all who wander

Well, I’m finally home. “Home” home even, not the in-The-States-with-my-parents-but-inhabiting-some-leaky-Florida-condo kind of home. I had a really great vacation, but I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to step on North Carolina soil and taste air that is fresh and clean and that is , most importantly, somewhat distinguishable from soup. I really didn’t realize I missed it so much. I read a book last semester that said something like, “Everyone has to leave home sometime so they can come back and fall in love with it all over again, for whole new reasons” and I think that’s probably true. I’ve never been so happy to just lie in bed and listen to the night.

I’ve done a bit of visiting in the last few days I’ve been home and most everyone has asked me if I miss Asia and Honestly, I don’t (well, beside the food anyway). I am so, so, so happy I went, it was a really good life decision, but I’m felt like I got enough out of the experience to move on to whatever is next in my life. A book I finished last week called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years spoke in ‘story’ terms, so this is inevitably the perspective my highly impressionable blob of grey matter has adopted for the time being. He had written a small autobiography and had a movie offer, so he was helping to adapt the book for the big screen. He had to learn a lot about just the difference between literature and movies, and said one of the things that made Star Wars so good was that it could be freeze-framed at any given point and you were able to pick out anyone on screen and know exactly what they wanted, what their overall goal was. So anyway, he was basically having to edit his life, pick through all these random memories and occurrences (as well as make up a good deal of them) in order to give “his story” an clear plot fit for presentation to a larger audience. Talk about a humbling experience. I don’t know what my story is about yet. I mean, we’re half an hour in at this point and the main character (protagonist?) is still wandering about with her head in the clouds. And though I don’t think this trip has given me any neon signs to point me in the right direction, no neat story line or conclusions, I think it was definitely a “positive turn”, something that changed the internal me enough that hopefully the change will come out later on and be conducive to whatever the heck I decide to do in the future. I don’t have things very ‘together’ at this point, nor have I ever, but I know at least quite a number of things I don’t want my story to be about. Like Miller says, no one ever cried at the end of a story about a guy who wanted a Volvo.

Well, here are the last of my pictures. Hope you enjoy them. I guess I’m going to go deal with the current crisis in my life: finalizing (aka creating) next semester’s schedule. Happy trails.


After dinner with the Ongs. That's Lydia, Clark, Abs, Andre, and your's truly.


My last Singaporean meal. Garlic naan with chicken curry, eggplant, some spicy bean concoction, a mango-watermelon smoothie, and the ever-present rice.