world allows us to absorb nutrients from minerals in the soil directly through our skin, so having to chew and taste food is an experience I am slowly getting used to. Not that I am completely unfamiliar with it. The warriors of Antares, for instance, skin and consume the raw flesh of their defeated opponents to honor them in the afterlife. Other races have been known to heat or cook dead animals so as to tenderize the meat best for consumption. But I have never seen the likes of the preparation and care that goes into cooking the animals of this world.

It is not just flesh, either, but the fruits and vegetables from the earth. All the spices, the different ways to cook—grilling, steaming, boiling, frying—to bring out different flavors. This is all a new experience. There is certainly an ingenious quality to the human mind that it can look at a tomato and think to do anything to it. Of the tastes I was most impressed with at this barbecue was something called Tabasco sauce. A veritable explosion on my tongue. I could drink it by the bottle.

Up until now, I have been content to blending protein drinks, which my sister does not particularly care for, but I think I will have to learn more about this cooking. Madison suggested that we pay for cable television, apparently to stay in touch with human popular culture. Anyway, there is one channel dedicated entirely to food! I had no idea there could be such a thing as a cooking program, but here they broadcast different cooking programs all day. (For a culture so obsessed with collecting valuable currency, humans sure like to waste it on things they aren’t even aware of.)

I look forward to learning more of these culinary arts.

Greetings Earthlings

My sister says I need to get out more. That’s easy for her to say. She’s 16 and about to start senior year in high school. She’s also adapted much more quickly here than I have. Let me explain. My name is Carter, I’m 30 years old and starting a new life in a new place, and I am an alien.

When I say alien, I mean a visitor from another planet, what you would call little green men from Mars. I’m not green of course, and I’m not really Martian either, but for sake of simplicity, let’s just say I am. Though don’t tell that to any of my Martian friends. They’re friendly enough, Martians. Boy, do they like to drink. But they can be pretty mean drunks, too. Lucky for you, they’re about the size of fairy flies because you wouldn’t want to mess with their intergalactic battle fleet.

But don’t worry about me. I come in peace, as they say. I got stuck here as a result of a failed mission to… well, it’s a long story. Anyway just me and my little sister now, and we’re trying to eek out a little life for ourselves.

Madison—that’s my sister—she loves it here, of course. She’s a teenager, at least in earth years, though she is far more advanced than anything she can be taught in some high school. But we have to blend in a little.

It was her idea that I write this blog. She actually thinks that I need to start dating. That’s the word she used, anyway. Dating. She tried posting a profile for me on one of those websites that uses countless parameters of psychological profiling to match you to you’re ideal mate, but what am I going to say to an earth woman? I’m an eligible alien bachelor performing an anthropological study on the mating rituals of humans, and do you mind being the vessel for my unborn spawn so that we can perpetuate my species. No? Well, that charms the females back home just fine.

This blog was a good compromise. I’m supposed to be collecting data on the history and habits of earth creatures anyway. At least, as my sister put it, it would seem like I was talking to someone instead of just transmitting out into the void.

Now, you may be wondering, shouldn’t I be afraid that I’ll be found out by posting a blog about being an alien? Won’t the government try to hunt me down and cut me up into tiny pieces or something? Well, why would they want to do that? Any government Martian hunters that would actually believe me and be interested in me have known I’ve been here long enough, and they’ve got bigger fish to fry. The way I see it, anyone that would read this blog I’m sure would pass it off as a simple piece of fantasy. And any unstable attention seekers that would believe it, wouldn’t know what to do with me if they did find me.

So, here it is. A document of my experience here on earth, and any oddities I find absolutely fascinating about your funny little world. Like humus. I don’t know what it is, but that is some tasty stuff.

Greetings Earthlings, my name is Carter, and I am an alien.