Capitalism And Outer Space

We were going to go to the Space Center today, and it would definitely have been neat. The last time I went to one, it was in Florida, and I remember looking over my head and pointing out the rusty orange and white rockets. That year I was seven, maybe not even.

Sometimes I think about being a third-generation engineer, and being in a family of engineers. It's like being born in a family of bakers, or cobblers or blacksmiths or tailors, except without a long term of apprenticeships. I was born predisposed to math, to science, born with my parents expecting that I follow their footsteps, if not completely then at least partially, into the scientific world.

My dad is lying on the bed now, snoring. A while after I got off the plane, maybe when we were in the car coming back from the airport, he turned to me and said, "It's still not too late if you want to change your mind and be a doctor." My mom says this sometimes too, in that joking yet all the same serious tone, "Are you sure you don't want to be a doctor?"

I tell them, "Yes, I'm sure. I want to be an engineer."

For people who come from this life they are not satisfied with it. They have worked hard, all their lives, fought against the waves of unfair disadvantages at an age where they should have had things under control and relaxed a little. They see people around them in seemingly easier lives, people who earn more (and money has always been an issue in our house), and they want that life for me, whether directly or vicariously.

. . .

These days, my dad spends a lot more. We went to the mall today, everywhere we go we look at the dazzling new clothes and bags and jewelry. He picks something out of the pile, points at it and asks, "What do you think?"

I shake my head. It is the wrong color, the wrong texture, or something, any excuse. He goes over to the stands of watches, stoops down and try to find the same style as the one on his wrist. That one he bought a few days ago. The strap is still too loose; it hangs low. He smiles when he realizes it is more expensive than the one he bought.

I am happy for him, proud, almost, that he is finally achieving the middle-class lifestyle he always wanted, yet also sad. There is something about the way he walks, shorter than ever before, that scares me. I am afraid that he won't be happy, I am afraid that he might lose this, I am afraid that after all these years of struggles he will look back and think, "What have I done with my life?"

And come up empty. I am afraid for him, even though he himself is not afraid. I am being paranoid again.

He walks up to the cosmetics counter. I watch as he talks with the sales lady, the two of them discussing the new brand of anti-aging cream available. He looks at the price and chuckles, shakes his head. "It's too expensive." And we leave. I wonder if he ever wishes he could afford this, for his wife, if he ever laments his inability to buy everything he wants for his family. I wonder if anyone will, in the future, do the same for me.

. . .

He woke up just now. Held my hand. Earlier today he had said, "The days pass by really quickly." He is going back in less than a week, to the misty southwestern Chinese city, while my mom stays with her parents until after Chinese New Years.

I am not sure what I want. In a few days I will be leaving too, heading back to icy Islandtown by myself. But in a few days I will be a few more days closer until Khajiit comes back. Those last few days, however, will be void of both, and they will be long and torturous.

. . .

In a few days, we will be headed somewhere. To the Gulf, maybe, or to Dallas or Austin, we are not sure yet. I am supposed to be the one planning all of this, but I have been way too distracted. When I wake up in the morning, I add up the hours to see if Khajiit will be awake, then I call him, and we cycle between being awake and being away and all of the other complicatedness of us being in different continents.

For example, right now, it is 8pm here, which means it is 3am over there, and way too early to call him.

He sent me photos of Paris today, and I really liked them, especially the one of the details on the Eiffel Tower, and the one where he is eating smoked salmon. Smoked salmon has other connotations for me, it reminds me of a summer that could have been had there not been other obligations, other obstacles.

They are all of the past now, although I still have the souvenirs. I still have a lot more I need to clean through before all the vestiges are gone, if that is even possible. I took out the wallet photo the other day. I had already changed the lockscreen image on my phone.

There are some clothes that need to be exchanged, photos returned, books taken back. We had really tried to make ourselves part of each other's lives, even though (and maybe even more so because) we could not be involved in person. I look at the calendar I now share with Khajiit, and it is almost empty, and that does not make me wonder because I know he will be with me, and those days he will not be are not for long.

. . .

My dad is considering moving back to the US again. My mom will surely follow him if he does. I may see them more often now. Maybe one day they will even settle, and I will visit them, just as other people visit their parents, without the hassle of trying to remember where they have ended up this time around. Although I will miss seeing new airports. I have seen many airports in my life and I am hoping to see more.

Samosa Fridays

During dinner on Friday (at this retro diner-like place mixed in with a convenience store), Denise and I split a vegetarian dish that included stir-fried eggplants and other veggies, chickpea and pasta salad, hummus, and pita bread. I punched in my portion of the cost into my budget manager (the one I rediscovered today while cleaning out apps on my phone) and said, "I'm over my limit for food today already."

"What did you buy?"

"Well," I said. "I bought an omelet in the morning at the café, and it was really expensive, but it had really good Swiss cheese and—uh—what did I have for lunch?"

It took me a good five minutes to remember. "Samosas. I bought samosas. Three for $2. That's what I ate."

I still have over $1000 left in my meal plan for the semester, and I have to use it up or else it will expire. The problem is I don't wake up early enough to eat breakfast (or if I do it's a quick bowl of cereal), and sometimes I would go out to eat. Islandtown makes that really easy, especially since Fish Wings is located downtown and there are so many good restaurants around. The other day Denise and I went to this pub and they served the best jalapeno poppers I have ever had.

And the poutine here is heavenly.

Also I don't really eat on the weekends, because I hold crazy schedules and sleep in the early mornings and wake up at around 5 or 6 in the afternoon. Then I make bacon and onion and eggs and whatever else is really easy to cook.

I think I need to buy a bunch of pre-made meals from one of the cafeterias and stash them away for the weekends.

Also, as I was walking back from the metro, I heard the tell-tale party music of our engineering weekly drinking party. The last time I was there they had this really complicated drinking game involving a map of the world, except with bizarre names for the countries. I wonder if anyone (if there is anyone, that is) who is reading this can tell me what the name of that game is?

My mom called me later that night, and among other things, said, "Why are you eating out? You should eat as much as possible from your meal plan." Which is very logical, and would have been easy to do back home, but when you walk down a street and it's filled with all sorts of restaurants and eateries, and you're really hungry because you haven't ate anything for hours and all you've had was a glass of wine, it's not that easy.

Plus I would have needed to sneak into another dorm's cafeteria, since mine does not have one and the engineering one closes early on Fridays, and I didn't want to go through the extra effort.

So I really need to get the planning for food part down.

My mom also said, "I don't except you to get a 4.0 (she was talking about GPAs), that requires too much effort and it's not worth it, but you should aim for above a 3.9."

Gee, mom, there is such a huge difference between a 4.0 and a 3.95.

Ridiculousness aside, I still miss her. We talked for over an hour over Skype (and was interrupted twice by Yuma trying to video-chat me on gchat), and we probably would have kept going if it weren't so late and my mom was at her parents' place, where internet is limited. I won't be able to see her in person until summer comes around, and if anything does happen to me it will at least take her a couple of days to get here. That is something I still cannot wrap my head around.

I talked with Nora last night and she said she was at Gaussianville, which is around 7 hours away from Islandtown. A lot of my friends back from Lakeside are going to Lakeside University, and they are 6 hours away. Beavertown is 6 hours away.

This distance isn't too far. But it is far enough.

Since I slept most of the day away, I don't have much to say about my day. But Zephy sent me an email a few days ago (or was that yesterday? I can't remember) saying that her tag will be forevermore small because I will never have an  occasion to talk about her. So here I am, mentioning her so her tag might grow a bit.

Yuma will be back in a few minutes. He is such a silly, strange boy. I don't know what he wants anymore, but I'll take his happy days one day at a time.

Happy Thanksgiving

I am thankful for a lot of things I don't really say out loud. Like I am thankful for the fact that I lost my blue and green pen. And I am thankful for my lack of balance when performing simple tasks such as walking in a straight line.

Oh, wait. I'm supposed to be thankful for good things, right?

Well. I am thankful for all of my wonderful friends (and ex-friends made not-current friends solely due to the lack of ease of communicating back in a pre-Internet era). I am thankful for my parents and their awesome sense of humor (even if I don't understand it half the times because they are very heavy on Chinese proverbs/idioms/folk lores/whatever else). I am thankful for Yuma for killing my sleep monsters (they have, unfortunately, been revived as of late).

I am also thankful for the delicious lemon meringue mini pie I helped to make yesterday. And by help I mean "force mini pie crusts into cupcake pan." It was good. Even though I don't really like lemon filling, or meringue.

I am thankful for my wonderfully hard bed because it is really huge and can fit two people on it even though there is only one of me. (I am also thankful that my window is really, really low large, but that is another story.)

And I am thankful that I will be getting a new laptop soon. Sony. Hopefully bright blue.

I Am Not You

Christine O'Donnell, Republican (and Tea Party) candidate for the 2010 Delaware Senate special election, has a  series of political ads where she says, "I'm not *insert whatever it is she says she's not*, I'm you."

Well, you know what, dad? I'm not Christine O'Donnell. I'm not you.

This comes after my dad's latest rejection of my common app essay. Basically, his logic is, "If I don't like this essay, then you're not submitting it." Which is fine, I suppose, since he's paying for the application fee, but it's not fine when his idea of an acceptable essay happens to only look like one thing.

He even said, "It's all right if you copy my words, as long as they're good."

No, dad, it's not all right. I'm not translating your work. I'm writing my damn college essay, and I'd like it to be about me, thank you very much. Which means, if you don't quite grasp it yet, that I'd like to use my own words to write about things that I feel are important to me.

I think he's more worked up about this whole process than I am. Like in Death of a Salesman. Pushing all of his dreams and hopes onto me, except I'm a loser-ish kind of daughter, and not the perfect overachiever he'd hoped for. But I'm still his daughter, I suppose, and his only one, so he alternates between life-is-all-good gushy happiness and what-the-hell-you're-such-an-idiot rage moments. Seriously, he has mood swings. And I know it's a bit ridiculous, but I'm rather glad he's in Florida right now. Because then I can turn down the volume on the phone and not listen to him scream when he does fall into his all-hell-has-broken-loose persona.

I am so close to just telling him I won't do any of this. Like, not apply to any school that requires an essay. Basically, any school in Canada. And just not putting up with all of this crap.

But it's my future, and I rather like Penn, so I want to do this. And I kind of hate him for making it come down to this, but I guess it's a life lesson in some ways. We can't all have what we want, and there are always the over-controlling supervisors (or so I've heard), and I need to learn how to deal with this so I don't get heart attacks in the future.

(Plus, I can't really hate him, because after all he's my dad and he's not always awful, just sometimes. But I digress.)

Also, my parents believe I must have learned some really great life lesson from all of my moving and such. They want me to write about it, and they think I can write something really great about it. I don't know what to tell them. "No, mom, I didn't really learn that if I work hard I'll always achieve my dreams even in adversity. I just learned that if you didn't belong to begin with you'll always feel like you don't really belong." I also learned that there is no such thing as forever, gee isn't that optimistic? I didn't learn those standard, heart-rending things they want me to talk about.

I've learned to survive, yes. But that is different depending on the person. My version of survival is living in the present. Their version is striving for success. I am okay with drifting. They are not.

I am searching for something, that is it. I am searching, perhaps for that ever elusive home, perhaps for an identity, perhaps just for a sense of peace and freedom. And it's stupid, because my going to college is against what I really want right now, and especially my following what my parents want me to do. But I don't know what to do otherwise. I am at a loss, and with no physical survival skills whatsoever, I am afraid to take that step.

I'm not you, yes, but I'm not me either.

I don't know who I am.