Okay, so clearly this whole calling on the phone thing is not going to
work at all. Nevertheless, I miss talking to you, so indulge me this
fairly lengthy communiqué.

18 hour drives can only be described with words like ‘hellish’, and
‘suffering’ and ‘near-death experience’. Matt and I left Tampa at 9am
and staggered into Urbana-Champaign at 2am Central Daylight Time,
barely able to keep our eyes open. I’m never, ever doing this drive
again, for any reason, especially not during the winter when there’s
ice and snow to worry about. We weathered… well, incredibly inclement
weather, an unbelievably brilliant and spectacular thunderstorm in
Kentucky, waded through some terrible traffic in Nashville, got to see
some amazingly beautiful foothills and valleys in Tennessee, and ate
some pretty fantastically unhealthy food.

For dinner, Matt and I split 12 Krystal Burgers. Have you ever been to
Krystal before? It’s a lot like White Castle, tiny burgers and all
that. I half-seriously asked Matt if I should bring my laptop in;
maybe they have wireless access, I said. He laughed and scoffed at the
idea. “Wireless? At a Krystal? Are you joking?” The next morning, I
came across a popular technology website. The lead article reported
that as of the previous day, Krystal had rolled out free wi-fi to all
252 franchise locations. My vindication was bittersweet.

Reese was especially cranky—to show her displeasure at having to ride
in a milk crate all day, she just absolutely unloaded in the towel
lining the bottom, an explosion of poops unlike anything I’d ever seen
before. Poor thing. I guess you use whatever you can to get your point
across. Since arriving, she’s been cuddled, doted upon, and generally
admired by a small group of guinea-pig owners here who have officially
dubbed her ‘beautiful’, as if I didn’t know that already.

…

I have a  confession to make: I absolutely cannot get enough of the
new Hilary Duff song, “Wake Up.”  My better judgment is rocked to the
very core at this shocking display of poor taste, but my reptilian
brain savors the candy-sweet hooks and trite teenybopper lyrics. I
leave it on repeat in iTunes, I sing along to it in the car, I catch
myself humming it in the shower, I hear it in my dreams. I hope we can
still be friends despite this. I know I would have difficulty making
such promises were somebody else to make the same admission to me.

Then again, Kim is currently listening to orchestral arrangements of
Enya songs, so perhaps it’s just something in the water.

…

We’re driving up to Chicago tomorrow. Keys, moving, cleaning, setting
up, Chinatown for dinner, perhaps a walk downtown or at Grant park at
night. It’s incredibly good to have Matt and Kim around; they do an
amazing job of keeping me centered and contained and… at that place
where I experience and take things in, as opposed to try to grab a
hold of or attempt to control. They’re a firm anchor to the past,
invaluable during this time where I feel particularly windblown and
rootless.

I know I say this a lot, and perhaps it loses something in repetition,
but I miss you.

Kim has hot tea waiting for me, so I will stop here. I have no idea if
you have any internet access where you are, and thus no idea when
you’ll read this, but whenever you do, I’d like to hear from you.

Take care,
David

I was a much better writer back then.

No end in sight.

Unbelievable.

I was watching television late at night, feeling sorry for myself and the directionless path my life had taken when I happened to catch a grainy, cheaply produced infomercial on the local cable access channel. In it, a very 80’s looking (curly brown hair, baggy brown blouse with huge shoulder pads) Julia Roberts described how she had spent nearly two months on the twin Pacific islands of San J— and San S— doing nondescript, charitable volunteer work and how this sabbatical, though arduous and full of privation, had allowed her find a new peace and purpose in her life. At the end of the show, she encouraged her viewing audience to call the following 1-800 number if they were interested in the experience of a lifetime. I wrote the number down on a receipt I found on the floor and promptly fell asleep on the couch.

I dreamed a fitful, fantastic dream, fantasies of a girl from far away hurtling into my life and knocking me out of the decaying orbits of my life, trips to Asia and half-serious jokes about moving away and what we’d do for the rest of our lives and other improbable notions. When I woke up and crash-landed back to reality, I felt more sorry for myself than ever; I hated my life and its pointlessness and the endless cycle of waiting, waiting, waiting. I grabbed the phone, called the volunteer agency and scheduled an interview for later that week.

Before the interview, the woman behind the counter said I would have to fill out these forms and watch a half-hour video detailing the specifics of life on San J—. She led me into a tiny, pea-green room lined with shelves overflowing with books. She threw a collection of worn pencils and pens on the table, letting them hit the scratched metal surface with a series of loud clacks, warning me to press down hard on the forms and to pay close attention to the video. She left the room and the small VCR/TV combo whirred to life.

6 weeks later, I was at an airport newsstand buying Dramamine with Scott, whose girlfriend was also accepted into the program. She couldn’t speak much English, but that didn’t seem to matter; we communicated just fine when we fucked behind Scott’s back, though neither one of us quite had the words to tell him about it just yet.

—

*Well, I guess that’s sort of an exaggeration:

There was the C family, who despite nominally living the American dream (musically talented sons, Harvard alums, successful postgraduate careers, etc.), forbade the speaking of Chinese in their home. The parents spoke only English to each other and to their children. Nevertheless, Mrs. C used to call my mother frequently to chat in Chinese. As I was a precocious and impolitic child, I once asked her what, exactly, was the deal with thier family. My mother, perhaps revealing exactly where I got my tendencies for blunt speech, sighed and answered (in Taiwanese, of course), “I don’t know, David. They’re just weird.” We didn’t hang out much.

Oh, and then there was also the L family, another successful, affluent group that produced a pair of Ivy League grads. My parents met them through some local Chinese-American pow-wow and did the requisite “you visit my home so I can show off, and I’ll do the same for you” swap one weekend during my early high school days. I had met the younger son at some academic competition of some kind– Academic Team, or Math Team, or something of equally nerdy– and since we both occupied the same social ecological niche, we were naturally competitors, cold and standoffish in that very shy, yet very driven way that nerds naturally fall into. When we visited his house, his mother quite out of the blue asked me in front of the entire group if I was seeing anybody. No, I answered, I’m not, trying to dodge the question. She smiled and rather proudly replied, “My Eric can’t seem to keep the girls off him. He has girls calling all the time, wanting to go out.” I wanted to ask her why didn’t any of these fawning fangirls ever accompany him to the Academic Team competitions, but I was sure even my quick-to-judge mother wouldn’t have approved of that. Later, I found out his bipolar brother once made the 10 hour drive back home to punch him in the face after a perceived insult during an earlier phone conversation, then turned around and immediately drove another 10 hours back to school. We didn’t hang out much, either.