The Super One is the individual who holds the Super Couple together when Kryptonite has temporarily crippled the Other Half.  The Super One is also the individual who accomplishes a vast number of tasks in lightening-quick time when the sheer number of tasks to be accomplished can produce Kryptonite-like effects: paralysis, wall-staring, incessant internet-surfing.

To my credit, there have been times in the two years with Nic that I’ve had to be the Super One.  Super Cook, Super Earner, Super Editor—to say nothing of Super Guy—are all capes I have worn.  In recent weeks, I’ve been Super Seller (not to be confused with Super Earner, mind you): all but two big items have been sold and we have three and a half weeks left.

Though I did sell a couple items yesterday, I may have faltered in my task at the train station. Not only that, I was trapped in a string of multi-tasks: trying to write yesterday’s entries, dealing with a couple interested buyers, trying to move all four and a half years of my Korea pictures over to Flickr.  All of these took way longer than they should have.

On the other hand, Nic’s focus was one of the Super One, ticking off things that we had talked about and put on a to-do list.  As you may know by now,  I am not the most logistically sound person (due to ADD or lack of sleep or idiocy), so the number of items Nic took care of yesterday would have taken me a week, the headache of dealing with bureaucracy causing apoplexy in the mornings and procrastination in the afternoon, and general anxiety in the evenings.  My Super Wife filed 2010 taxes, bought traveler’s insurance, bought boxes so we can start sending books and clothes home, worked out some logistics on getting visas for Vietnam, reserved two sleeper berths for Kuala Lampur to Hat Yai, typed up currency conversions for five countries and typed up flight itineraries.  All this and she still had the energy to read aloud a chapter of my first novel that is going through another revision.  Oh, she wasn’t done yet.  She also consoled me about my 24 hours of general ineptitude.

I’m not late in posting here.

It’s 430 in the afternoon and I haven’t been drinking since 3.  It all didn’t start with a Kahlua and coffee.  It didn’t move on to a beer and then a Beam and coke.

The absurdity of fictitious Wednesday afternoon drinking was not brought on by the madness of the Busan Train Station this morning, the first availability of tickets for those wishing to ride the rails during Lunar New Year Holiday (February 2 thru 4 attached nicely on a natural weekend for a full five days with family and paying respect to ancestors at their graves).  There weren’t the grubby, yelling lunatics that train stations seem to attract.  I didn’t stand in line from 915AM until 1100 knowing my objective: February 2 one-way tickets for two on any available train.  When asked to write down the date and time on a piece of paper just before reaching the head of the line, I didn’t write 2/1.  I didn’t get tickets for the day before we were to travel.

I didn’t curse at myself after realizing my mistake.  I didn’t berate myself for my failed attempt at a coup for this highly-sought-after travel day.  I didn’t talk to myself like a crazy person in any of the world’s train stations.  I didn’t call myself a fucking old moron.  I didn’t have a little crisis.  I didn’t tell Nic.  I didn’t hear consoling words from her.  She didn’t give perspective, saying a leisurely jaunt up to Seoul would be better than the madness of Lunar holiday travel and trying to make it to the airport when time was a factor (the day of our Korea departure).

I don’t worry about my non-senility.  I don’t still console myself with Nic’s perspective.  I don’t feel a hell of a lot better now.  I don’t have to prepare dinner now.

The Bard wrote:

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day…”

Mondays are still tedious.  Running around town, tying up loose secret agent ends at Russian tea houses.  Also, at the university, I relinquished keys to an office with a view of the Nak River Valley; I also ceded books with notes, recycled two and a half years of unclaimed student papers and exams, signed final papers for legal and monetary reasons.  It was much more of a grind, too, since it was too damned cold out yesterday to ride anywhere.  I took the Silla shuttle up the hill from the subway, giving me flashbacks to my first month or so at the university.  You’d think I’d sleep like a baby, but I had a workmare last night, one that doesn’t stop completely and seems to go on half the night because you just cannot wake up from the nagging dream that you’ve forgotten something or are being asked to do something that you really don’t want to do.

“To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.  Out, out, brief candle!”

I still have to return a couple research books to the library today and may have to return other research books used for my new novel before the end of the month, but all official business is complete.   Nonetheless, I still had that damned workmare.  Will I shuck off this coat of professional responsibility in full, or will it stay strapped like a straightjacket?  A dusting of snow last night is still on the ground.  As I walked back from the gym, I still couldn’t comprehend that a month from now I will be in the midst of summer sitting on beach in Thailand, bleaching my mane and cheek-locks with sunshine.  Also, over breakfast, Nic read a little to me about a section of the Annapurna where you reach the highest pass, over 5400m.  You must take two or three nights to acclimatize to the elevation and then head out early on the day of six to eight hours of walking in which you ascend over 1000m and then descend another 1000m.  In a departure from our routine, we dusted off our trekking packs.  Things suddenly became a little more real.

“Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard from no more:…”

I’ll slip back on to campus today to take care of library business.  My last few weeks at the university have been quiet.  Came down with a mysterious case of “I don’t give a fuck” Syndrome (IDNGAFS) for the last faculty meeting and didn’t attend.  Was still feeling a few symptoms of IDNGAFS for the Christmas party and didn’t attend that either.   I’ve strutted and fretted enough for paltry monetary gain and a pat on the back; I suppose this is a side-effect of many jobs.  At least in my experience.  I need to find something that pays and that I am passionate about.  The idealist never dies.

“it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

I’ve still got student loan debt.  I’ll return to the US in roughly the same economic shape I was in when I took off all those years ago to come here.  Having said that, I don’t think this has been a tale told by an idiot.  He’s just an idealist that still believes the lack of home roots and monetary sustenance, ironically, has allowed him to thrive, grow in ways that the direct path to “domestic bliss” could not have provided.  The struggles of my 20s and the expatriatism of my 30s signifies everything to a solid future for family, home, roots.

January will be a month of lasts—last day at Silla University (today), last shabu-shabu (last night), last night in Korea, last love motel, last visit with friends, last hike in the mountains here, last chumchi doc bap, last look at the Nak River just outside Busan as we slide along the shore north toward Seoul on the KTX on February 2, last Christmas, last birthday, last dinner party. There are others. I’ll recount my experiences of these lasts here.

But, if January is a month of lasts, December was a month of firsts—as a married man, first margarita, first Christmas, first birthday, first dinner party. First time I wrote consistently in months.

So, if December was a month of firsts, and January was a month of lasts, it stands to reason that February will be a month of firsts. Certainly, it is desirable that there was this kind of predictability in life; and surely I’d complain about it if there was that sort of predictability. But January will bleed into February. There is no clear delineation in the meaning of firsts and lasts at this crossroads. I will here demonstrate: It will be the first time I’ll be saying goodbye to Korea for the last time, the first time I’ll be unemployed in two and a half years, the first time I won’t subject myself to the after-effects of shabu-shabu or chumchi doc bap. And next year will be the first time in five years that I won’t have a working birthday, a marginally-boozed margarita, a Christmas without family, or a dinner party without California wine.

It is this sort of logic that may allow me to wind my way past much melancholy as I set off on the Great Asian Adventure with Nic. It is also this kind of logic that allows me to think of the things ahead instead of focusing too much on the negative aspects of Korea that I will leave behind.

To that end, and not to belabor the point, I’ll move on to a first. I realized the other day how much time Nic and I have in Kuala Lampur (KL) on our connecting transportation. The cheapest tickets we could find all went from Incheon (Korea’s major airport in Seoul) to Malaysia. And, for the purposes of adventure (and for budget reasons), we’re going to do a border crossing into Thailand on train. The thing is that we arrive in KL at 5AM on February 3; we don’t have to be on the sleeper train until 9 that night. So, the first big adventure outside Korea together (aside from meeting the parents last winter) is a whirlwind of one of southeast Asia’s premiere cities. With the little reading that I’ve done, it is a good way to ease yourself into that region of the world: the light rail is supposed to be spectacularly easy and facilitates the visitiation of many different areas in the city. Aside from the world’s second largest towers—Petronas Towers—we’ll be visiting the colonial areas of Little India for some roti and some dahl and colorful saris; Chinatown for chaos; Detaran Merdeka (Independence Square) and the National Mosque. With all that time, these places seem easy to see in a 12 hour period. And sure, we’ll be running ragged, so a little coffee with condensed milk as we sit and write postcards near the Central Market will revive us. Besides, the train trip that night will be the first time I will sleep like a baby on a train.

When great change is afoot, I tend to dream more.  I take instruction from legitimate dreams.  A sober, unplugged journey could bear vast implications to my inner life.  Sex and death.  That’s what I’ve dreamed of most of my adult life.  The sex has involved “me” in the dreams; the death has happened to “others.”  Some might say that these two motifs are symbolically, metaphorically, psychologically similar.

Though I still find myself often thinking about death and sex, I don’t dream much anymore.  Maybe it’s a sign of aging—which I refuse to believe; maybe it’s a by-product of a few evening drinks—which is only sometimes the case; or maybe my life really hasn’t been as much in a state of upheaval as I often seem to make it out to be.  Does this make me a liar, a purveyor of dreams that didn’t happen, a shadow-maker of dreams that are really only the daytime imaginings of an idle mind?  And when I do dream, its validity comes into question: was it really a manifestation of some legitimate inner turmoil, or was it that I watched a twisted episode of television or tripped-out movie?  The “media dreams,” as I call them, are merely the collective rare bit dream of a writers’ group who ate bad pork at some late night staff meeting.  I always disregard these media dreams.

On the other hand, what do I make of a series of recent negative dreams about my recently-commenced beard?  Why aren’t my eyebrows scorned?  Why isn’t the peach fuzz on my ears ridiculed?  (Probably because, in reality, Nic won’t let those get out of hand.)  At any rate, my beard, of all things, is the one hair-growth project that looks good. While the increasing length of my cranial fuzz at the very top of my head looks like the path less traveled or one slightly overgrown wagon-rut on the Oregon Trail, my facial follicles have suffered no indignity since last I implemented a moratorium on cheek-shaving.  In one dream, though, a group of students told me I should shave the beard off because it looked stupid.  In another dream, Nic told me she didn’t like it.  (In waking hours, though, she tells me she likes it.)  And, in last night’s dream, I looked at myself in the mirror and pondered the cutting of said beard.

The reasons for growing my hair out are two-fold.

One is practical: not only is it cold here in Korea and there are still some peaks to train on (we head out this Sunday morning in 38 degrees F), but when I get to southeast Asia (in spite of the heat), I’ll have less to worry about in terms of maintenance of short hair and shorn cheeks; all the more time to ponder the weight of the world.  In addition, the extra hair will provide much-needed extra warmth on 4000m Himalayan spring nights, keeping shivering to a minimum and holding The Brothers Karamozov steady.

The other reason I am growing my hair out is a symbolic au revoir to social norms.  This is not to say that I will also take to touching Thais on the tops of their heads, moving ritualistic artifacts in Vietnamese hill people’s villages, laughing while in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, or eating with my left hand in Nepal.  I’ll do my best to represent myself well in these culturally diverse situations.   However, I have worked hard and earned my place on this trip.  I deserve to thumb my nose—at least for a little while—at those who say only an unrespectable, disrespectful man has an unkempt and disheveled mane.  The travel beard is by no means a unique concept.  I, however, fully intend to participate in it.

 

“Estranged” Holden said, maybe just to get Grace riled.  She yelled at him, “Patience!” And she left the singing room and went home.  He was just having fun at her expense.  Everyone knows “Welcome to the Jungle” is the best Guns n Roses song, but long ago—six months or so—they’d agreed “Patience” was their song.

Over-reaction, sure.  It was stressful at home with the stray cat they were trying to find a home for—the cat was running incessant  laps on the counter and table tops, gnawing on plants, assassinating peaceful toes.  But the real reason they were out at the singing room was to escape the rhino upstairs.  The house had been shaking every night for five hours, a large mammal upstairs doing laps or gymnastics or just seeing how long it took for the humans downstairs to come and complain.  The rhino wanted to spear the human and laugh.  Holden was sure.

It was his call to go out that night.  Everything bothered him more than it did her.  She had the uncanny ability to close her ears when watching YouTube—which she did more than anyone really ought to.  Is “Growing Pains” really that great of a show that she couldn’t at least show some sympathy when Holden was complaining about the cat or the noise or his students or the administration or the traffic or the market owner or the unsanitary conditions at the doctor’s office?

The cat was sweet to Grace.  The cat–named Pumpkin but really should have been named  Cheeto–was dubbed Stupid by Holden.  Grace didn’t like that; it was the one thing she always heard with those skillfully-selective ears of hers.  The cat didn’t like the name Stupid, either.  If only Grace would see Pumpkin during the long hours of alone time Holden and the cat spent.  Since Grace was teaching winter session all day, Holden was left to his own devices.  Since Pumpkin only understood Korean, he couldn’t sympathize with Holden’s emasculation as the house wench and plight as the ever-besieged foreigner.

Out of sheer boredom, Holden tried many times to befriend the cat; but Pumpkin didn’t seem to like being put on his back and spun on the hardwood floor and then left to bump off furniture and fall over.  Inevitably, when Holden was between cleaning the breakfast dishes and making dinner, he would take a nap or read a book on tourism in Thailand or stare at the ceiling.  Just as surely, Pumpkin would attack, an elaborate and patient assault on unguarded toes or fingers.

Just yesterday, Holden caught the cat by his tail after one such surprise attack.  He pulled the cat toward him, picked him up by the scruff of his back and flung him against the wall.  If Grace knew this, they would certainly break up.  She was or wasn’t accusatory, asking why the cat cringed behind her all night after she got home.  Holden said Pumpkin was Stupid, that’s why.

Could it really be true, Grace said to herself, that this boyfriend of hers had been a teacher of small Korean children for the past six years?  Could it really be true, she continued her internal rhetorical query, that she loved him?

When Holden got home from the singing room, Grace was surfing the net: watching the series finale of “Growing Pains” for the sixth time, looking at prices for taking a cat home with her, scanning Monster.com.  She didn’t look up as Holden walked toward the kitchen.  Pumpkin fled frantically from under the dining table and knocked over a small plant.  After he’d settled under the bed, Pumpkin meowed plaintively.  The rhino upstairs was pirouetting and the elephant in the room stayed absolutely still.

[46 minutes]

For my birthday, I decided I wanted to have one last dinner party in this great apartment before all the furniture, pots, pans, plates are sold.

I have few delusions and many failures to speak of when it comes to cooking for guests.  A logistically unsound person to begin with, I am flustered and have been known to spend the entire evening managing my missteps in the workspace while the party rolls on elsewhere in the house; if the wine and company are good, my frenetics may go unnoticed.  By the grace of Mark Bittman and Anthony Bourdain (God surely does not exist in my kitchen), I’ve pulled off a few wins in the dinner party category.  Last night was a win.

My issue in the kitchen is timing.  Therefore, I started the day before with my homemade marinara wickedness. Stewed canned tomatoes have a lot of water and need to be boiled down; also, the red wine (always cook with what you drink; idiots use  “cooking” wine) in the sauce needs time to sit and have a long friendly conversation with the herbs and garlic in the sauce (oh, for the days when I can grow my own herbs).  I recommend this day-in-advance prep for all red sauces (and soups, incidentally).  The day-in-advance prep also works for larger dinner parties because ten is not an easy number to prepare for.  If you want time to actually socialize with the guests and you want a casual atmosphere, this menu is perfect.

This is not to say that you won’t be in the kitchen the day of your party.  Yesterday, I felt like I was in the kitchen all day, washing dishes, adding to the sauce, washing more dishes, cleaning around the house, coming back to the sauce, adding more of what was needed.  The layering of the flavors really allows for a rich, full-bodied final product.  Round out your day-before-prep with as many mushrooms, spinachi (the plural of spinach) or other veggies (eggplant or zucchini) as possible.

I’ve never made the same sauce twice.  Aside from the aforementioned tips, it is important to note that I really don’t work with a recipe.  When I set off on a marinara adventure, I have the basic procedures in mind, the little signatures that make the base of my sauce unique (there are a few secrets I only divulge to dinner guests).  However, it could be the external variables such as the season, the guests, the wine (or even if I am feeling a bit cocky and adventurous from a successful day at the keyboard) that influence the final product.  In any case, tasting as I go, doting over the concoction and adding what’s needed/desired is effort that, while certainly time-consuming, is absolutely not labor intensive.

The smells that emanate the house invariably will bring a certain wife into the kitchen.  But this is yet another part of cooking in general that I truly enjoy.  For this aspiring cook, putting together a meal–whether it be for two, ten or twenty–requires outside discernment and suggestion.  With Nic’s help, the fashioning of this sauce yesterday, specifically, was like she was helping me edit a short story: masking a flavor that was too strong was like a deletion of a superfluous or poorly-written sentence; adding a squeeze of lemon at the very end was like choosing one synonym over another.

In addition to the red sauce, there was also a Chef Nikolai standard.  Anyone who’s anyone knows the pride I take in my Caesar salad, the recipe I took from Ma and made my own (she never used anchovies, an omission which I cannot fathom).  But I won’t go on about this.  Caesars are simple and if you want the recipe, I’ll give it to you.  Again, over time, you’ll make it your own depending on your taste.

None of this would have been complete without Nic’s herbaceous, spicy garlic bread.  Also, she made some killer chocolate chip cookies.  In addition to the chocolate-covered sunflower seeds, the real coup de grace was when she decided to sprinkle just a few grains of sea salt on the top.  The results were a perfect balance of sweet and savory that could be dipped in either milk or–less-traditionally–the remainders of your wine.

This will sound like yet another elaborate excuse, but it’s not.  I was just about to settle into a couple hours of reading and re-acquainting myself with the work I have so far completed on the second novel; however, my computer started to freak out.  Every so often, a message will pop up that tells me my computer has 34 malware, spyware and viruses.  Of course, this stops any writing progress dead in its tracks.  All I need is one more month out of this piece of shit, 4.5 year-old computer, and now, now of all times, it starts giving me grief.  I immediately went into panic mode, trying to get some virus protection, all of which costs an arm and a leg.  A saavy friend of mine even recommended a free virus-killer, but the “shield” that is on my computer currently won’t allow it to download. 

Stupid, old, ignorant Me, I thought that closing the computer down and giving it a rest would fix things.  However, this morning, I write furiously here because that didn’t work.  I think there is a timebomb in this computer and it will melt down at any moment.  Luckily for me–but not so much for my writing habit–I was able to offload all important docuements onto my external hard drive.  As of now, all important things are safe.  But I think this computer has shut itself down a couple times, too.  So, as I said, I type here without much recourse–or editing, for that matter: I cannot even open MS Word and typy my entry beforehand as usually do.

Anyhow, as I let my computer rest yesterday evening, I went out for my birthday after a secret agent meeting at a Russian teahouse.  I had a gluttonous Western-style dinner (of the kind I am ashamed to admit here) and then just tried to take in a movie.  But the only English language movie that’s out right now is F’ing Harry Potter and the Witch’s Cold Tit or something like that.  We settled for a DVD bang (a room where you can watch a movie in a little, private theater).  Now, I’ve been to these establishments before.  The concept is nice, but the sleazy underside of this kind of operation is they are usually doubling as a cheap way for teens and uni students to get sexy with each other.  Watch a movie in the dark, get a hand job, get a blow job, have your first sex.  All for 1/4 the price of a “love motel.”  Pretty great, except I just want to watch a movie (I have the money and a goddamned apartment…most times).  Last night was one of those times and this just happened to be the most disgusting DVD bang I ever encountered. 

In addition to the projector lamp being well past its prime so the movie (as marginal as it was, oh Robin Hood) looked as if all the shots were taken in moonlight, there were other standard greats of this movie-watching adventure.  There was the standard faux-leather sofa, this one in paticularly torn-up state; the ubiquitous Kleenex box was ready for action; and lots of action had been had, apparently.  Dried jizz shots on the wall (and who knows where else; I might be pregnant now, for all I know) and a full trashcan of spent kleenex jizz rags.  Awesome!  And it gave me something to write about here.

Okay.  Fuck this computer.  It just shut down on me without warning.  Good thing Nic has a working one and I have all my important docs off this dying dinosaur of a computer.

All this old man needs is a change of scenery from time to time.  After four and a half years here, I have travelled to Japan twice: once on the famous one-day foreigner visa run to Fukuoka, and the second time on a ten day holiday to Osaka and Kyoto.  The only other place I went to was Beijing; this was no mean feat, since the memory of bicycling on the hairy streets of Beijing and the 10 km hike on top of the Simitai section of The Wall is forever etched in my mind. 

But these travels amounted to a little over two weeks in nearly half a decade here in Asia.  Granted, I’ve been to the US three times, but let’s be honest: going home isn’t really a vacation (as Nic is fond of saying), what with the semi-celebrity status incurred by many months away.  I clamber for the beach; I lust for white sand and turquoise water.  I long to be at the top of a mountain.  I seek the mystery and splendor of ancient capitals and the haunting of genocide sites. Well, Nick, haven’t you lounged on Haeundae Beach for two or three days a week in the summer for the last two seasons?  Haven’t you been to most of the major peaks in Busan?  didn’t you write an article about one of the hikes in Busan?  Haven’t you twice been to Korea’s ancient capital of Gyeongju?  Like I said, I need a change of scenery.

I need not leave the beach at all for a week.  I need jungle mountains that are steamy and verdant.  I need a better sense of history than this town has given me.  I need to better understand real suffering and loss; odd that it’s tough to find that in Korea, given its history.

Last night, the Thailand itinerary took a little more shape.  A week on Ko Pha-Ngan’s northern shore with sleeping, swimming, eating, reading, writing, hiking.  That’s sure to revive the body for the remaining 2.5 weeks of breakneck travelling north to Bangkok, then west to Kanchanaburi where thousands of Allied POWs perished while building a railway to Burma’s ports during Japanese occupation of Thailand during WWII; this is also the site of the Bridge on the River Kwai—yes, they made a classic movie with a rather young Alec Guinness.  After a quick return to Bangkok, we’ll head to the ancient Thai capital of Ayuthaya (four hours north of Bangkok) before heading far to the northwest corner for the mountainous province of Chiang Mai, trekking in Pai (pronounced “bye”) and caving in Mae Hong Son.  There may even be time to hit Thailand’s highest peak, Doi Inthanon (2565m).

Quickly I jot here, as this secret agent has a 9 o’clock.  But it is not on my autobike that I go.  In metric, that’s -1 degree C what I mean?  In English Imperial, that’s 30 degrees F that.  With the winds kicking up to 15 mph by noon, that’s really F’ing cold. 

Last year I rode in the bitter, windy cold 15 times in 3 weeks to teach a two hour class.  I didn’t get the feeling to my fingertips or my X and Y chromosomes till mid Spring.  Yes, I know I’ve written that before, but it seems that memory goes as you get older.  Or maybe it’s just that I have been in the cold too much and have lost brain cells related to processing sounds and reading words properly.  So, I have either early onset dementia exacerbated by excessive cold winds on an autobike, or I am just old.  Tomorrow I turn 34.  I will be exactly the same age my dad’s brother was when I was born.  I wonder if he had these problems when he was my age.  One bright spot is that the other 12/28 baby in the family has his wits about him and still runs a few times a week and travels around the world in his retirement.

In any case, I am still one of the youngest in my extended family, but at my mid-thirties, I still have the aches and pains brought on by using my youth for good (or at least fun).  The knees that bother me are a result of four years of eggbeater treading water and a drunken spill or two.  The bad shoulders get creaky in the cold, leftover pain from too much wrenching of my shoulders doing the backstroke or pump-faking the water polo ball.  Yes, somewhere I have written breifely about these things before, too.  But now that I am in my mid-thirties, I am allowed to repeat myself.  Also, not everyone that is reading this knows of the senility from which I suffer.  Maybe I should just go back on Metadate and gradually increase my dose until I don’t need that morning cup of coffee or even to sleep anymore. 

Sleep is for the weak, and I get weak early in evenings, finding the pillow most nights (except the holidays and the night before the night before my marriage) before 10pm.  This often times only means that I am tired and need a nap, apparently, because half the time I wake up before the bell-ringing monks at the Buddhist temple a quarter mile from here.  Maybe I should just be a monk.

It is at this time of year that people make their pledges for the new year.  I think that’s a bit of malarkey.  I think everyone should make their birthday resolutions.  And people should be a little more realistic about things.  For example, when I was younger, my New Year’s resolution was to do a hundred sit-ups a day to get rid of baby fat.  I still have baby fat.  Another common resolution was that I would read more and get better math grades.  I never read more until I entered university.  And my grades in math went exponentially down in high school, starting with “Bs” my freshman year, ending with “Ds” my senior year.

Resolutions are too far-reaching, in my experience.  They will not stick.  So, instead of making an empty promise to myself and the resolution universe (which will get lost in all the other empty promises floating around the stratosphere this time of year anyway), I’ll make a 33% birthday resolution and start with that.  And I make these resolutions as a way test the waters in how to proceed with the rest of my life, thus doing away with resolutions all together. (This idealistic early morning writer looks a little into the future and says there will be times of lapse, i.e. when he reaches the land of beer, bratwurst and cheese, all bets are off).  After 1/3 of a year, we’ll see where I am. 

But, before that time, on the journey in Asia, I am devoted.  I will write a letter a day to a family member when I am on the Asian trail.  I will practice the art of caring for my gastro-intestinal region (that’ll be difficult with all the cheap pad thai  and Thai beer in the first month, and dal tadka and buttered chipati in Nepal; but excess is what needs to be managed).  I will take the time to absorb my surroundings with mostly sober eyes and a mostly monk-like devotion to the experiences I will have.