cce blog

my 23rd year

So my birthday has come and gone, and it's time for the wrap-up on the past year. So while I finish my dinner of cha siu pork and beer, here's the analysis: all in all, I had a good twenty-third year. I think I "broadened my life experience" more than I have in any other year.

I now have memories of places and situations that before were just big question-marks in my mind, or things I'd seen in movies or books. Now I know "what it's like" to be a backpacker bum in Asia; to walk with hundreds of thousands in the biggest anti-war rally in London; to work with scarily impressive PhD's at a huge research center; to chill out under a thatch roof on an island in the Gulf of Siam; to graduate from college; to finish an issue of "The Economist" in a Taiwanese mountain temple; to visit Herve, Belgium, the town that gave me my surname; to make sense of a Chinese newspaper; to be in a Dutch coffeeshop; to go to a Cantonese hardcore punk show; to get dengue fever; to attend a New England "hippie" music festival; to live with my girlfriend; to get extra pages added to my passport; to wear a surgical mask whenever I go out; to watch America in wartime from afar; to actually want a watch that shows time for three time zones; to be in the country where my mother grew up; to be an "expat" (well, "gweilo" at least) in Hong Kong; to climb to the top of Angkor Wat; to ice-skate at a rink in a big HK mall (did this yesterday); and to watch a subtitled Snoop Dogg on MTV Chinese (doing now).

So it was a fun year. The only criticism I can think of was that it wasn't a particularly productive year: I didn't get into grad school, nor did I make bundles of money or further my "career" very much. But from the outset I termed it my "year off," during which I wouldn't worry about those things, so perhaps it isn't appropriate to use this criterion. Plus, during the period when I had a full-time job (June-Oct), I was getting a more-than-reasonable weekly paycheck (which in turn paid for the rest of the year). So.

So. I guess, due to the nature of my "year off," though, these were all just "diversions": I have to "get serious" now, come back to New York and get a job, a life, a car, two kids, a garage, okay, I'm going overboard with this, but you get the point. Like my horoscope said yesterday: "Take the first steps towards planning the future you want." Time to dust off the ol' resume.

But I still have a couple weeks left before my flight home. How much are tickets to Bali going for now ...?