harvard kid dies

a member of our graduating class died friday morning in his native san juan. i didn't know him, but i was friends with his blockmates. they were all great guys and hard partiers. he died in a car crash on la avenida ashford, a 2 mile street that crosses from puerta de tierra (where we stay) through the posh condado casino district and onward to santurce. my brother and i have walked its entire length several times between the caribe hilton and a small italian place at the far end of ashford. they serve medallas, presidentes, negra modelos, and also great specialty pizzas on those platters that lift the pizza at least twelve inches off the table. to me san juan is a quiet city all over, the kind of place that's summer all year around. not just the sun and the surf, but the attitude and mentality associated with the place. although i'm sure even in condado there are thousands of waitresses trying to scrape together a living. spending long stretches of their lives in the struggle. an article in el nuevo dia said that he lost control of his car at 5am friday morning on the condado stretch of ashford. i'm sure he was completely mashed at the time. 5am is probably one of the worst times of the day.

roald dahl - madame rosette

"He was a young concentrator, this Stuffy; an intense athletic concentrator who moved toward what he wanted in a dead straight line. He took hold of winding roads and carefully he made them straight, then he moved over them with great speed and nothing stopped him."

"it came to me like a song i wrote"

this morning i went to the doctor to see about my leg.
i came home and took a nap. in this nap i had a dream.

i was in front of some bodega at night. there were flowers in front of the bodega (as usual) and the streets were wide and empty. i looked onto the lot across the street; it had an building in various states of construction with a big courtyard in the middle.

i was on a charter bus with my parents and a lot of other people, including one average-looking white guy with blond hair. i got off the bus because it was about to leave and my father and i went to the underhold to put some suitcases and stuff inside. he was tossing all of my stuff in but it wouldn't fit because my lacrosse sticks were positioned poorly. for whatever reason i felt very frustrated but too depressed to complain about it. so i took over, forcefully repositioning my lacrosse sticks and then stacking the suitcases on top of each other.

i was in a vast and busy subway/train terminal underground. the platforms had red tiles all over them. it was the last station in the line so there were about four or five parallel trains lined up. my beautiful friend lexy got onto one full train which then promptly departed. i was left in the station with a bunch of other people, so we started walking around the end of the platform so that we could board another train. as i started walking, i was accosted by a young white male with wavy black hair who introduced himself to me as lexy's brother. i was very surprised at the information, since lexy had never mentioned him to me. i asked him "out of curiosity" what their father did for a living. in my mind i saw their father as a spry old white man with freudish/leniny grey hair and a goatee. i misheard the brother's response as "he manages blah blah." i asked him to repeat and he said "he runs nations." a liberating wave of relief and understanding washed over me - it was the answer to everything. i felt like i immediately understood everything - why alexis was born in jamaica, that this kid and i were destined to go into the nation-running business, that i had emerged from the darkness and depression that had followed me for quite some time. max (brother) and i passed by a table on our way to the train platform; three asian kids in white polos were sitting there passing out free samples/fliers/whatever for mcdonalds. i said "wait up" and turned to the table. the kid closest to me made me a soft serve cone and handed it to me. he then handed me a small rectangle of paper (some kind of temporary tattoo) and gave me a huge slap across the left cheek. i was a bit shocked and looked into my hand at the piece of paper, which more and more resembled a big cookie with some japanese kanji on it.

literature

keith kachtick - hungry ghost

i recently read this book by a former high school english teacher. i took freshman english and a senior elective with him. it was so surreal to read this book because it is him. this book is him. the protagonist's story, it's his life. the sex, the LES apartment, the dog, the neighbor, the photography, mia malone, the overwhelming buddhism, the retreats, the goats, morocco, that's all his life. in every paragraph was something he'd mentioned in a class or in a meditation session or at a meal or in a discussion or in a conversation. i feel like someone had taken a photograph of his life - encompassing every single thing he experienced and every single thing that experienced him - transformed it into words, and glued it unedited onto the pages of this novel.

brilliant. top shelf stuff.

locale

i am here.

siberia

true story. my sydney grandfather has a brother. i only found out about this today. my father mentioned him in passing and i was a bit affronted that i hadn't known about him earlier (probably a byproduct of my indoctrination that knowledge is power). anyway he graduated from college during the earlier stages of the communist era. as it was back then, he was assigned to a workplace. his assignment turned out to be a medium-sized city in heilongjiang, the northernmost province of manchuria and china, situated across the amur river from siberia. having no say in the matter, he went there and worked for twenty years or so. during these twenty years he made it a point not to marry local girls, because they are ethnically and culturally distinct from han chinese (read: dark, short, ugly, manchu) and that just wasn't his steez. every year he had about a month's vacation off, during which he'd come back and chill in shanghai. one year he met a girl and they fell in love. they kept in touch and soon they were married. but she didn't want to go to heilongjiang, because "for ten or eleven months of the year it's so cold you have to wear one of those big russian hats" (source: my father). so for the next twenty years or so he worked in the north while she stayed in shanghai, raising their two children. during his vacations he'd come home to shanghai and chill.

damn.

sunday

there's this place my parents and i go to sometimes (including tonight) called shun lee. it's an upscale chinese place in lincoln square a block from the park. something that has always struck me is the fact that we are always the only asian people in the restaurant who are not waiters. everything inevitably reminds me of colonialism and the exploitation of my people and my homeland by people of caucasian descent. unfortunate but true.

raphael saadiq - i know shuggie otis

"girl i'm coming home soon
sometime around june"

john mayer - no such thing

i think i alternate between bouts of being incredibly hopeful and terribly alone. i just got one of those "i'm graduating" mass emails from one of my best friends from high school. he's in my homeland, china, planning to find his way overland to his homeland, italy. like me, he was also without aim or academic excellence. soon enough i'm going to be over there too without a job or purpose. it really hit me when i ran into a couple of freshman hookups and they both told me "well, i'll miss you! good luck in the future!" it made me realize that i really have no clue what i'll be doing in the future. zero clue. it's easy to tell people traveling and medical school but that all seems so far away on the horizon that it has no substance to me right now.