Thinking of jumping... I woke up with a headache. It was one of those blunt sunny Sunday mornings when nobody is on the street. Because everybody wakes up with a head like a hole, perhaps. This was a different Sunday for me, though. My mother called all the way from Germany to Oregon to express her utmost concerns. After all, I don’t jump of the bridge every Sunday, despite occasional threats. My friends were cheerfully scaring me into having become one of those computer-nerdish weekend warriors who have to do something stupid on Sunday, charge it to their corporate account, just to tell the story on Monday in the office: they actually made me count how many participants would wear Birken-stock footwear. In this extreme physical acts obsessed society, it really counts if you can answer the ubiquitous - "How was your weekend?" - in a trained unexcited voice: "Fine, I surfed the pipeline in Oahu." It will definitely make you feel better for the rest of your day in the boring cubicle, answering phones and typing letters. You don’t, of course, mention that you wiped out each of three times you attempted to get up on your board and that you spent the rest of your day drinking coconut liquor cocktails. I, however, do not belong to that world. I do stupid things all the time, I don’t wait for Sundays. And I don’t find them shallow. I reveal in childishness. Maybe I didn’t have enough of it in my life. For me it would be a challenge to sit a day in the office, a challenge that I haven’t attempted yet. My whole "career" could actually be described as "downwardly mobile". I remembered last time when I jumped of the crane at Oak Ridge Inn on Long Island, tied to the top only with a thick bungee cord to my ankles, that it was fun. But it was my first jump. It went by so fast, I didn’t quite realize what could I do except to give myself up to the gravity. I wanted to see how it feels when you jump of the high-rise. I just came to New York city, so I was obsessed with the innumerable high-rise buildings around me. It was like, gosh, if you get upset you just take an elevator and jump, accelerating your downward mobility by the use of gravity, instead of begging in subways until a cab runs you over on the Park Avenue. I wanted to see how does it feel when the ground accelerates towards you, the blood rushes to your head and the fast moving air makes you squint. I was curious about how long does it take and what do you think during the free-fall. Of course, I preferred to do it without the splat effect at the end. So, I chose bungee jumping. This is one of the finer things in one's life: to get very close to one's death. No, no, you don’t have the time to think. It goes very fast and you are basically immersed in the adrenaline rush. Just before the splat, the cords stretch and pull you up like a Jo-Jo, playing with you for a few minutes. I doubt many people enjoy that gut wrenching rubber pendulum, but that’s part of the game. If you don’t get pale in the face and uneasy on your feet when you finally "land", you would have to fake the story. Of course, you may enjoy having forces of nature play with you for a while, relax and spin and flip and twist in the air using the momentum of the cord. I definitely had in my mind to do that again. Now I got it as a birthday present from my girlfriend (she jumped to): four jumps from a private bridge spanned over deep canyon in North-Western Rockies, organized by bungee masters from the Carpe Diem dangerous sports club. Here you wear a full body harness, pretty much like when you sky-dive, and the cord is attached to the harness at the navel level. It is safer than walking on the street in New York city. Jumping to your back and looking up to the safety of the world of solid state, to which warmth and coziness you are so accustomed to, represented in the bridge, with the volume of the thick rubber wires uncoiling above you like the umbilical cord and the strange and violent forces that pull you deeper in that new world of void, deep and unknown and so intangible, feels like being born again. Maybe, that’s why the bungee jumping was originally established as a rite of passage to the manhood by some Pacific islanders (although of course they did not use bungee cords). I am going to do it again, hopefully throwing in some tricks next time. I did a front flip this time, although not exactly smoothly and I did the elevator jump, after which I was kind of done for the day ;). Talking to my younger brother in Zagreb, Croatia, he told me that they had bungee jumping during summer from a bridge over Krka waterfalls. He didn’t go, though, but he’d love to take me there and join me if I come next year.