changes and happenings

A lot of things have happened. While not everything has been smooth or even pleasantly rocky, I feel the heaviest kind of lucky. It's quite sappy how consciously lucky I feel every day to have everything I do, how much it holds up even the worst days. To inadequately recap. I spent the summer in Vietnam to work on a public health project. I traveled to the center and south, and lived in the north. I stayed in a rural town for a couple weeks, visited my dad's old village, and lived with my uncle, his son and his son's family in the city the rest of the time. My cousin's wife, quite possibly the sweetest person I've ever met, cried at the airport when I was leaving.

I spent three full days at home in which my dad told me how he planted a near dying cherry tree in the middle of our yard and my mom armed me with hoisin sauce to bring to New Haven. You know how parents are cute to everyone but their own kids? My parents are so cute even I think so. I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving, and having a full week with them (and all the brothers, so I think it might be our first full family Thanksgiving ever). My mom keeps reminding me we'll make the turkey together (she made her first one only a couple years ago) and that she'll make my favorite meal too. She and my dad keep asking me if I need funds, something they haven't done in years. I'm guessing they're asking now because they think I've run out, which I was worried about too, but it looks like I'll be able to ride out at least this next year on residual income and aid, which is another part of the luck. But it's funny to me that my mom tells me not to worry about buying a dress for the semi-formal because she doesn't want me to "suffer" (literal translation).

I drove cross country with Allison. We stopped in Tahoe, Lovelock Nevada, Salt Lake City Utah, Denver Colorado, Wall South Dakota, Madison Wisconsin, Rockville Maryland, Lancaster Pennsylvania and arrived here after ten days, 72 hours which were spent driving. We saw lots of rocks and castles, real and figurative. We saw salt and sunsets and my new nephew. We talked a lot, and laughed an unfathomable amount. We played lame games and took pictures of nothing (on the hour). Silly things happened, like our Wisconsin adventure which included bruises and a flooded bathroom. Beautiful things were seen, like Utah and the beautiful beautiful Badlands, which are not castles but make you feel royal, but also small. I'm so so glad that we took the trip and that Allison was the Thelma to my Louise, because how often do you get to do that and more rarely, have it be quite perfect? When in your life you feel both brave and unsure and open to emptiness, drive across your country with your Thelma.

Upon returning to New Haven, I embarked on a scrambled unique honeymoon with the wife, traveling in a 14-foot U-Haul to retrieve and move furniture. First time I've bought real furniture, first time I drove a U-Haul. It took me a full week to get everything and unpack, a week in which I ignored all things school while realizing in class that we were already supposed to have learned in that week what would've amounted last year to a month of material. But it doesn't matter, because I love our new home almost as much as I love the wife. We live on a street lined with restaurants and little shops like the camera store and the random stuff store and the art store and the Art School, and two coffeeshops, including one that's half a block away and owned by Asians who already know how much I love chai. We're on the first floor of an old brick house with hardwood floors and white walls encased in darker wood, with a big kitchen and the homey feel I knew I wanted when we were looking for an apartment. It's just that much farther from school, and that much closer to downtown. Jen and I cook, and Nupur has a bread machine.

School is intense. I can't learn this much this fast. We're learning in modules this year, and we've started with the heart. One of the most interesting, and complicated. Apparently in a month we're supposed to understand the diseases, know the treatments (what do you give first? what's a last resort? what do you give to diabetics?), comprehend how an EKG works and what it's supposed to look like in every kind of dysfunction of your heartbeat (do you know how many different ways your heart can beat?). All this makes me again grateful for being here, without real exams or grades, so I'm still able to appreciate how intellectually satisfying the science is and remember how lucky and awesome it is to pursue something that works your mind and heart. The year's going to be a bit insular, all of us cooped up studying, which sounds kind of sucky but there will probably never be an excuse again to just be cramming in knowledge (hopefully) without other obligations.

At the very least I like the people I'm cooped up with, and through everything else I feel most lucky for the sheer quantity and quality of the people in my life. My college blockmates are all really happy and kicking ass in their respective areas of work/study, and that makes me really happy, to think of everyone growing through the ups and downs of the post-grad years with such grace. It's even crazier to think on the growth with my high school friends who are still some of the best people I know. And in New Haven I have the family I adopted (or who adopted me), people who really love me and at the lowest points (which have indeed already been experienced in the past few weeks) remind me I have absolutely everything I need. Anything that's been hard reminds me also of how there are things I still don't know about myself, and how the more painful experiences force you to know yourself. How you're built, what you value. I know better that honesty matters to me more than acts, that there are things I know I deserve even as much as we hate to use that word on our own behalf, that for as much as I communicate there's a whole lot I miss about even people I know really well and so I need to work on that, that even if you're supposed to pick your battles I will never be able to give up on a person that gave me reason to start trying in the first place. In the end, even if what you find makes things harder--not so much the realization but you yourself--there's good reason for being how you are, and good reason for how each person is.

Reading this over confirms the sap that gratitude makes you produce. But another point is just--so things are quite different. I don't think I'll be blogging much from now on, because I started writing a tiny bit over the summer and I think I want to try as much as I can to continue that, and this year forces me to choose. I'm not sure what happened, but I think it's been this accumulation of gratitude that's pushed me to finally put some things into stories, or rather, clumps. I'll return somewhere in between clumps.