The Old Curiosity Shop

Reality's Hairy Gut

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 04:29:53 GMT

So after I write my strategic plan for taking over the world, reality rears her ugly head, belches in my face and scratches her gut. I discover that face belching kinda sucks, the gut is prettier than mine, and reality is her same old self a little bit of the ugly, a little bit of the beautiful, lots of the mundane.

My week in clips:

1. Rejections should come with initiation rites

Got my first round of magazine rejections today. Isn’t there supposed to be some sort of initiation ceremony for this kind of thing? Tattoos? Howling at my desk?

This is a sign from the universe that I should submit more, right? I need to keep the rejection editor in bread and potatoes. It’s a bad economy. Times are hard. Giving up means the poor turkey will lose their job!

I’m feeling relatively cheerful because I made my running goal today. Every time I meet a simple goal it’s like having another brick placed into the giant monolith of confidence I’m trying to build. There will be wings on my monolith. It will be made of marble and it will still fly. I don’t know what I’m on, or where it came from, but I love it. For once in my life I feel powerful.

2. I google image deserts at work.

I can’t help myself. I stare at cupcakes and get all warm and flushed and happy so then I have to calm myself down by googling boiled eggs. (They're very calming, there's something pleasing about the purity of their shape, their (lack of) color.)

I tried explaining to my dad. Discovered that, no, he and, in fact most people, do not stare at pictures of cakes and spend hours thinking about the perfect way to describe the smooth silken sheen of icing on gingerbread. Informed him he had issues. Got the smack down.

Spent an embarrassing amount of time IMing with a coworker about cupcakes. Felt much better about self. Explained that I haven’t actually eaten that many cupcakes in my life, I am more about staring not touching. She told me to change that immediately. I quite agreed.

On my way home I passed a gourmet cupcake store. Decided to take Rilke to heart and change my life. Walked in. Told myself, just one.

The thing is whenever I enter a pastry shop I’ll lock eyes with one pastry, know that it’s mine, walk up to the cashier announce my order. Then I’ll pause and look at all the other pastries sitting in their cold little display cases.

They look at me with sad lonely eyes. “How could you leave us here?”

I can’t.

I never can. Long story short, left with a big white bag and very little money in my pocket.

Sunk my teeth into one little sucker. And nearly died.

Discovered that I hate cupcakes. It’s not because I eat subpar cupcakes, it’s because the entire architecture of a cupcake sucks. The bottom part is uninspiring, or if it is delicious all of it gets wiped out by this mountain of frosting that looks like a sugar bird took a massive dump on your cake.

Nibbled at the rest of my cupcakes in desperation.

Realized cupcakes are a big fat dirty lie packaged as a harmless looking cakelet. Eating one is like being killed by a hooker named Mimi with amazing legs. The sugar puts a bullet through your heart.

Uh, anyone want a cupcake with a huge bite taken out of the side?

So now I’m sitting on my bed, profoundly unhappy because not only am I rejected by magazines, but cupcakes are a freaking lie.

Just totaled my expenses for the month.

Dear God. I’m in the red and it’s all because of cake.

FML.

3. Chinese women think I'm hot.

I’ve been running all over town purchases Chinese goodies for my mom since I’m going home for Thanksgiving.

Stopped at one store and named all the pastries in Chinese as I ordered. Yes, I picked up no Chinese from my mom except the desert nomenclature. It’s a gift. You wish you had it too.

The shop keeper perked up. “You’re Chinese?”

I perked up. No one ever thinks I’m Chinese. I go out with my mom and people think she’s my professor. I look overwhelmingly Indian. People assume my parents are going to give me away in arranged marriage and I’m a vegetarian. It pisses me off.

“Yes!” I said.

“Oooh. Pretty face,” she said.

I choked. Then I made her repeat it just to be sure I heard right. Would have made her repeat it a third time…only, you know, dignity. (You can tell people line up to tell me I’m pretty).

Then she gave me free pastries.

The thing is when I was in China this summer, old ladies would come up to my mother and tell her I was very pretty. One of them wanted to shake my hand.

I became very vain. Also very thrilled. Also very freaked out.

You don’t go through twenty one years of life without figuring out where you stack in the aesthetic hierarchy. There are mirrors, little children on play grounds, friends, relatives trying to be kind and failing etc. I’m comfortably nondescript…this kind of treatment was…novel. To say the least.

Wondered if this had to do with cultural standards for beauty. In Mauritius fatitude is prized. Girls are sent to schools to cultivate fatness: they sleep and eat balls of couscous mixed with butter. (I want to go to Mauritius!) One day our progeny will laugh, or perhaps cry for, a generation that’s so obsessed with losing weight some people nearly died of it.

I suppose even though I look Indian there’s a subtle undercurrent of Chinese in my features, the way if you mix a dollop of white into red paint, it becomes pink, almost red but different. (Plz do not scan sentence for racial or political implications. Thx.) Perhaps it had to do with finding a touch of the familiar unexpectedly?

Realized though that no Chinese males said this to my mother so cultural standards went out the window.

Wondered if instead the Chinese ladies looked at me and saw an invisible stamp on my forehead, the stamp of one whose will has been completely broken by a Chinese mother and consequently is totally and unconditionally obedient.

Either way…my secret super power= getting Chinese ladies to give me free pastries and I’m still in the hole because of excessive pastry spending.
Fail.

4. Newspapers are for toolbags.

Two weeks ago I was working my way through leadership books and read that any good leader should have a solid understanding of what’s going on in the world.

Felt very shamed because I go out of my way to avoid the news. The sight of a newspaper brings an attack of the vapors. Have decided instead that anyone who reads the newspaper is heartless and probably eats unicorn steaks for breakfast.

Sat up in my bed, told myself to have courage. Ordered a year’s subscription to The Economist. Made sure it came out of my entertainment fund so I would feel monetarily obliged to read it when it came. It’s no use telling myself to read Google News. I give up as soon as it gets the least bit depressing.

The first copy came last week. I read all 120 pages on trains, during lunch breaks, the odd fifteen minutes waiting in line.

I was shocked.

It’s really good.

The articles are hilarious yet substantial. There’s enough background information for a total newbie like me to become acclimated yet the analysis is intelligent (unlike say Newsweek, their articles make me want to cry), and I love the perspective. When in America do you actually open a newspaper and read an article about Singapore which doesn’t have a disgustingly American bias? When do you open an American newspaper and find an article about Singapore, period?

Also it helped that I felt very smug and self important as I read it. Look at me! I read The Economist!

In total I think it took a concentrated four or five hours to read the whole magazine. My head hurt from all the expanding. I had to refresh myself with Taiwanese soap operas afterwards. Breathed a sigh of relief. Alright that was lovely, and I did some real growing, thank God it’s a biweekly magazine so I can rest. Please pass the manga.

Got my second edition yesterday. 120 pages.

Weekly magazine.

I have to do this every week for fifty two weeks?!
Where are the cliff notes?

5. My coworker is a higher life form. Possibly a robot.

Realized why I feel like an idiot next to the only other person in my department. We were talking about presidents. Rutherford B. Hayes in specific. I was a little nerdlet in elementary school. I liked reading biographies. I had a thing about the biographies of presidents. I loved reading about their childhoods…always thought the biographies spent too much time on their boring adult lives.

Scanned my brain. Hayes rang no bells except for the picture of him on the book I read. Figured I was golden. After all, I knew Hayes was a president. That's better than most of America, right?

“Oh yes. Hayes,” my coworker said off of the top of his head. “Famous for his work restoring the South after the Civil War. Ran against Tilden, beat him.”

Okay.

I paid attention in history class. I read biographies for fun. I still don’t know anything about Hayes. Suspect said coworker may be a robot disguised as a human. I just have to ask him the right question and then I can expose him as an Artificial Intelligence machine at the next staff meeting!

Sadly, given that there aren't any good questions for distinguishing between life and computers, and "Do you eat megabytes instead of bagels?" will sound weird at staff meetings, I think I'm just going to have seriously hit the over time if I want my boss to see me as a life form with a modicum of intelligence. Currently I'm at aloe vera. I’m aiming for squirrel. Maybe on my year anniversary I’ll work my way up to gorilla.

6.I was a slacker in college and I'm paying for it.

Did some homework on getting into business schools and had a mind boggling epiphany: despite all those hours in the library I was a slacker in college and now I’m going to pay for it. All of them have this demonstrate leadership requirement. Not, oh be utterly convinced that you may contain the seeds of leadership within you, but you know, what have you actually done to make a difference in other people’s lives?

Uh….look, I was super burnt out and sick of the leadership farce when I got to college so I avoided campus life? This is leadership because it meant less work for other people! I was one less sheep that had to be herded about!

In actuality, I was rather dismayed. My GPA is within the range but below average for the schools I’m looking at. I will go on taming expeditions to stalk the wild GMAT score. If you spend hours oozing love, sweat and arrrgh into a test, it can help but love you back right? I'm within range but nothing special.

I’m going to need a compelling story, and right now I don’t have one. Realized that I may need to sit down and come up with a strategy to get myself in somewhere, and it may take a few years to lay down the steps.

In a weird way, I’m excited though. I let the undergrad admissions process happen to me. Applied to everything my college counselor told me to apply to. Did no research of my own, and looking back on it had I started thinking college instead of freaking out about college, the process could have been much less painful. This time, I have the chance to take charge, really research programs, really develop and tailor my story over the course of a few years so it builds up.

Must reread Art of War. Time to seize, conquer and demolish! I mean, build.

What I don’t appreciate are the stress pangs of “Oooh must get in.” I feel like grad school is my one and only way to redeem myself for “not meeting expectations” when it came to “getting in" for undergrad.

Have already consulted the internet magic 8 ball for several different schools (you have to understand I had the magic 8 ball page book marked when I job searched). Am about to break my head open because it gives conflicting answers. What does one “No way”, two “Outlook not so good’s”, and two “Definitely’s” add up to?

Crazy pyramids.

Screw it. I can take charge of my GMAT, take charge of doing a great job at work, and figure out leadership opportunities outside of work. If I don’t get in, then I accept that there other things in life I was meant to do. Repeat ten thousand times. Absorb, and become one with this.

Oh world, how do I make all of these things happen?

Work, Write, Run

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:49:26 GMT

School is a dangerous business for the neurotics of life. For the past ten years the sole purpose of my life was to complete a pile of assignments.

I derived a masochistic pleasure from completing each task. A finished assignment meant I was a good student, and therefore buried under the tangled knot of my neurosis, there was a good person. So I never looked up from my books to trace out the arc of the assignments, examine the path they put me on. If I did stop to pause over my reading, all I could see was tables filled with students hastily scribbling away, and if we all stopped scribbling to look up, what would we see? An expanse of ugly carpeting and cement walls light by florescent lights in a basement without windows, a basement where it was impossible to see Saturday fade into Sunday.

Looking up was a waste of time so I didn’t. I’m not sure many of us did.

And so sometimes it is a shock to wake up in my bed, walk to work and wonder how I got here, where I plan to go from here, and how I’m going to get there. For about three months I socialized like mad until I realized I was spinning in slow circles in the sand, socializing was alright, sometimes it was fun but all it lead me to were restaurants with the same food, the same conversations with the same coworkers.

Developed a three part mantra to cope with life: for the past few weeks I have thought of it constantly for the past few weeks I have been happy and sane.

(Except for when I don't meet my daily goals. Then I'm a basket case...as I have been all weekend.)

1. Work

I feel like an absolute tool bag saying this but the goal is to become a CEO. Not because I’m terribly interested in money and power but because the problem of getting a group of people to work together towards a common end fascinates me. I read business books and get excited. Aim for the moon and at the very least you’ll lift off into outer space, right?

I have taken to reading books on leadership and self improvement before going to bed, and oh what a difference it makes. It’s like having someone light a small flame late at night and waking up to find that it has grown into a fire consuming everything in its path. Reading them keeps self-improvement in my mind, forces me to cross examine every moment and wring a lesson from it. Try. Keep trying. Just try.

Hard skills:
Picking these up is painful. Other than writing I have no knowledge of anything else and am not terribly interested in much else besides people. This sucks because in order to be a leader you actually have to know what you’re doing.

It’s slow going, for ever fact I learn I forget three. For every system I understand I forget two. Ultimately it doesn’t matter how well I know them, but how well I can perfect a mechanism inside myself to pick up and clear and clearer rendition of reality.

Sometimes sheer determination isn’t enough, especially when it is 3:00 and the post lunch haze is going strong. I’m dreading tomorrow because I made a mess of one of my reports on Friday and I shall have to clean it up, and be wide awake while I do it. But I’ll do it.

Soft skills:
There are some people born with a mysterious X factor that compels other to them. They speak and others lean forward as if pulled by a magnet.

I don’t have it.

I’m hoping it can be learned. I’m convinced part of it is confidence: something I don’t have. I’ll listen to whatever people tell me, I’ll go into tailspins easily.

“You’ve been a bitch,” my coworker said to me on Friday after I’d spent three weeks tied to my desk. “I’ve been avoiding you all week.”

“I’ve been working,” I said.

“I know, I figured,” she said. “Just don’t let it happen again.”

I was tempted to let it ruin my Friday. Instead I gave myself a firm lecture on how confidence comes from being around people who seek to pull you up instead of down. Keep rolling, keep rolling, mental note to cut down lunch breaks with this coworker.

Mostly though I am convinced that good leaders are people who help other people develop their potential. It is difficult to be supportive, it is difficult to look at people and see a mass of talents that need to be encouraged instead of a mess of flaws. It requires a great personal generosity that I don’t have: I get jealous of other people’s talents because I am not sure of my own, I am judgmental of others because I have no faith in myself.

To be a good leader I need to begin by being at peace with myself and it is hard, it is very hard.

2. Write

Writing is what matters. I’m not at a point where I can make it my career, in order to write I need something to write about. I simply don’t have enough content or experience under my belt, but after I have written I do not question why I continue to wake up every morning or how I could possibly justify my existence.

Yet, I am terrified of the blank page, of writing stories, poems, anything other than letters to friends. I am a coward, I do not like failure and every attempt means I will write something that will go rotten in a few months if not weeks. It takes courage mixed with a strong dose of vanity to write and then post here--after all I am asking for time and attention, I'm quite possibly revealing too much of myself, laying a trap for my future self if the wrong people read this, or just plain offending people right and left--and although I always have the vanity, I don't always have the courage.

My challenge to myself is to write religiously anyway, to sit down every day and try something, everything, anything and then to submit. I have an excel spreadsheet on my computer listing all my submissions and a ginormous magazine database.

I’ll worry about getting accepted later. I’ll worry about writing something marketable later. Right now it’s enough to write and submit.

3. Run

I have severe asthma. Growing up I developed a simple equation in my head, running meant not breathing. Though I have medication the resistance to exercise is still there.

I started because what? I had severe writer’s block? I’m becoming anal about my weight? My boss and my mentor are both running fanatics?

I started, and I still haven’t stopped. That’s what matters to me. I have come to love the moment where I plunk down on a yoga mat and stretch until warmth drifts through my muscles, the same warmth of eating hot soup on a cold day.

Getting on the treadmill still scares me. Every time I see it I think I am going fall and hit my head, or most likely to fail my quota for the day. Every time I up my quota I think I will not be able to meet the new standard, and I think tomorrow, tomorrow might be the day when I stop going to the gym for good.

And then I find that I have met my goal for the day, and somehow my fear of the page has melted away and it is easier to write.

As the days pass and the minutes spent running stack up, and the tenths of miles stretch out and I keep meeting my running goals the conviction grows: If I can do this, I can do anything.

fathers + children

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:32:34 GMT

She says, “What’s it like growing up with a genius?

You choke on your tea, and say, “Who?” but you already know. They’ve been saying it ever since you can remember.

“He’s incredible, you know.”

“There’s no one else on earth like him.”

And then they look at you. You’re five, and you know all the stories, that boy who grew up in India and could only breathe in numbers, that lanky teenager who won physics bets to keep himself in chapattis, that young man who scared his professors and impressed the Nobel Prizers, a man with a dream, the man with the dream.

Play with the dream in the sandbox, fall asleep holding its hand, and when he says it will be yours too one day--swell with pride. Paint your face in your mother’s makeup, wrap yourself in sheets and old sweaters, polish his shoes until they shine, slip them on and clunk around the house screaming: Here I come.

They tell you you’re just like him, and you know you are. Cultivate the same duck footed walk, the explosive temper, and wait. Wait for the seeds of genius he surely gave you to flower into strange and wild fruit that you will cup in your hands and show the world—see how they glisten, see how they glow.

Beg and badger your way into advanced math classes even when the teachers tell you you’re a borderline case, take physics, keep taking physics even though the equations spin around and around in an incomprehensible dance, because surely the numbers will call to genius that must be there beating inside of you, that must be there waiting to waken.

Keep waiting for it as you enter the marble halls of college. Give up the math, the physics, say you’re a natural born writer instead. Parade past the professors wait for the genius to call to one of them, any of them. Hate the girls who know they're talented, curse the boys who never doubted it, tell people you’re a work in progress, talk to you later, goodbye.

Grab a shovel, scrub at the ground, dig holes to China, dig holes to Japan, dig tunnels shaped like donuts in hopes of finding your own dream curled in the dirt, a fat white grub. There is nothing but dirt and skinny worms. Ditch the shovel, collapse on the ground.

Scream at the genius it’s time, it’s got to come out, this game has gone on long enough. Shake it by the shoulders and shout and shout but it’s deaf, it’s dead, it’s out for lunch be back later.

Stare at the sky. It is blue and endless.

He calls and he tells you he can see your future and it’s wonderful, you and the dream, god the things you’ll do with his dream. He needs someone like you who can use words and tell the world what a dream built from numbers means, needs someone who’ll get all the men and women of the world to stand to attention.

“And my God, you have what I need,” he says. “Now isn’t the time,” he says. “Five years. Maybe ten.”

And there it is, his dream shining over tunnels to China and tunnels to Japan, no donut tunnels, no grubs, just the clear prism of his mind blazing through the mud and the dirt of the world, dreaming, dreaming on and on.

Put down the phone and get on a treadmill. Run until your lungs heave. You can see your face in the mirror opposite, it is an indistinct blob, very red and blank from exertion, with hair plastered all over it. Keep running, but the view doesn’t change, the face is still red, still covered in hair, still exhausted, still blank.

Take off your glasses. Everything beyond the tip of your nose blurs, but still your legs keep churning, carrying you somewhere, going nowhere.

Find it’s easier to run this way.

Put the tea cup down.
Tell her you don’t know.

Rough night. Bad morning. Panicked so much when I wrote this that I almost started crying.

I walked into a liquor store once and they sold “Wandering Poet” sake in a small bottle for thirty three dollars.

If I drank a glass of it would I be doomed to wander the earth speaking only in verse?

EDIT: In an attempt to take myself more seriously, I am trying to submit everything I write. If you have any feedback on this/for me, I'd greatly appreciate it. What you have to say can only help me grow.
Thank you.

Miss Manners Gets on the Phone

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:18:12 GMT

I love my cellphone to the point where it might be a new born baby fresh from my womb oven smelling of cinnamon and apples. It beeps, I pick up. It weeps, I hush hush into the mouthpiece.

But here’s the rub: everyone else owns one too and they behave the exact. same. way. And you get a world where people answer while they piss in public restrooms, yammer away while hanging out, and probably text while they’re doing unmentionable and scandalous things that I can’t talk about because I’m rated G. Quasi G.

My cellphone addiction=cute, understandable, totally reasonable.

Your cellphone addiction= Me take it and pitch it over the balcony.

Final result, everyone should be required to pass a basic etiquette class before they’re allowed to own one, but Congress is involved in some teensy debate about health care and that shizzle and with the economy and well…

I think I’ll have to take things into my own hands.

I’ve come up with some basic cell phone etiquette rules. I have broken all of them except number six because I don’t know how to put people on hold. Actually, let me be more accurate. I’ve shattered all of these rules and made pretty pots out of the pieces. At the rate I’m going:
A) I will have no friends
B) I will have no one to call on my phone

Therefore this is my attempt to save myself from a life of doom. These are the rules. These are the rules I must not keep breaking, but I’m writing about them as a victim because it’s so much easier that way.

1. Do not pick up the phone if you can’t take the call.

I just called my dad. He yelled, “I’m on a ladder, is it really important?” Later he informed me that he picked up because it might have been an emergency and he was worried.

My dearest, darlingest father, I’d like to point out that if you’re on a ladder and I tell you I’ve been kidnapped by a hoard of beautiful men with sculpted shoulders mmm, I mean help, you’re more likely to fall off of the ladder and create a second emergency of your own than be of any actual use.

Let us sit down and repeat the mantra.
Don’t pick up the phone if you are not in a situation where you have at least five minutes to actively listen and respond. Do not pick up the phone if you are on a ladder. Do not pick up the phone if you are underwater. Do not pick up the phone if you are driving. Do not pick up the phone, Sam I am.

2. Do not pick up the phone if you don’t want to take the call.

People don’t have ESP when they call. They have no idea that your cramps are so bad it feels like you swallowed a live piranha, or have just taken a vow of silence for the day or accidentally dyed your hair spotted orange and are in the bathroom attempting to slit your wrists as a result.

So, it’s remarkably unnerving to dial someone and hear: “I don’t feel like talking, I’m busy slitting my wrists” or “Hmmm, mmmh mhhhh….that’s…interesting” in a zombie mumble.

Therefore let us agree:
I love you and we know this because I’m calling you. You love me, and we know this because even though you’re in a shitty mood you’ll pick up.

Let it be known:
We’ll actually continue to love each other forever and ever and have a sick happy lovefest if we both agree its okay to ignore the phone and call back. Capiche? Capiche.

3. Be mindful of where you use your phone.

I’m in the bathroom. I am tinkling and I am not very happy about tinkling. Public restrooms are already a disturbingly intimate experience because you can see the feetsies of the person next to you who is tinkling, or plopping (God forbid), but at least you can pretend they are just a pair of feet and you are utterly alone in this world as you tinkle and plop to your heart’s content…

Or at least you can until the feetsies start talking on the phone.

…And I don’t even want to think about the person on the other end. “Gertie, Gertie, where are you? There are lots of plopping and tinkling sounds. Is this some sort of concert hall?”

Oh yes, yes it is.

Okay, the bathroom is an extreme example, but this applies to libraries, planes, trains, anywhere where people are jammed together.

Also, for the record, don’t stand under a NO CELLPHONES sign and talk. I did that. I do not recommend the experience. You look like an idiot and pretending you can't read won't help you.

4. When you’re on the phone don’t have side conversations with the outside world.

The whole point of getting on the phone is to escape the big bad scary world. Doy.

I have a friend who’ll start talking to her family members when she’s on the phone. It’s awesome, it’s grand, we’ll be talking about metaphysics and Descartes (Descartes was a metaphysician! Did he have a cap?!) and all of a sudden she’ll yell at her brother: “I know you just got out of the bath, but put on some underwear,”

And I’ll hear, “But I don’t wanna.”

“What about the new pair? The lace silk boxers with space aliens?”

“Down with underwear!”

And suddenly it’s just so hard to think about Descartes’ hat…

5. When you’re hanging out with the outside world, don’t have side conversations with your phone.

I do not do polygamy. I especially don’t do polygamy if I’m competing with a phone. It kills my ego. Here I am, in the flesh, hanging out with you all bright eyed and bushy tailed and if you’re lucky I’ve actually brushed my hair and applied deodorant. (I’m really popular. Just sayin’.)

And….you pick up the phone to talk to someone else. Ego punch.

Do not answer the phone. If you must, excuse yourself and keep it brief. Honestly though, its just better not to pick up because then you’ll have to explain to the person on the phone that you can’t really talk.

Do not text. If you must, apologize briefly. Make sure to keep it short. Don’t get entangled in a text conversation.

Do not flip open the phone and use it to keep checking the time. This screams, “I am bored,” very loudly. Unless, of course, you are really bored. And in that case you should just end the interaction. If I have to be somewhere at a strict time I set a phone alarm because it lets me focus completely on the conversation.

These rules still apply if you’re in a group situation. Excuse yourself from the group to take the phone call. If it's going to be really long, let the group know you have to take off.

6. Don’t put people on hold, call them back.

I think I might be unique in this regard, but when someone says “Oh dear, I’ve got a call waiting, it’s my mother, she’s chilling with the polar bears in Alaska, can I put you on hold because I want to hear the polar bears roar?” I’ll actually stand there and hold the phone.

And keep holding the phone.

And start picking my belly button lint with the other hand, contemplate how gross belly button lint is and how much easier it’d be to clean my belly button if I could use both of my hands, but I can’t because the asshole I’m on the phone with put me on god freaking hold.

Call back. This means I can actually do something that requires both of my hands and won’t pick my belly button lint.

Yeah, even if you call back five minutes later, don't put me on hold. There's a lot I can do in five minutes.

Better yet, prioritize. Ignore the call waiting unless it’s really important. Even then, you can always wrap up the conversation and then call the call waiting person back. That way there’s no pressure to get back to the person on hold.

7. If someone tells you they have to go, let them go.

This is so self explanatory.

And yet so difficult.

Naturally these are subject to change depending on the scenario and it really boils down to some cute punch like: when in doubt don’t pick up.

Thoughts? Additions? Stories? Cookie? Cookies!

My Man Godfrey

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:56:00 GMT

I want out. There’s the kind of love they tell you never to have. It’s for, oh hell, let’s be original, let’s be fresh, let’s shake up the litany and say: a man named Godfrey.

Godfrey is sitting down at the computer and vomiting all over the page until there’s nothing left inside of you. Godfrey is this poem.

Read the poem all the time, read it between spreadsheets and homework assignments, send it to all your friends, read it until it echoes in your head, a great ringing bell and know—

You’re nothing without Godfrey.

But Godfrey appears once a month and it’s glorious and then he says, “Goodbye sweetheart,” and he’s out the door, to London, to Paris, to fucking Bali, who knows, who cares and it is goodbye.

Goodbye Godfrey.

Only it’s never goodbye, its Godfrey all morning, Godfrey all afternoon, Godfrey all night. Godfrey, as you walk to work. You chase Godfrey down white sidewalks lined with scarlet and mahogany trees that form a canopy overhead. Godfrey is in the golden mist of seven thirty a.m. when the city is just beginning to wake and the sun still believes anything can happen.

Godfrey peeks at you through spreadsheets you work on midmorning, whispers, “What are you doing darling? Come here, come home to me.”

You count the hours, count the minutes, arrive home, flip open your laptop and…there’s no Godfrey.

Godfrey doesn’t exist.

Godfrey is never coming back.

You tell yourself you’ve given up hope. Any reasonable person would get out. Any reasonable person would invest their time in something more lucrative, or at the very least, if it’s that bad, board a plane, sail off into the sky, and find Godfrey. Look for him in the cobbled streets of London, hunt for him in Paris’s bakeries, coax him away from the beaches of Bali.

Instead you wait. You bake jam muffins, take Hindi classes, talk to your coworkers and laugh at their jokes and ache a little inside. They think you’re mad: can’t talk about TV, can’t talk about sports, doesn’t understand pop culture references can only talk about Godfrey, Godfrey, Godfrey.

“Give up,” they say.

“Get a life,” they say.

And you find, indeed, you have lost the art of conversation. You don’t have anything to say except, Godfrey, Godfrey. Goddamn you, Godfrey.

You start going to the gym after work. You run on the treadmill because you hear that somehow, running on circles sets people free. You run like it’s going to turn you into a great white bird and you’ll circle around the poor pathetic gym and then bust out of the apartment soaring over the trees and you’re never coming back—

And your lungs give out, your head spins and you slow to a walk, slow to a stop. Get off the treadmill. Walk around the gym, dazed.

Crawl back to your apartment, cram a jam muffin in your mouth and curl up in bed with your computer, a half creature facebook stalking other people to live their lives and you open Word and write:

“I want out,”

and right there, there’s goddamn Godfrey, beaming at you.

Suddenly you can live with yourself. Suddenly you rather like yourself and the future unfurls her red carpet for you and Godfrey and that is all you need....

And Godfrey doesn't show up the next day and you scream, and you bang your head against the wall, stop because it hurts, and then keep banging it because you know even if you pack up your books, throw down the pen and scream at Godfrey to go away, and he goes and you become an investment banker who speaks in spreadsheets, you’ll still wake up every morning thinking Godfrey.

Namaste Adam Smith

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:40:44 GMT

I have become a working student.

Thursday nights I pack up my bags and rush out the building, dodging cars and pedestrians, in pursuit of Hindi. Our class is three hours long and filled with other young professionals hellbent on somehow learning the language. A handful have Indian roots, and like me, never learned the ancestral tongue. Some have fiancés or significant others that are Indian, and others are here because they visited India and fell in love with the country.

That’s what we have in common really. Love. You don’t study Hindi for ambition, it’s Chinese and Arabic that’ll boost your resume these days. You don’t study Hindi so you can broaden the horizons of your communication, Spanish will take you to more countries and English could double as the lingua franca of India. You study Hindi because subtitles on Bollywood movies and the richly accented English that’s spoken to foreigners isn’t enough. You study Hindi in order to sink past the skin of India, to speak with grandmothers and laugh at the bawdy songs that are sung at weddings. You study Hindi so you can walk in the streets of India and feel at home in the world.

A room full of people in love with a country is a little sick actually. We have the woman who spent a month in Jaipur, talking about “this is how they live in Jaipur” the man child of immigrants responding, “Well, maybe that’s what you saw, but I know my parents did it differently," and the guy who worked in India for three years shouting them both down.

Fools. I more Indian than all of India put together. Ahem.

Our teacher is a tiny lady with a hawk’s nose and an aristocratic manner. She sprinkles her Hindi with Sanskrit: “I’m not teaching you any of that awful street Hindi…” she said, and proceeded to speak Hindi like I’d never heard it spoken before. “This is the proper Sanskrit pronunciation. No one uses it, but when you speak it, everyone will know you’ve been well educated.”

After covering the board with Hindi and Sanskrit derivations, she gestured towards it. “It is dirty. Clean it.”

We stared.

She stared back.

We cleaned the board for her. We passed out papers for her. One member of our class sends out the homework each week and a recap of each session, all on her orders.

After the first class I googled her. I was hoping to find a message board of people ranting about her truly terrible teaching.

Instead I found articles, interviews, and her autobiography. Apparently, she was born a princess, the child of one of India’s last kings. She was raised in fourteen palaces, forced into an unhappy marriage. Flouting tradition and family, she divorced her husband, and fell in love with a Pakistani military official.

At the time, Pakistan’s law forbade intermarriage between Indians and Pakistanis…The Prime Minister of Pakistan changed the law for her.

She's met Nehru, Mao, and the Shah of Iran.

Oh, I struggle with Hindi. It is impossible to memorize the characters, and the lectures make my head ache, but wild horses couldn’t drag me out of this class.

On Saturday mornings, I roll out of bed, grab a muffin and walk to economics class munching. I like to arrive early so I can sit in our class room and look out the window. There, I can see the solemn dome of the capitol framed by the sky. Then our professor will start talking, and I’ll forget everything else.

Our professor grew up in Ghana and used to work at the Department of Agriculture. He accompanied grain shipments to Russia and has seen parts of the world most people only dream about.

“I want class to be fun,” he says, bouncing, and in his hands, economics isn’t a social science: it’s a religion, a way of life. We talk about economics and Buddhists, economics and corrupt Nigerian policemen, economics and bankrupt farmers in the Midwest. Economics is in everything you do.

He throws an issue on the floor and we fall on it, shred it to pieces, hold each piece up to the light, and turn it over and over in our hands.

I’ve been in more academically rigorous classes. I’ve had professors with more credentials; I’ve met students who are so intelligent in ten years or so, I’ll be bragging about having gone to school with them.

I’ve never seen anything like the level of enthusiasm in this course.

Anyone who gets up early on a Saturday morning to learn is in class because they want to be there. In high school and in college, even the most academically dedicated students thought of school as a duty to be discharged. We don’t have economics class next week, and already e-mails are flying out for having at least one, if not two, study sessions.

My classmates are wellsprings of stories and experience. Andy has traveled extensively in Asia and Egypt. Mario grew up in Haiti and taught English in Japan. Roni has two masters degrees and lived in Nigeria. Demetria is a lobbyist who grew up in Greece…there’s a Latvian banker, a former Peace Corps volunteer, the list goes on.

The professor mentions corrupt police and Mario and Roni are on it, conducting an analysis of Hati vs. Nigeria. He mentions tariffs and someone brings up the farmers of Ghana. Every class period doors keep bursting open in my head, and beyond them I can see the sun rising in a different time zone, wheat fields across an ocean. When class finally ends, I am a little shaken, a little bit bruised, utterly exhilarated.

How to Get an A in College

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 19:19:12 GMT

When people told me the college paper is an entirely different beast than the high school paper, I laughed. I rocked papers in high school. They walked up to me, I fed them grass from the palm of my hand, shot them, presented the carcasses to my teachers and received accolades.

Then I got to college and was utterly utterly demolished in my first few writing courses. The college paper is a heftier creature, more wily, more complicated, existing on an entirely different plane of existence. I had to rethink my whole philosophy and rework my technique. While previously I’d just sauntered into the savannah and strangle the thing with my bare hands, in college I had to sharpen my hunting knife and hide in the bushes for a good week or so before I even caught a glimpse of the beast.

I learned to revise my butt off, do prep work weeks in advance and meditate about papers. However, even though my grades slowly climbed from horrifying to respectable, I still couldn’t get up to my former high school standards. I was doing solidly but not brilliantly.

“I feel like I’m missing something,” I told one of my TAs, after receiving yet another respectable grade for a slightly mangled beast. “I really want to know how to write a truly excellent paper, and I’m not there yet.”

“You realize you’re close, right?” the TA replied. “You shouldn’t even worry,” he said, damning me with another B+/A-.

Not helpful.

But, during my last year of college I finally figured out what makes a truly excellent paper in the eyes of the grader. Here are the papers that taught me what it was.

1. Buddhism

The weekend before this paper was due I hung out with my cousins and downed something like four Bollywood movies, suffered minor brain damage from staring at Shahid Kapoor’s pretty pretty face and most assuredly did not think about papering. Then night came and I realized I had no paper, the professor was a hard grader and this was 30% of my grade. Threw paragraphs at the page, hit the last paragraph where we were supposed to provide an evaluation of the class and went wild. My computer was a keyboard and I was a maestro. Or a punk rocker.

I told him, I wished, nay needed, this class to go on every week for the rest of my life because listening to lectures made me more compassionate, I was now inspired to become a monk and abandon the shallow materialistic world. I ended with a flourish: in short, the most valuable class I’d ever taken.

Most of it was sincere, but I conveniently left out parts like: this would be a better class if we were allowed to ask questions, if he didn’t yell at people who didn’t accept reincarnation as the sovereign truth, or I almost dropped the class the day he told us people who did something horrible in a previous life are reborn as women or blacks. (Alas, the deadline for drops was over.)

Stumbled into class the next day, handed in the paper and prayed I’d never get the grade back.

Well…

Grade: 11/10

When I told my dad I thought that the evaluation and the grade were an example of correlation not causation, he told me not to be a naïve idiot. *weep*

2. Fiction

My professor had the happy habit of reassuring everyone that if we got a B- it was really an A-, a B was really an A. Satisfied with this explanation, I accepted a pile of B’s in good humor until I made the mistake of asking a classmate if he ever handed out actual A’s.

“What are you talking about?” she said. “I got a B on my first paper and then I got nothing but A’s. I think he wanted to scare us with the first paper grade and that’s what he was talking about.”

Panic. Panic. And…rage. Rage because the classmate in particular had a rather bad case of senioritis and when we workshopped her pieces in class it was embarrassingly clear that she’d written them in fifteen minutes.

After a day of moping about how much I suck. I decided to fight. I don’t suck. I’m an under appreciated genius. There’s a difference.

Cobbled together a list of all the authors he ooohgasmed about in class. Read books by the ones I’d never heard of. Wrote metafiction where I reviewed each book from the point of view of a woman having relationship issues. Each review reflected a new stage in her relationship. Ensured that the piece is impossible to fully understand unless you’ve read all the books.

Skipped my usual editing process where I go two drafts, ask everyone I can find for feedback, and put it through more revision. [Well, I did get feedback (“wtf were you on when you wrote this?” “Uh…nice concept, um…you could execute it better”) but ignored all of it.] This was a one draft fucker.

Workshop:

Class’s comments: Okay, who the fuck is Lorrie Moore and why did you juxtapose her with the Bronte sisters and Herman Melville?

Me: Because he talks about Lorrie Moore every class period. Erm. I thought Lorrie Moore’s stories reflected the emotional chaos of the protagonist.

Class: You have issues, the Lorrie Moore references stick out, this piece is impossible to understand if you haven’t read all the books, the characterization is uneven, the pacing is ridiculous, and the whole story feels like it was written in twenty minutes.

Me: How did you know?!

Professor: *slapping his knees* The Bronte sisters! Herman Melville! Lorrie Moore! This is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. You know, you could do wonders with this if you cleaned it up a bit. The concept is amazing. You should really publish this before someone else does.

For the record, none of my professors had ever thought I was publication worthy until this point.

Grade: A

3. English

For our final paper not only did we have to analyze a book, we had to read two pieces of critical analysis on the book and provide a counter argument to those papers. I have no problem reading books. I have very large problems reading critical analyses. They use polysyllabic words! These essays are written by dragons pretending to be people. They’ve decided their ideas are so valuable they must protected them from being understood by ordinary mortals.

In college English classes I learned to use words like “humanistic” and “discrepancy” and “contiguous.” I think I used contiguous in each of my theses. Great word. Still don’t know what it means.

Anyway, my TA gave me two papers to read. The first involved phrases like “the structuring pull of a privileged transcendence.” I read it five times on different days in different moods and still had no idea what it was talking about. I asked my roommates to translate passages for me. They patted me on the back and ran away. Smart.

I asked my TA for the other paper. “Actually, I don’t have another paper,” he said. “So, I’ll just give you my thesis which happens to be on the book you picked. I’m really interested to see what you think of it, and I’m looking forward to reading your counter argument.”

Fucksauce.

Just…fucksauce.

Read the paper very carefully. It was long. Why are all these papers long? If I crossed my legs, squinted, held my breath and the wind was blowing from a southeast direction I could almost understand page 2. Out of 25.

Solution? Quote nearly the entirety of page 2 into my paper, ooohgasm about how awesome the argument on page 2 is, expand on it by adding my own analysis, skip the entire counter argument because I don’t have one, and go back to talking about my own thesis.

Took it to the writing center.

Writing Center: Oh God, what did you do to this poor innocent paper? Oh, hahah, btw, nice way to quote your TA.
Me: *wibble* *blubber* In over my head, do not understand what I’m writing about.
Writing Center: It shows, we know. Okay, don’t panic, rewrite this and show it to us again.

Rinse and repeat that process about three times. …Usually the writing center tells me I’m good to go after one visit. When the writing center told me to come back after the sixth revision (seventh? I have a draft called 5.5) I gave up. There’s striving for excellence and then there’s slowly going insane. I accepted my doom by ~~eating copious amounts of my roommate’s chocolate cake~~ with good grace.

So the uh, final comments were a surprise.

Final Comments: Normally, I wouldn't email a student at 2 am but I had to let you know this may be the best final paper I’ve ever received from a student. Can I used this as an example to show future classes? Secondly, can I borrow some of your ideas for my thesis? The only other thing you could have added was a counterargument…

Grade: A+

Taking Over the World

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 05:27:20 GMT

The writer’s block is a frozen mass of um, something that’s solid and really hard to um break down. Yeah. Words. Diamond. Yes. I have a solid diamond writer’s block thing. Shouldn’t I be able to sell it on e-bay?

I have lost the art of conversation.

Thankfully my friends haven’t.

Me: I’m bored.
Azzy: I was bored, so now I'm plotting to take over the world.
It looks like it will take a while.
But if I can find 3 other people with about the same abilities as me who are down with the plan, we can complete phase 1 five years after graduating.
Me: Can I be one of those people?
Azzy: Do you feel like learning how to operate a data center?
And are you roughly guaranteed to have a way to generate 80k/yr in spending capital after graduation?
Those are the current requirements for things to move efficiently.
Me: …are you rejecting me?
Azzy: Kind of?
Quite frankly, you'd be very very useful at around stage 3 or 4
But stage 1 or 2, the endeavor has to be run very tightly, and is based on a bunch of tech you don't know.
Stage 3/4, we need people who can talk to the public, so there you'd be useful.
But stage 1 is just capital generation and research.
(Essentially we [CENSORED])
At around stage 3 things get very complicated, so, almost not even worth talking about it yet.
Me: But that’s where I’m involved. I want to know!
Azzy: Fine. Stage 3 is where we need to get the US gov't to grant us a very small legally independent country.
We basically want to do this based on developing some weapons for which testing them on US soil would be very bad, then do some lobbying saying essentially (but in better words): "We can give you bigger guns, but we need to have an extralegal zone to do it, because law prohibits us."If we ever get to stage 3, I promise I'll explain 4, but if any of this ever comes to pass, I'd rather not have stage 4 written down in chat logs forever, just in case.
Me: I have issues with that!
Azzy: Don't worry. Realistically, I have a good chance of getting 1 and 2 to happen, but not 3.

Censored= Azzy gave me the full details of his plans but asked me not to post these details on my blog.

I think this is the difference between genius and ordinary schmuck. Azzy gets bored and takes over the world. I get bored and I watch j-dramas.

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:31:43 GMT

I will not be defeated by writer's block.

German Correspondence Course

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:03:46 GMT

The most successful piece I ever submitted for fiction class was a mock facebook wall I wrote. Naturally some clever fiend just had to say, “Well, I don’t understand the point. Could you just turn in a real facebook wall instead of writing your own? What’s the difference?”

Honestly, the difference is that the real wall conversations are much better. My friends Erica and Alex are doing a German correspondence course via facebook, and every morning I stalk them diligently and spend about fifteen minutes laughing my ass off.

Um, I should probably ask their permission to post this, but that’s extremely awkward so I’m going to be a plagiarist and just post it. (I am going to burn in writer hell, oh my God, but that’s okay, this is so funny I’ll be redeemed for sharing it.)

German Correspondence Course

Alex: Teach me!

Erica: Alright, here's your first handy phrase: "Ich bin ein Berliner." It helps if you look and sound like President Kennedy when you say it.

Alex: My hair waved stiffly, and patriotically, in the wind. My stolen store mannequin was fitted with a blonde Marilyn Monroe wig. My face was dabbed with makeup, to weather it into the face of a veteran boat skipper and Senator. And then I spoke the words of my proud chariot-wielding, sword-riding ancestors:
"Ich bin ein Berliner!"
Thank you, Erica.

Erica: Ok, next phrase is "Wo ist das Hurenhaus?" This means "Where is the bathroom?" An extremely useful phrase when in a foreign country.

Alex: This better not mean something like "whorehouse"...

Alex: In exchange for the wonderful German lessons you have been giving me, I would like to teach you some of the Spanish I am learning.
Today's lesson: "El."
It means, "The."
Good word to know.

Erica: Thank you. I will use this new knowledge to the best of my ability. I realize that I didn't give you a phrase today. To make up for it, here's something a bit longer.

"Du liebes Kind, komm geh’ mit mir!
Gar schöne Spiele, spiel ich mit dir,
Manch bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand,
Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand."

You should approach small children on the street and say this to them.

Alex: Thank you. I tried what you said, but the children could smell me coming and ran before I could shout it to them.
Here's another word in Spanish: "La."
It means, "The." Just like "El." Except they aren't interchangeable. In Spain, if you use "la" when you should have used "el", they'll chop your hands right off. Sometimes they won't stop there. In Mexico, they do worse.
The only way to determine which article to use is to memorize every noun in the language. Every. Single. One.
For tomorrow's lesson, I'm going to have to ask you to purchase a Spanish dictionary.

Erica: You've reminded me, counting is also useful. "Vier" (pronounced "fear") is the number four. I don't want to overwhelm you with too many numbers at once, so we can do the next one tomorrow.

Alex: Vier. Wo ist das hurenhaus?
Having now mastered conversational German, I would like to tackle the written language. Are there any good books you would recommend?

Erica: I'd definitely go for this one.

Me: <3

Erica: Care to join? I'm sure you'd easily be able to catch up to the rest of the students.

Me: How about stand up comedy class instead?

Erica: I can't teach something I have no experience with myself... that would be wrong.

Me: Professors do it all the time.

Erica: Fine, fine.

...Ok, so step one is to stand up in front of a bunch of people. Practice that for homework, and we'll go over step two tomorrow.

I’m off to find a bunch of people to stand up in front of.

Oh yeah. I have deep thoughts on graduation and moving to DC to start my first job, and I'm apparently leaving for China to be a tourist with my mom but my brain has turned into a porous waffle and I can't remember any of them.

Last Night at College

Fri, 15 May 2009 03:53:51 GMT

Late Fragment, Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

All day the agony of leaving has been sharp, relentless, the agony of leaving behind a full life, three years of loving, hating, and laughing with my friends.

Thank you for sharing moments of life with me.

Reading List

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:53:19 GMT

Two papers down, two to go. Promised myself I could have some time off to write this, since I’m ahead of schedule.

Book chat:

Absalom, Absalom, Faulkner

Just finished a paper on it. I’m surprised by how much I like Faulkner. I shouldn’t, I believe that reading is about clarity and Faulkner’s the first author who has actually forced me to Cliff Notes just to make sure I got the full story.
But reading him and then analyzing what you’ve read, is like dropping a paper flower into water. Something impossibly complex blooms out of a dry dead mess.
I suspect Faulkner and Melville made it into the cannon, not because they’re fun to read, but because writing papers on them is such an exquisite delight. Shake the book and theses pour into your lap.

Tyler’s translation of The Tale of Genji

There’s no way I’ll finish this before Spring break ends. It’s killing me that I can’t read the Japanese because Tyler comes close to reaching a divine beauty in some sentences, and in others he falls flat on his face and I realize English is a very ugly, clunky language.
Plotwise, I’m treating this as the ultimate shojo manga. Genji is a player. Just how many chapters are going to be devoted to his affairs?!

How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco is an asshole. I struggled with In the Name of the Rose and ultimately gave up, so I was pleasantly surprised by how readable and funny Eco is. Wow. There’s a man underneath the academic.
Sort of.
He’s funny, but it’s the humor of a man who travels first class, orders room service in five star hotels and hates the world. Yes, it’s sad that your croissant is half frozen and you’re smoked salmon smells, get over it.
What would be funnier is to read Umberto Eco’s version of Nickel and Dimed.

The Sunny Side, A. A. Milne

I squeed so badly when I found this. I am not a Pooh fan. Love the writing, but all the characters are really unlovable. Then I found A Table Near the Band at a second hand shop and discovered that Milne is quite a different writer when he does short stories for adults, so when I found yet another short story collection…!!!
Milne’s characters are so charming and ridiculous. They carry around pen knives and pretend to be murderers before tea time. How could you resist a passage like this:
“…When a man like that invites a whole crowd of people to come to your flat…well it isn’t polite to put the chain on the door and explain through the letter-box that you have gone away for a week.”
-Oranges and Lemons

Eco is making fun of the world and if you don’t get the joke you’re stupid, Milne is laughing at himself and invites you to join.

Self-Help, Lorrie Moore

Here’s what I’ve deduced from Lorrie Moore’s writing:
She is a non-descript woman. Early in the evening she likes to have a drink at the bar. She prefers to be alone, but she won’t mind if you join her. You’ll get to talking about work, and she’ll slip in the occasional comment that’ll make you explode into laughter. Her hands move when she talks, and you will notice she is not so plain after all.
Charmed, a little woozy headed, you’ll follow her out to a back alley.
There, she slits your throat.

I’m reading this one slowly. I can deal with being killed twice a day, max.

Poetry of Pablo Neruda

Mostly, I am trying to understand how my poetry professor sees the world. He doesn’t read fiction, poetry is his life blood. The class he teaches is meant for people who love poetry- people who can just carve themselves a hole in a poem and live in it- but in the way of new readers, I have a very low tolerance for anything that doesn’t immediately grab me.
Neruda is one of the few poets I really love, and when I read him, I realize my problem with all the poets is that they don’t know what they’re doing…
I am suddenly very grateful that someone beat Spanish into my head, but very sorry that I was not a better student. Neruda is so much more powerful in Spanish. Between him and Genji, I’m so frustrated with translations that I almost can’t bear to open Turgenev’s Letters or Robert Bly’s translation of Kabhir (which he cobbled together from other translated works).

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

-Poetry, Pablo Neruda

Girl Got Game, Shuziru Seino

This is so bad I thought I was hallucinating.
Not to spoil anything, but if your friend burns down the building to test the depth of your friendship, that’s when you get the hell out of there. There are other people to be friends with, and even if you’re sorry for the dude, there’s a reason why he doesn’t have friends— they’re probably all dead.
*sniff* I don’t know what manga to read now that I’ve exhausted Skip Beat. Actually, I’m a little burnt out on manga because pre-Spring break, that’s all I read.

Confession:

I’m reading these books differently (minus Girl Got Game). I tend to chomp through fiction, but it is difficult to read any of these for more than an hour at the time. The language gets to my head, I must run around the room, I must fall off of a sky scraper, it’s too much. After a while, the rush wears off and I suddenly want to go for a walk or stare at the ceiling and think nice ordinary thoughts in nice ordinary language.

Thoughts at 8:28 p.m., the end of a grueling week

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 01:29:43 GMT

Somewhere in the world there’s a train pulling away from a station, and it’s a train I need to be on. Commuting two days a week to an internship in DC means I live by the clock. A split second is the difference between getting on the metro and catching my train, or having the doors squeeze shut on my fingers.

***

When I miss the train, I buy myself a pastry and walk around DC, admiring the Capitol. Next week I think I’ll miss it deliberately and go to Chinatown for Peking duck sandwiches.

***

Lemon danishes make me feel like I’m cramming a summer’s day into my mouth.

***

I’ve started thinking of interviews as conversations where I get half an hour to peer into someone else’s life.

***

If I could be born again, I’d ask God to give me a singing voice. When most people say they can’t sing, they mean they are shy. When I say I can’t sing, I mean my choir teacher pulled me out for mandatory after school sessions and tried to beat some sort of tune into it.

But some days, I think the only real way to express anything, is to stand in the middle of the road and belt out lyrics at the top of my lungs. Perhaps that’s why I have no voice.

***

During the morning train ride to DC I watch the sun come up over fields full of dead wheat and fall in love with America, the vastness of the land, the pink streaks of sky. When the train pulls into the station a wave of commuters, dressed in their uniform pea coats, scarves, and leather gloves, descends. Heads bent, they clutch their coffee cups and iPods, bumping elbows as they jostle past each other in order to catch the next train.
When I join them, I am filled with an overwhelming hatred for my fellow human.

***

Music is dynamite. I wonder how people can stand to walk around all day plugged into their iPods. My favorite songs bring on a rush of adrenaline and all at once I am desperately in love, desperate for glory, desperate to sing, dance, jump off a bridge and go down in flames.

I don’t listen to music often.

***

Oh please, please, tell me the name of that train I need to be on. Tell me where it’s going and when I’ll get there.

Good night.

Dim Lamps

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 06:00:54 GMT

These days I believe in magic eight balls, my uncle’s palm reading nephew and that blind fortune teller in New York my mother swears by—any dim lamp that will shed light on the future. For the first time I have no idea what life will look like three months from now, six months from now. I don’t know what I’ll be doing, I don’t know where I’ll be, and lastly, I don’t know who’ll be in my life.

I am lying to myself, actually. I know. I can hear the whirring wheels of the present rushing headlong into the future. I know each turn takes me further away from the various people I used to be, and thus the people I used to know.

It’s always strange when a friend comes back from studying abroad. They’ve seen so much, changed in so many little ways, and yet they will only give the briefest sketch of their adventures. I have done the same when I go abroad. There are the easy stories to tell- the one time when there was a camel outside the window!- but there are so many ordinary moments that don’t add up to stories- the after dinner walks in Bangalore, the endless highway that soared above the slums of Jakarta- these pieces are where new bits of self are forged. These are the boring moments other people don’t want to hear about.

It is easier to continue on the regular path and pretend that no detour abroad was ever made.

Going abroad isn’t all that different from leaving. My high school friends and I all went off to college and when we all reunite, I know there have been a thousand adventures I shall never hear of, just as there are a thousand tales I will never tell. Mostly we do not even notice changes, we are too busy comfortably settling into the role of our past selves.

What a silly, sheltered little life I have lead, and by exchange, what a gloriously happy life too—the most traumatic moment to date was arriving at college: it was a complete uprooting of self. I am still grieving for the pre-college me, still entirely unsure of who I am, away from home. I used to know I could take over the world. These days I have trouble opening jars.

You’d think as a junior in college, I’d be over it by now- but no. Stories about childhood make me maudlin. Vacation ends in a week, and the thought makes me ill even though I have so much going for me at college.

Sometime during the trip to Baltimore I will snap into another person. I will be someone who writes grocery lists, cooks and does laundry, someone who is so constantly wound up that she never sleeps past ten on Sunday mornings, someone who can not open jars but must anyway because there are no parents around.

You could not imagine after seeing me at college, how lazy I can be at home, how careless, how relaxed.

At the moment I can not face the enormous loneliness and grief that will come with another upheaval. Mostly I don’t think about it. Still, sometimes when the apartment is empty Jams’ orgo notes, Nixie’s boots, Aaron’s place at the card table will take on a new meaning. Without their owners, they are artifacts from other lives, a reminder that it is only the slats of our lives that intersect. I will never know what it is to look at the world through their eyes, or what day to day existence really means for them.

I am not sure I would wish to- one life is difficult enough to handle already- but sometimes it is nice to think that as I hurtle forward on a train going I don’t know where, that I won’t be alone, clawing at the windows. Perhaps there will be other passengers who will be there for the entire ride, and there will be time enough to get to know them thoroughly.

Welcome Home...

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:36:09 GMT

May a sea serpent named Cataluna rise up from the foamy depths of the Atlantic Ocean and stangle me to death should I ever again make an airplane meal of:
A) California rolls
B) a Mrs. Field's chocolate chip cookie
C) virgin bloody Mary mix

On a brighter note, I am now closely acquainted with the upstairs toilet. There's brand name is stamped onto the lid like a tattooed name. Who knew?!

On the darker side, my parents are about to kill me because I keep singing my new song of woe between bouts.

"I am vomitose going on comatose
I know that I'm naive.
Pasteries I meet tell me that they're sweet
And willingly I believe.

I am vomitose going on comatose
Innocent as a rose..."

Ta. The savage wild call of porcelain, resounds in my gut and I must flee.

Edit: Okay, it's no longer funny, someone plz kill me and put an end to this misery. Kthanxbye.

This Girl's Life (Rough Draft)

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 05:32:58 GMT

Merry Christmas everyone!

(This is usually how I write English papers.)

Assignment: Come up with what I want to spend the next fifty years of my life doing and a plan to achieve that goal.

Due: May 2009

What I do know:

I want to dedicate my life to becoming a better writer.
- At some level I don’t care if I publish anything- at the rate I write, publication is extremely unlikely. I just want to be able to create clearer and clearer renditions of reality. This satisfies me like nothing else.
- College has helped facilitate this- I love watching the grad students pick apart my English essays. They’ve honed their writing and analytical skills to such a fine point it’s a pleasure to get beaten up by them. The question is how do I make sure I continue to grow as a writer once I leave?
- If I’ve learnt anything this year, it is that after a certain tiny threshold, talent doesn’t matter. Raw dedication is the difference between the students who go on to become writers and those who choose other professions. According to my poetry professor, you've got to want to write like you want to eat, like you want to drink water. It's a dumb animal urge that keeps popping up despite everything else. I hope I have the dedication, I don’t really believe that I do.
I am ambitious.
- In a masochistic fashion I love deadlines, challenges, collecting stars, running in the rat race and pushing myself to come out at the top. Living in small cabin in the woods would drive me fucking insane.
- This makes me more vulnerable to the rat race. I love playing by the rules, even when I despise the rules. I’m fucking terrified of blank canvases, and free falling into space. It’s easier to work within a framework even if I don’t like the frame or the work.
- I have many skills. Mostly I don’t believe this, but some days it occurs to me that I have a strange combination of skills that could be put to good use somewhere and it enrages me to think they could all rot inside of me.
I want a diversity of experiences so I have writing fodder.
- My internships sucked. They also fed my writing assignments for the next year or so. There’s nothing like living and working in another culture to shake you out of your shell and force you to learn more about human nature.
- Suckage usually breeds good writing.
- I hate stretching my comfort zone, it’s uncomfortable! I’m shy. I’m awkward. I don’t do so well away from home, and zomg I still want to spend time observing other countries and cultures. Hopefully not as a tourist.

What I don't know:

Everything else. Including how to make what I do know happen.

Thesis:

Currently am applying to jobs without really considering whether or not they'll make me happy or if they'll lead me to a career that will make me happy despite all my fierce proclamations of needing a career I love. There are so many options and I am so terrified of being responsible for my own life, I figure I might as well screw up in the most accepted manner than in a spectacular fashion despite:
1) my parents saying they're willing to support me emotionally as well as financially as long as I make some progress towards a life goal.
2) not really having anything to lose except my own time. I have no money. I have no one I need to support. I can always come home crying if my stint as a sherpa ends in disaster. At least then I'll have tried to climb mountains instead of giving up before letting myself think about them. Despite knowing this I'm still doing a shite job of looking for rat race jobs instead of sitting down and thinking about what I want out of life.

Note to self: further refine thesis, do more research. Thesis reads more like an angry rant than an actual thesis.

Helpful Quotes:

“If your everyday life appears to be an unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth.”

-Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

2.

“One could not but play for a moment with the thought of what might have happened if Charlotte Brontë had possessed say three hundred a year—…had somehow possessed more knowledge of the busy world, and towns and regions full of life; more practical experience, and intercourse with her kind and acquaintance with a variety of character….

At the same time, on the other side of Europe, there was a young man living freely with this gypsy or with that great lady; going to the wars; picking up unhindered and uncensored all that varied experience of human life which served him so splendidly later when he came to write his books. Had Tolstoi lived at the Priory in seclusion with a married lady ‘cut off from what is called the world’, however edifying the moral lesson, he could scarcely, I thought, have written WAR AND PEACE.”

-A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

3. Interview with Po Bronson author of What Should I Do With My Life?

npr.org: You've said that the matter of what we should do with our lives is "the most obvious and universal question on our plates as human beings." After interviewing hundreds of people, how would you say most of us address what you call The Question -- do we do a pretty good job of meeting it head on, flounder hopelessly, avoid it with a vengeance?

Bronson: Most attempt to answer it with one eye open, one eye closed. We let our fears govern our decisions; rather than challenging the validity of those fears, we accept the boundaries set by those fears, and end up confining our search to a narrow range of possibilities, like the guy looking for his car keys under the streetlight because he’s afraid of the dark. Some broad examples: we confine ourselves to a range that is acceptable to our parents or our spouse; we confine ourselves to places inhabited only by people "like us," meaning of our class and education level; we place too much emphasis on being respected by an imaginary audience; we shy away from avocations that take a long time to mature and pay off.

I was inspired by people who had overcome these fears to look beyond the obvious choices. It wasn’t easy for them, but in a way that hard journey made the result even sweeter. It wasn’t just a matter of finding the right puzzle piece to match their skills; they had to grow as a person first.

Questions I have for you:

What do you know about your life?
What don’t you know?
What are the things you want to do before you die?
- Which of these have you done?
- Which haven't you done? Why haven't you done them?
What are you thankful you've done?
Any regrets?
- Edit: What have you learned from your low points in life?

Jakarta Kitchen Maid

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 21:38:51 GMT

at five you wake me
tapping on the door.

i dress for work in the dark
and curse this life.

in the kitchen you give
me breakfast

and pack lunch
without a word.

after i leave you will
spend the day cleaning

my laundry, my room
my floor, my toilet.

i still don’t know your name.
do you bless this life?

at nine i stumble home
you take my coat and shoes

give me dinner and
don’t say hello.

once i saw you
smiling while chopping lettuce

you stopped when
you saw me.

at ten we silently
retreat for the night

you to your cramped
kitchen bunk.

me to my king
sized bed.

we were all sisters
in a previous life.

Take Off

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:06:24 GMT

Written a week ago…

When the plane to Singapore lifts off, a grimy layer of insecurity slides off of my shoulders. It falls somewhere in the Jakarta cityscape that is receding from sight, from memory. I’d rather be flying home than taking a week to see Singapore and Malaysia. Our travel plans are ridiculous due to ticketing issues. My mother flies into Kuala Lumpur and I have to an eight hour train from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur ahead of me. Still, I am happy, exuberantly happy.
It wasn’t that I was unhappy in Indonesia, it wasn’t that anyone was unkind but rather that everyone did their duty so very dutifully. Spare me from gratitude. It is carbon monoxide poisoning. You do not know you are dying until it is too late to save yourself. How can you complain about oh- lack of conversation, loneliness, clashing value systems, not being loved- when someone who owes you nothing is steadfastly doing their duty towards you? Instead you bend and you berate yourself for appalling ingratitude until the stone monuments in your mind begin to crumble to dust.
I did not realize any of this until the plane left the ground, the world fell away, and I felt lighter than I had in weeks.
I had thought I was incapable of talking to people, had known that college and friendship was a delusion, but at the Singapore train station I strike up a conversation with a Malay dentist. She tells me about planning outreach programs in village schools, giving it all up to immigrate to America with her children, hating America and its stressed out materialistic culture, and how much she loves the warm relaxed pace of Malaysia. She gives me her address and tells me to call her during any emergency.
Perhaps, I’m too happy. Later when it is dark and the train still hasn’t arrived at the station I walk down the corridor and ask the first person I see when we’ll arrive at the station. The person turns out to be an architecture student who follows me back to my seat and plumps himself down. After a few minutes he gives me his number and address and insists I call him if I want someone to show me Kuala Lumpur. I huddle into my seat. He shifts closer and asks me for my screen name. His phone rings. He picks it up and I hear him say “American”. Two years ago I would have taken his friendliness for granted. Then, I imagined I had been granted an immunity (is this innocence?). Two years of nothing in particular happening at college, lets call it life, and my immunity morphs into a fear of male strangers.
When the train arrives he escorts me to a taxi and sends his regards to my mother. Safely ensconced in the taxi I decide he is a very nice boy, but I feel lucky rather than immune.
The taxi driver wants to know who I am and where I’m from. We stumble through a conversation, navigating past my strong American twang and his lack of English and I explain I’m Indian and Chinese.
The taxi driver winks at me and flashes me a thumbs up: “Very cute combination.”
I give him my best smile. Compliments have been rare this summer, and this is delicious.
Perhaps I still have some immunity.
Kuala Lumpur is a brighter, cleaner version of Jakarta. The roads are lined with the same lush greenery and tropical flowers, but here traffic moves instead of remaining bumper to bumper for hours.
I learn I am not a unique product. 25% of Malaysia is Chinese, 10% is Indian. There are frequent inter-marriages, and yes there’s even that extra dash of Malaysia (which is almost Indonesian but not quite) that I thought made me unique.
I start angsting because I realize I can’t angst about being unique anymore.
At the shao lin style temple my mother gets terrible excited because she thinks there will be monks and kung fu. I remember that a long time ago, back when my father was always away on business trips, she was the center of my world, as she has been these few weeks.
There are no monks, and there is no kung fu, but she takes me through the steps of prayer. Put money in the donation box. Take the incense. Light it. Stand before each alter. Bow your head, repeat your prayer. Do not scream if the falling ash burns you.
She tells me to pray for the health and wealth of everyone I care about. Then, and only then, can I pray for myself.
We visit the Islamic Museum of Arts. The museum was only built ten years ago and the collection is green and crude, but housed in a building that is worth visiting for its own sake. It is white and spare, full of empty spaces occasionally relieved by an outburst of intricate inlay. In front of the elevators is a large room that has a sheet of glass on either end. One end overlooks a blue star shaped fountain, the other a wave of trees. In the middle of the room there is a carved dome. In the mid afternoon sunlight, the gold blazes and the room is a dazzling, fiery white. It is a reminder that God is perhaps not the material, but the absence of it- ironic for a museum.
In Singapore we shop. I believe money is meant to be hoarded in a great nest underneath your bed. My mother takes it a step further and believes spending it takes a few years off of your life. This applies in all cases except: A) delicious Asian food B) overwhelming cuteness.
Overwhelming cuteness means so cute it’s a squeegasm.
Then we buy, no questions asked.
(We have the taste of five year olds. Seriously. We keep ignoring boutiques in favor of shops filled with stuffed animals and hair clips.)
This policy worked quite well until we ended up in Takashimaya, a Japanese department store.
There was a particular display that involved pastel colors, fat smiling cats on plump purses, hats, Kleenex box covers, walling hangings etc. etc.
Squeeeeeeeeee!
We looked at the price tags. I pulled out a calculator to make sure I’d approximated the conversion correctly.
So cute. So expensive.
My mom glared at me.
I put the calculator back. 1.35 Sing dollars = 1 US dollar, so it’s cheaper anyway, right?
Squeeeeeeeeeeee!
Squeeeeeeeeeeee!
Squeeeeeeeeeeee!
The sales person, who knew an easy mark when she saw one, kept trotting out and piling more and more in front of us.
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!
What can I say? The cuteness lead to a sensory overload that fried our neurons and rendered my mother and I temporarily incapable of doing math.
At the very end I calculated the price in USD.
Complete and total wallet massacre.
I considered throwing the calculator out. That or going on Prozac.
So cute + So expensive = So damn broke.

Sent the following e-mail to my dad:

Hi Dad:
Mom and I squandered the family fortunes on cute things with cats today. Plz. admire them when we come home and do not ask for the bill. That would be untactful and rude.
How are you?
More importantly, how’s business?

Love,
Me + the cats

My mom and I just talked it over.
We’re going back tomorrow.
We talked it over and there’s one backpack with a little cat peeping out of the pocket we can’t do without.

…We’ll take the money out of the food budget.
…For the next six months.

Addendum:

For today and tomorrow night, I am on my own in Singapore thanks to the abominable knot that are our travel plans. I am terrified by how much I hate it. I am grateful most of today was taken up by escorting my mother to her flight, but tomorrow stretches before me, terrifyingly empty. I’ve never spent a night at a hotel by myself. I spent a few hours wandering around the mall just so I could drown my loneliness in the ceaseless waves of people.

Temporary Security

Sat, 10 May 2008 05:46:57 GMT

Some days I worry about privacy. The interiority of my life—more than most of my friends, more than most of my relatives, perhaps more than I know about me— is online. There is a blithe blindness in writing publicly. I am not considering the friends of the friends who potentially have access to this, the person who found this on a computer’s browsing history I forgot to delete, or the people who will track me down years from now.

Yet, when I stop to censor myself, to narrow the broad range of topics, to eliminate this or that person from today’s rant because my words may get back to them, it feels as if fetters are locking themselves over my wrist. I don’t want to be prudent; I want to write as if this were a cheap diary with a lock that I hid in my underwear drawer. It is not satisfying otherwise.

Instead I tell myself that there are so many people online, so many things to do, and so little time. I don’t imagine anyone could be particularly interested in stalking me.

So wrote the girl who posted her address online, the suicidal boy who transferred sophomore year, or the high school freshman who described her fantasies about her crush in explicit detail. No one seemed to care in real life, and it seemed impossible that anyone would bother to read them online, so they described their lives in morbid detail.

I read their blogs, waded through pages of bad writing and spelling mistakes written by people I barely knew, because I found it fascinating to watch their masks crumble to pieces on their faces.

Columnists like Anna Quindlen have written articles mourning the disappearance of privacy for the internet generation. I’m not sure how I feel. In high school I shared my blog with school mates. Most of the people I knew well did not read it. Somehow though, I got to know a small circle of people whom I never would have imagined befriending: upperclassmen I was too shy to talk to, underclassmen I had no classes with, people I liked but somehow never saw. I’m still in touch with several of them now. I love hearing from them, I read their updates, and I think about them from time to time. I hope they are doing well.

Sharing blogs with my college friends has allowed us to describe the details of our lives, capture the intensity of our emotions in the moment, or just rant about or day, at our own convenience. The key to relationships is time: time to sit down and talk over lunch, time to check in with each other, and that doesn’t happen often. Being able to read what’s going on in each other’s lives prevents us from falling out of touch when we don’t see each other.

Yet, I am worried about the day I slip up- perhaps I already have- and an employer reads something bad and fires me, or a friend of a friend of a friend that I wrote about somehow gets this address and reads something cruel I wrote about them, years and years ago.

What I really worry about though, is vulnerability. In my last blog a couple people left vitriolic anonymous notes that stung for months afterwards. I worry what I post is too honest, too full of emotion, and I have just sauntered naked across the screen for everyone and their pet elephant. Then one day, when I am comfortably ensconced in my post as mayor of New York, all of this will come out and my career will crash. Or that you, right now, are judging me. Are you the boy who sits next to me in class? Do you laugh when I write about despair because I know nothing about despair?

We are taught not to cry in public when we are small. It is loud, it embarrasses our parents, and it disturbs other people. Rather, we must put our best foot forward, learn to shake hands with a firm grip, and perfect our smile for the camera because the moment we are born we are entered into a grand competition for resources in the world: food, shelter, and the means to obtain more of each.

We are told to practice impression management because it will help us during interviews. We learn to present our best self, gloss over our mistakes and failures, and focus on moments when we have outshone everyone else around us. The result is a toxic cycle where everyone constantly feels outshone and constantly tries to outshine everyone else. People around me still talk about their SAT scores.
“Ooh man, I studied so hard and it paid off. I got a 750 on math.”
“Really? I took it cold and got a perfect score on math.”
“Oh, well, you know I didn’t study that much. Besides, they gave me a scholarship. Pretty awesome.”
“Sadly, I’m not eligible for a scholarship. My family makes too much money.”

Similarly, it becomes natural to snap something sarcastic at someone who hurts our feelings instead of saying: “You hurt my feelings,” because feelings make us vulnerable.

No wonder blogs are so compelling. It’s a relief to know how vulnerable everyone is behind the impervious iron smiles that go up every day. It’s a relief to know that other people are just like you: more vulnerable, fragile and beautiful than you could possibly imagine.

It’s also a relief because now you have blackmail material on them.

I am going friends only this summer for my internship.* Please leave a note if you've been lurking, and you'd like me to friend you.

*Mostly because I have a bad bad feeling that during my last internship my boss could have/maybe/probably did read this.

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."
-Benjamin Franklin

<3 From the Universe

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:49:34 GMT

A heavy depression has been settling on my shoulders during the past few days. I got a flat B on the paper I’d poured my soul and a revolution into. Furthermore my grant proposal to fund an internship in Baltimore was soundly rejected without the saving grace of an interview. Finally, the thought of summer vacation makes me feel queasy.
As of now I have two internship offers. One is a Baltimore internship that seems low on content and resume value, but means a quiet summer hanging out with my friends. The other is an internship in Indonesia that has high resume value, and is somewhere on the Richter scale in terms of emotional stability. My emo poetry stage in life can be attributed to Indonesia. Even so, I have written a grant for funding for it too because I am a slave to my resume. Anyway. Everything else I applied to is somewhere between those two. I’ve been dealing by burying my head in books and hoping it will work itself out by May.
Cue in much angst, depression, and a general feeling that I ought to spend my life wasting away by a window over looking a pond. Woe is me! I worked and got poor results. I asked the universe why it had no validation for me. An A. Big shiny trophies. Parades. Pickles on sticks. I’d settle for pickles on sticks. I like pickles. But no. The universe seemed to reply that I was an untalented caterpillar I will never rise to the heights of butterflies. No metamorphosis in store for me...

It would have been appropriate if a deus ex machina had entered my life and sang songs and strummed a harp about how great I was and how my papers kick major ass…
Sadly the universe did not consider such actions appropriate.

However, it did send me an e-mail.

Dear Student:
Congratulations! You have been pre-selected to be a student tutor. No interview or application needed. Pay is __Double My Current Salary_ and hours are flexible!

I danced madly in my chair. I’ve always had this sneaking desire to be a writing tutor, but you have to have an English professor recommend you, and the way my papers are going that’s not happening.
Then I read the note at the end of the e-mail:

Note: We have pre-selected you to tutor in statistics.

Hang on while I giggle hysterically.
Math has only been my least favorite subject since I was thirteen.
Whenever someone asks me for help with it, I start hyperventilating into a brown bag because I have absolutely no confidence in my skills. I make lots of mistakes.
This is what happens when I help my friends with math:

Me: Hem hem, er er, oh pardon, I told you to do the wrong thing. Hang on let me think about it…ah, can I get back to you? *nervously shreds brown paper bag*
Friend: Sure?
Me: *frantic phone call to my dad* HeyhowdoIdothis?kthxbye!
*turning to friend*
I have it!! It’s really not a huge issue…you do la la la wa wa wa awooga.
Friend: You do what now?
Me: Oh dear…I messed it up. I’m sorry, it’s been like two years since I did any math and I wasn’t very good at it and I know I suck but I don’t mean to suck. It’s not my fault…Hang on let me call my dad. *dials number*
Friend: It’s okay, I figured it out. Also, you look kind of ill, are you okay?

I’m sure I’d make an excellent tutor.
And by tutor, I mean target for angry math students to throw tomatoes at.

I shook my fist at the universe and informed it that this was not validation.

Shockingly, it obliged me once again, and I got my second e-mail of the day:

Dear Student:
Congratulations! You have been selected to receive the ________ internship grant award for your summer internship in Indonesia. It was very competitive and only one student was selected. If for any reason you choose not to accept it, please let us know as soon as possible so we can notify wait-listed students.

I ooohed and felt my chest swell with pride. Then I read it again and the full ramifications sunk in. Funding for Indonesia. Must make decision fast. Can not wait till May and hope for the best.

Cue in long bouts of trying to decide if the ability to put internship and grant award on my resume is worth going absolutely fucking crazy and potentially trying to set off a volcano to bury the entire nation Pompeii style. (I did mention that I have issues with the place, didn’t I?)

I had the good sense to stop asking the universe for validation, but it wasn’t quite done yet…

This morning, as I walked to Moral Philosophy class, I realized the decision is so difficult because the two internships are exactly equal to me. They go around and around in my head. Indonesia. Resume Gold Star. All expenses paid. Award. Extreme loneliness. Culture shock. Boring work. Baltimore. Resume filler. I pay the expenses. Low prestige. Friends. Second home. Boring work.
Whee. Massive indecision. Whee. Massive stress because I hate not know my plans and holding out on people. Whee. Brain nearly shuts down. Whee. Panic. Panic. More panic.

Clearly the thing to do was shelve the issue and concentrate on other things. I thought about moral philosophy instead. My professor is wonderful. He rehearses his lectures and then freaks out in the next class if he thinks he screwed up. I have so much love for him.

He proceeded to begin today with a critique of his last lecture.

Professor: You just want to apologize for Monday’s lecture. It was terrible. I didn’t make many clear points…I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I want to say that I’m under a lot of stress right now.
Me: It’s okay. We all have off days! Hug?
Professor: I’ve got to make a commitment about what to do with my summer, and both of the options are just as good as the other.
Me: Seriously man, could we talk about something else…?
Professor: I have to decide where I want to go surfing. Costa Rica…
Me: Surfing? You jackass.
Professor: or Indonesia.
Me: ...!?!! *gibber*
Professor: Now there’s a principle of philosophy that illustrates this very nicely. Buridan’s ass is this donkey that can’t decide between which two stacks of hay to eat…because they’re so perfect. Only in this case it’s Indonesia and something else.

He drew a donkey on the board. On the left side he drew a squiggle and labeled it Costa Rica. On the right side he drew a squiggle and labeled it Indonesia. We spent the rest of the class discussing decisions and Indonesia while I attempted to end myself with a pencil.

I shall leave you with his concluding words:

Professor: You know what the ass does in the end? He can’t decide, so he shits himself, goes crazy and starves to death.

Writing Center

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:35:02 GMT

I just had a mind blowing conference at the writing center. The writing center is a our local help center for analytic essays and it’s located in quaint little cottage just off of the campus greenhouse. I’ve seriously considered petitioning the president to let me move in there, writing center be damned.
I’m not terribly fond of the writing center. On principle I bring every single paper I write there for feedback. Typically they tell me I’ve done a fine job, the paper is in great shape and they don’t really know what to say to me. However, I have yet to get an A on a paper in an English/Philosophy/History class.
I’m comfortably on the line of B+/A- and it’s driving me nuts. In high school I never got anything below an A. I plugged a thesis into the five paragraph format, made sure I hit the reader over the head with my point three times, and I was fine. But that’s not working anymore. Why?
No idea.
Most of my friends in the same classes are in the same situation, and we’re completely puzzled. We talk to our professors. We see our TAs. We use the feedback they give us. We write multiple drafts and start two weeks in advance. We go to the writing center, but it isn’t very helpful.
Then, last fall my English TA passed out an example of an A paper someone had submitted. I read it. I was thrilled. Then I was heartbroken.
I understood very clearly why I wasn’t making As, even if I write four drafts of every paper and ask multiple people to read it. There’s no way anyone could give me an A when papers like that were being submitted.
It wasn’t a paper. It was an odyssey through the text. You, the reader, were Dante, the writer was a tender Virgil who held your hand and pointed out the sights and sounds of hell. (Every text is hell when you have to write a paper about it.) Virgil never said, “this is what I will teach you.” Virgil never dictated a thesis. Virgil just sat next to you and chatted lightly. And when you came out you realized, somehow Virgil had spun the world on its head for you. It was as if the thesis was woven into the atmosphere of the paper, so all you had to do was breathe and it would come to you.
Humbled, I modeled my next paper after it.
I got a B-, and the TA slammed me for neglecting to put in a thesis. I’ve stuck to five paragraphers ever since.
Today, I took my faithful five paragrapher into the writing center. The instructor for the course had already read my first draft and dubbed it “good.” (I’m wise now, I know that means above a B instead of A). I was expecting minor surface changes and an overall “good.”
Not so.
The tutor leaned back in his chair, stared at me and said: “You’re a fine writer, and you’re clearly a smart reader but you’re repeating your point way too much. A really good paper is a cascade of insights; each one adds another dimension to your thesis. The repetitive five paragraph style doesn’t work anymore. You’re in college.”
At that point I nearly threw myself down at his feet and begged him to be my guru.
Everyone has said that college means more sophisticated papers, but no one has ever really told me how to do it, because there’s an expectation that we know how to write papers already.
Yes. I do. Five paragraph ones. Pardon, you want something else? Other types of papers exist? What?!
Anyway, he gave me a crash course. I’m still not sure I know what I’m doing, and there’s probably a huge risk of getting another B- but I’m thrilled. I’m finally learning something.

Also, on an unrelated note I’m feeling somewhat disenchanted by professors. A common concern for entering students is being taught by grad students instead of professors.
However, I've found often times the grad students are better than the professors. I find them easier to relate to, they have more sympathy for students, they are more interesting in hearing what I have to say instead of writing my ideas off because I’m an undergrad. They also tend to work harder to engage the class and show much more interest in teaching us instead of inundating us with their view points.
Furthermore they're attitudes about life and learning are much more congruent with ours. All of my grad student teachers, even the terrible ones, think hearing from the students is important and encourage us to contradict them. A lot of my professors are much more concerned with molding my mind around theirs. I call the molding the god complex and I hate it.
Seriously, good grad students should be let loose in intro classes. It makes much more sense to have students learning from good, if slightly less experienced teachers in intro classes, then from bad teachers who are the top in the field. Top of the field teachers can be saved for the more advanced classes for students passionate about the field.

Why I Love Humanity

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 02:05:34 GMT

Here's an anecdote as related to me last weekend. Everything is true and no facts have been altered (besides verbatimness).

Part 1:

“So my best friend at college is a vegetarian. Not the kind of vegetarian where you give up meat because you hate it, but because he thinks eating meat isn’t sustainable by the environment.”
“That’s one cool guy."
“But he really misses meat. So he found a solution….”
“Yes?”
“Every month he goes out on to the highway and looks for dead deer. Then he brings them back to his dorm, stores them in his shower, and cooks a few pieces every day. We have deer eating parties every weekend.”
“…”
“The first time he did that, they had housing inspections two days later.”
“…”
“Oh, and he got really tired of dragging the 110lb deer all the way back to college. So next time he found a shopping cart. These days puts the deer in the shopping cart and pushes it back home. He calls it shopping for road kill.”
“So if his pet cat dies will he…?”
“Oh my god, are you kidding me? He loves that cat. He talks to it on the phone every week.”

I’ve been promised a package of deer meat in the mail. I can’t wait!

Part 2:

“Hey dad, guess what I just heard?”
[Insert retelling of above anecdote.]
“Oh my God. You’re kidding me. That’s so awesome. I mean not only does this boy have convictions, he’s willing to do something about them. That’s pretty rare. I mean, we never do anything about our convictions. We just sit on our lazy butts.”
“Yeah. I was charmed.”
“I want to meet this kid! He’s so resourceful. I want to try some of this deer.”
“I don’t know if that’ll happen.”
“Oh well, if I can’t meet him, I can at least follow his excellent example.
“Uh…dad? What do you have in mind? Dad?!?”

Turns out my mom has something against the idea of eating road kill. I don't know if I'm thankful or disappointed.

There are monsters living under my bed

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 05:45:29 GMT

Among the joys of being a neurotic basket case is the nightly ritual of dealing with the monsters under my bed. For most people, the monsters melt away once they abandon faith in the holy triumvirate of the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. However, instead of chivalrously dying, mine have grown fat off of dust bunnies and continue to plague me during odd hours of the night when my parents have gone to sleep, and there is no one to chase them away. Also, at the grand old age at twenty, one feels vaguely like they ought to be able to take their monsters out for a midnight airing and then accidentally lock them outside the house.
Sadly, it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it’s one of those grown up things that occurs when you can legally drown your sorrows in large amounts of alcohol. Maybe I should look into illegally drowning my sorrows in large amounts of alcohol.

Let me introduce you to the three who’ve crawled out from underneath my bed, to keep me company tonight.

First off, there’s Squishy. Squishy is a thin and dapper gentleman who makes a favorable first impression. He’s charming, he’s got a highly moral character, and he sounds so reasonable. The general feeling is that everyone from fish in Finding Nemo to politicians, especially politicians, could do with their own personal Squishy.
Squishy’s the man who sits on your bed smoking a cigar after you tell your mother it was your brother who really broke the vase and he gets grounded for a week while you get off free. Squishy doesn’t say much, he just sits on your bed, peering at you through the haze of cigar smoke. Nasty stuff that smoke, it'll waft up your nostrils keeping you awake all night long.
The worst part is when Squishy decides he’s rather fond of you. He’ll sling an arm over your shoulders and though the sun will rise and morning will come, he’ll continue smoking his cigar by your side, his arm getting heavier and heavier until you twitch and sag underneath his weight.
He’s a good gentleman to have around, within reason. However, he's a bit clingy. Sometimes he’ll use anything as an excuse to visit.
Squishy decided to pay a call when I opened an e-mail from the person who is coordinating my big fat gold star backup internship. Having read my transcript, the coordinator voiced some concerns. The company is very technical, the internship might not work well in conjunction with my studies, I may be disappointed by the duties I’m assigned.
Squishy’s sitting on the edge of the window sill smoking. He hasn’t said anything, and he isn’t going to, but I think he wants to know what I’m doing spending my college career taking classes that have no practical value. He wants to know why I even had the nerve to think I could intern somewhere technical when really I’m just wasting the intern coordinator’s time…and I really have no answer for him.

Lumpy’s a tubby adorable little fellow. He’s jolly, or rather he would be jolly if he ever managed to wipe the woeful expression off of his face, and trump up a genuine grade-A smile.
Supposedly, there are a few people who’ve never had the pleasure of being acquainted with Lumpy, but my suspicion is they’re just good liars. Lumpy’s the kid who sits on your bed when you’ve failed a test, or a series of tests. He’ll sit and sigh with you, drawing his knees up to his chest. Aye, it’s a sad you failed, but it doesn’t really matter since you never had the ability to do well to begin with.
Who doesn’t love have a sneaky love for Lumpy? He is as comforting as warm macaroni and cheese, and as helpful as empty calories without nutrients. Lumpy will tell you, you’re wee and helpless, and there isn’t much you can do about it, so you might as well accept it. Lumpy and I are excellent friends.
Right now he’s sucking on a peppermint and occasionally patting me on back, comfortingly. “Silly, what were you expecting? You really don’t have many skills. It’s only natural that you should get a reply like that.”

Finally, there’s Spiky. I’ve never been able to figure out what Spiky looks like because he’s always curled up into a tight ball, with his back facing me. He’s got floppy hair that obscures the shape of his head and juts out into sharp and tiny pinpricks. I’m not even sure Spiky has a gender, I’ve always thought of him as a hedgehog. Spiky’s the one who spends the whole night shaking in his corner.
Spiky is the spirit of the boy who checks his room six times to make sure he’s locked the door. Spiky is the girl who clutches the arms of her chair in a white knuckled death grip for the entire nine hour flight. Spiky is the parents who lie awake at because it’s 3:00 a.m. and little Johnny still hasn’t come home from that party.
Spiky is my favorite. It’s a rare night when he doesn’t come, between panicking about test scores, my future, having to interact with someone I’m not perfectly comfortable with, riding the bus to strange and unknown places…Oh there's always a reason for Spiky to come visiting.
Tonight, Spiky’s sulking in the corner. He doesn’t like the fact that we’re packing up and going back to Baltimore tomorrow. Spiky wants to stay here at home, where he’s spent over a decade rocking in his nook under the bed. Spiky doesn’t want to have to deal with people other than my parents, and thinks maybe if he hides in the closet tonight, tomorrow- with it’s promise of change, massive amounts of people, endless responsibility, and that horrible moment when you’ve stepped off the plane and realize there’s no going home for another six weeks- tomorrow will not come.

I'm working on being more of an adult. I'll let you know when I get there.

Recipes from a Gourmet

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 23:04:38 GMT

I am now at the stage in life where my peers, driven by slender wallets and the horror of institutional food, have begun to experiment in kitchens and trade recipes. It would be mildly horrifying if it wasn't quite so delicious.
For a long time I have refused to enter the kitchen as a chef, claiming that my sizzled water, underdone toast, and overdone eggs have exempted me from the culinary arts forever. However, it is difficult to resist the stages of development for long and I have been forced to succumb to cookery. I even have recipes.
Here are three of my favorites. I promise you, if I can make them, you can too. You think I jest. I do not.
The others are uh, still works in progress.

Bon Appétit.

Yogburt, 'Appycots, and Weird Crunchy Stuff

From time to time I am seized with random burning pangs of hunger and need to eat something like a meal but not quite as large. After much foraging in our kitchen and dumping random things in bowls I came up with this recipe.

Ingredients:
A. Yogburt: Plain or vanilla yogurt
B. Crunchy stuff: Granola or some disgustingly healthy cereal that tastes like cardboard... basically anything that will crunch pleasingly between your molars
C. ‘appycots: Fruit or dried fruit or raisins
D. and: Sweet flavorings (sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, I don’t really care, the whole point is you forage)

1. Cut up the fruit and put it on the bottom of the bowl, so it’s like a city of fruit.
2. Dump a proportionate amount of crunchy stuff over the fruit, so it’s like a sandstorm hit the city.
3. Glomp mountain loads of yogurt over the crunchy stuff. Man, a sandstorm and then a blizzard? Life in this city sucks.
4. Add enough sweet flavorings to give yourself diabetes. If you’re using plain yogurt, add enough sweet flavorings to give yourself and the entire nation of Taiwan diabetes.

Om Nom Nom Spaghetti

Spaghetti is the college student classic. Or anyone’s classic really. It looks like an actually meal, but requires somewhat less effort, and it can be eaten in large quantities without killing someone’s stomach.

Ingredients:
A. Unsuspecting victim: Parental Unit/Suitemate/Significant Other/etc.
B. A lean and hungry look.

1. Wait for unsuspecting victim to arrive. Spring out of a handy place and plaster yourself to them. Gripping them around the waist works well, so does clutching a leg and sitting on top of it. Just make sure they can’t escape.
2. Look as young and helpless as you possibly can. Mutter sweet nothings about eternal love. (Sincerity is helpful but not a must.) Intersperse little wibbles that come from hunger.
3. If that fails, simply refuse to let go until you get your spaghetti.

Chef’s Tips:
1) This can be used to procure anything. Spaghetti is a classic, but as long as you have printed out the recipe and can procure the ingredients anything goes. If you’re really good you can get your victim to procure the ingredients for you.
2) Make sure your victim is a better cook than you are, unless you’re a human garbage disposal.
3) The key is making sure your unsuspecting victim is the sort who’ll feel guilty knowing you’re hungry.

Pan de la vie Boheme

This recipe is very old and well beloved across the earth, especially among starving artists who have chosen to live for their art. It’s cheap, filling, and requires minimal time. Moreover it’s delicious, especially if you’re savage-beast-hungry.

Ingredients:
A. Bread
B. Toaster

1. Put the bread in the toaster. Set the timer.
2. Wait a few seconds. Pull the bread out of the toaster and peer into the toaster slots to admire the cherry glow of the wires. Consider petting them because they’re pretty.
OR
If you have on of those nifty toaster ovens that look like yawning metal caverns, take the bread out and stick your hands in for a few minutes to warm them up.
3. Replace bread.
4. Do jumping jacks.
5. Stop when you hear a wee ding.
6. Take the bread out.
7. Other people have been known to enjoy various spreads such as fresh butter, or fruit preserves on their bread, but the chef prefers hers plain. There’s nothing quite like the simple taste of pan de la vie boheme uncomplicated by the excrement of cows and fruit. Also, it’s kind of a lot of effort to find a butter knife, open up the spread, spread it on the bread, and then wash the butter knife.

*Note: If you have no toaster, an open fire will do as well. The discarded belongings of one’s suitemates do very nicely for firewood.

Living the Good Life

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 05:58:00 GMT

Best day ever.

Breakfast

Woke up feeling vicious and vindictive having gone to sleep on a half resolved quarrel. Channeled my woes into the creation of fruit chaat. I love making fruit chaat. I go on a treasure hunt in the kitchen for fruit (or non fruit) and they are subsequently accepted or vetoed by my parents.
“Grapes?”
“Sure.”
“Tomatoes?”
“God no, what are you thinking?”
“Yam?”
“Uh…well…live life dangerously.”

Over breakfast I was instructed on the merits of using my anger to build constructive relationships. Result: I nearly ended my dad. Do not under any circumstances lecture a pissy PMSing daughter on overcoming one’s anger. Just don’t. My mom tactfully suggested we go off on our errands.

Afternoon

We ended up going out to lunch for my birthday. My birthday is on the eighth, but my parents have been celebrating it with a continuous food orgy for the past two weeks. Or, rather, ever since I came home it’s been a continuous food orgy. My aunt and cousin were over for Christmas so we made fresh chapatis daily to go with our dahl and vegetables. Fresh chapatis only happen when we go to India, and restaurants flat out suck at chapati making, so this was a big deal.

After they left my mom asked me what I’d like to eat on my birthday. I said dumplings. We made them. We ate them. My mom asked me what I’d like for my birthday. I said onigiri. We’re making them once my dad leaves for a business trip because he hates them. My mom asked me what I’d like for my birthday since we can’t make onigiri yet…Um, basically the fridge is stuffed with kheer, roasted yams, apples with caramel…I’m going to stop now.

I know I have a problem, I see no reason to fix it.

Righto…so, we…uh, lunch. We went to my mother’s all time favorite Chinese restaurant. The smell inside makes my father blench, the paint is peeling off of the walls, and in the overcrowded aquarium lobsters and crabs stare at customers as they await their execution. The food is second to none.

On the way to the Oriental grocery store we spotted a completely new and different Oriental grocery store. We thought we’d peek in and oh my God it was packed. I nearly got mowed over by old ladies fighting over pears, and I did run over a six year old when I stopped at the beverage section BECAUSE OH MY GOD THERE WAS STUFF WRITTEN IN INDONESIAN! When does that ever happen? I had to stop and read the ingredient list out loud to my dad. I got the impression he wasn’t as enthralled as he should have been…

Actually he was in the midst of plotting. He realized my mom and I were beyond rational thought. Cream buns! Fresh coconut for the drinking! Sugar cane! Papaya salad! Bubble tea stand! He grabbed the cart and checked out while my mother and I were still staring at the baked goods. No cream buns. But there was an enormous ruby pomegranate.

A few blocks away from the grocery store there was a library. I eeped yearningly. My parents usually tend to ignore such noises because if there was a time bomb strapped to my back and I saw a library on the way to getting it removed, I would eep and run in. This time they stopped.

I think we were in an area densely populated by immigrants because they had an amazing foreign language book and film selection. My mom saw the Chinese section. There was this sudden, holy silence. My dad and I tiptoed away.

My dad showed me the film section. Then he regretted showing me the film section when I simultaneously saw Bollywood classics (not just the new releases, but classics!), anime, and Korean dramas. I found Take Care of My Cat, and kind of died because I’ve been searching for this film since middle school. It didn’t come to theaters. Rental stores don’t have it. My library system doesn’t have it, but oh my god it was there sitting on the shelf.

Then I found the graduate school/career section and life became less fun as I tried to figure out the difference between the GRE, GMAT and CLEP. They all sounded like STDs. Still, the job support they had was amazing. My local library doesn’t have much on graduate schools or careers. This library had a couple shelves devoted to graduate schools, as well as vocational exams. They also had a job finding machine that looked like an ATM machine, only jobs. The atmosphere was different too. It was loud, and filled to the brim with people. At least three different languages could be heard, and it was clear this library was a well beloved hangout.

We ended at the local Cub where we picked up chips for…my birthday, because I vetoed all sweets, but chips with freshly made guacamole and salsa! We don’t do chips and I get massive guilt attacks when I eat them at college. (Not that that stops me, but still.) My dad and I got completely absorbed in a discussion about how to change Fahrenheit to Celsius in your head and my mom nearly ditched us out of sheer disgust.
The formula is: 9/5C + 32 = F
My cousins uses 2C+32=F.
I round C to the nearest 0 or 5 and plug it into 9/5C+32.
I thought I was genius for coming up with this method, and when my cousin explained his, I started laughing hysterically because it completely didn’t occur to me to round 9/5 to 2.

I shelved the issue a week ago, but somehow I decided to have a massive meltdown about it while picking out avocadoes.
“I’m just not mathematical. I simply can’t think of the clean and simple way to do things,” I said beating my chest with an avocado.
What my dad should have said was, “Of course not! It is pure genius that you round to a 0 or a 5. Your cousin’s way is lazy and inaccurate.”
But alas, no.
Instead he said: “Let’s analyze the delta and see which version is more inaccurate.”
Because we didn’t have a calculator on hand we ended up gazing blankly at the avocados while furiously calculating in our heads. Eventually I realized my dad did all the calculations faster than I did, so I just pretended to calculate and nodded sagely when he came up with numbers.
Anyway, we realized that for Celsius > 10 degrees, my method is better.
I felt vindicated.

“Of course, I knew this before I started,” I said. “A gut instinct lead me to believe that my method was more nuanced and this multiplying by 2 business is ridiculous. I was simply too absorbed in some very important matters to do the full mathematical analysis. Naturally, I appreciate your effort for you have…”
At that point my dad whacked me for being a condescending ass and I was forced to claim child abuse.
Then we realized my mom was nowhere in sight and scrambled around the whole grocery store until we found her picking out tomatoes muttering about crazy people and thermometers.

Once at home we decided to start making salsa and guacamole right away. I reached in my jacket to take out my wallet and ended up pulling out the avocado I’d been beating my chest with. I’d unwittingly stolen it. I stared at it in horror and wondered if this was the beginning of my life as a petty criminal: first an avocado, than some old lady's bracelet, and then I’ll be running through the streets waving a gun robbing children of their stuffed animals. I’d be like Jack the Ripper only with Barbie dolls.

My parents took the avocado away from my numb fingers and put it in the blender. When I tried to explain I need counseling for criminal tendencies, my dad heartlessly told me the avocado was the least of my problems. Since I occasionally go on these uh…binges where I ask lots of questions about how to forge checks or get through security gates with a bomb, I really couldn’t argue, but still.

The guacamole was delicious though. At least I'd stolen high quality goods.

Afterwards we all settled in the living room to read. I’m still plodding through Barchester Towers. I have this uncomfortable feeling that I don’t like Anthony Trollope as much as I should. This feeling was further confirmed when I fell asleep and woke up three hours later. Then there was a massive guilt attack because I dishonored Trollope by falling asleep on one of his books.

Evening

I poked my parents, who were still buried in their books, about dinner because I’d been given strict instructions not to eat the rice which nullified all dinner options in the fridge. My dad announced he was going to cook something for me. Of late my dad’s has had this need to fill me with food. He usually looks on benevolently when my mom goes into her feeding frenzies, but ever since I got to college he has these strange urges to cook for me. (I’ve stopped weighing myself. There’s really no point.) He knows about three different dishes that are all variations on scrambled eggs, but they’re all excellent. It came out twice as big as he'd intended- my dad cooks on the grande scale.

I convinced my mom to have half my omelet and then she packed my dad off to bed least his arthritis get any worse than the hellishly painful level it’s already at. She stayed behind and asked me to help plot ways to keep him from doing things that will land him in bed for weeks: attending my cousins' weddings this summer (Indian weddings stretch till dawn), staying up too late for business meetings, worrying ceaselessly because the pain never goes away.

There was this terrible moment when we realized there wasn't much we can do. Life keeps marching on, people get married, work piles up, and there are good days but also lots of bad days. Time doesn't stop for something like pain.

I’m lucky, oh I’m lucky to have this life.
The best, the most frightening part, is I really don’t understand how lucky I am.