More to Life

Hey everyone, I'm not going to be so literary and descriptive in this post as I have been in the last few. This time it's a message from me to you. First, thanks to all of you who have faithfully visited my blog since I restarted it last winter. Also, welcome to the recent influx of people who arrived here by searching "more to life" on Yahoo!, MSN or whatever other search. I don't know what you were looking for, or what sort of wisdom Yahoo! thinks I have to offer about "more to life" by listing me second on their results to that query (and suddenly boosting traffic to this site). But whatever it is, I hope you manage to find some answer among the pages of my life.

As the year comes to an end and everyone starts looking back on the past year, I invite you to take the time and scroll back in time on my blog and relive some of the crazy highs (more, and more, yay more!) and lows (more, and unfortunately more) I've been through this year.

As for me? Well, I'm leaving on a jet plane. Fear not, though, I know when I'll be back again. January 19th, officially, but I might have a chance to post to my blog once or twice while I'm gone. I'm heading over to the tumultous holy-land, the birth place of three major religions. What a journey!

Okay, so I just want to wish everyone a Happy New Year!!! since I won't be here to type it when it comes along. Oh, and you'll want to check back when I get back... To all those "High School Crush" story fans out there, there will be a part 3 in the series! LOL. Don't get too excited! Think of it more as a denoument (or whatever that means). :-)

Despite my occasional nasty, juicy, red zits and my sometimes uncontrollable, puffy, semi-long hair which would make most aesthetically-minded people run 100mph the other way, Youa would still smile at me and hold up a conversation. Time proved her one of the best friends I made in high school.

Luck had it that at the end of my sophomore year, when Youa graduated, I was accepted to take classes at the university she would be attending. The university, while huge, was small enough for us to run into each other here and there, and in our mutual struggle to adapt to yet another new environment, we made a point to meet up for lunch, or just for some homework sessions in the library after classes were over for the day.

So now, a year since I had last seen her, once she finished switching her grandma's IV tube, we bid her family good bye and drove off to the movie theatre. We both, somehow, sat through 3 hours of Alexander, which was intense. And then since she insisted to buy my movie ticket, I insisted to get her something to eat.

We drove around the outskirts of the Twin Cities, among the boonie neighborhoods and the new silicon suburban developments, for half an hour looking for a half-decent place to eat. Eventually we came across a dimly-lit, sleepy, concrete strip mall along the highway. Nestled in the middle of a sea of parked cars, we found an empty Bruger's Bagel shop. We walked inside and asked if they were still open. Yes, we had twenty minutes left to sit and eat our veggie rosemary-oil bagels before they closed down.

Finally, after a year, we had a chance to sit down face to face and catch up on all the mayhem we missed in each other's lives. I told her about my nightmare of a roommate, and how with a little perseverance and a lot of luck I managed to move out of that hell and into a single room in a different dorm where I found some peace, quiet, and finally some friends. She told me how she's thinking about applying to pharmacy school. Wow, I was so proud of her. This girl came to America as a refugee, grew up in poverty, and to this day can't speak English too well. Few people ever put much faith in her, and yet here she is, rounding out her fourth year of college and thinking about pharmacy school.

"We're closing up now," one of the employees told us. Our time was up. Her father had been calling her and imploring her in Hmong to come home, though that she didn't tell me. I knew our time together was limited, and another year may pass till we see each other again. Of all our five years of friendship we've yet to commemorate it with one picture together. We needed to do it now, or it may never happen.

"Who's going to take our picture?" Youa asked me.

"I don't know." I was too embarrassed to ask one of the Bruger's employees, and Youa was too. We passed another minute or two talking, enough time to convince me to swallow my pride and seize the moment. I walked up to the lady closing up the cashier, "Would you mind taking a picture of us?"

She gave me a blank stare, like, what do I get paid to take customer's pictures? She hardly muttered OK, but I had already thanked her and dashed out to my car to get the camera.

"We're high school friends and we haven't seen each other in a year," I told the cashier as I took the ice-cold camera out of its case. She smiled a bit. I think she finally warmed up to the idea, but I was still embarrassed by my request. I just wanted her to snap the pictures quick and so we could be out of there as soon as possible. Youa less than 5 feet tall stood beside me. I felt like a giant beside her. As she conveniently put her arm around my waist, I tried to kneel down and wrap my arm around shoulder.

"Cheese!" she said. We both busted out toothy smiles, but they camera never flashed. The smiles lingered tensely on our faces waiting as we waited for the picture.

"Try it again!" We refreshed our smiles and stood waiting. Nada. Youa ran up to the lady and took the camera to figure out what's wrong. She fumbled around with it for a bit. "Here, let me see what's wrong." I reach my hand out and moved in a bit closer. I brought my head close to the camera to see if something looked wrong. But Youa wouldn't let go. "Here, just let me have a look." "No, hold on a second, she insisted." I got closer to try to inspect the camera, and all of a sudden I was blinded by a bright blitz of light. As I tried to refocus my eyesight, everyone broke out into a hearty laughter. All right, at least we're all a bit more chilled out now, I thought.
The second round of pictures went much better. We thanked the lady and made our way back into the car.

It was a balmy 3 degrees outside. "Brrrrrrrrrr!!!" I shouted as I felt the snot in my nose freeze. We both sat shivering in the car as we waited for it to warm up a bit. I reached for my seatbelt, and Youa cocked her head up.

"Do you want me to give you a kiss?" she asked.

As if the shock from the cold wasn't enough, my eyes got even bigger and I blinked. "Give me a what?"

Youa was fearless. "Do you want me to give you a kiss?"

"A kiss?!" We were friends. It wasn't like that, after all these years where was this coming from?

Youa smiled and I could see her slightly crooked brown-white teeth. I guess her family never had the money to invest in luxuries like dental hygiene.

"One kiss or many kisses?" She insisted. I gulped as I pictured her lips up against mine.

"On the cheek," I offered.

"OK, one kiss or many kisses?"

"On the cheek?" I wanted to make sure, and yet felt incredibly dumb, like an elementary school kid to whom kissing was still a big deal.

"One kiss or many kisses?"

"On the cheek?" I looked at her as I tried to hide in my puffy winter coat.

She put her fist in my face. I stared at it. What did she want now? She smiled at me and leaned forward. I pushed my head back against the driver's seat. She opened her fist and revealed a handful of Hershey kisses. Oh man. I wanted to piss in my pants (well not really).

"Ahhh!! Hahhaahah," Youa laughed at me. "What did you think I meant?!"

LOL. I was so embarrassed I couldn't stop laughing. She knew exactly what I thought she meant. I gladly took a bunch of her kisses. They were filled with caramel and absolutely delicious.

Today I finally busted out of the house I've been hiding in since I got back here. I took the car and drove over the mighty, frozen Mississippi, past two highways, downtown and the capitol. Tucked a few miles behind the big city, I found the house of my old friend from high school. When I got there, she was standing outside in the 3 degrees Fahrenheit weather in nothing more than pants and a long sleeve shirt.

"Youa," I shouted as I slammed the car door shut and felt the bitter cold pinch my face, "aren't you freezing?!?" I seem to have my own way of saying hello.

She invited me inside, where I had been once before. The house was old and dirty and run-down. I remembered as I saw for the second time, that these are the conditions truly poor people live in. There were dozens of old shoes piled up by the entrance. There was very little furniture: a tiny old couch that hardly sat two people, a wooden stool, and an armchair. Youa pulled up a chair from behind the door, an old one you could imagine having to sit in uncomfortably for hours in school.

Across the room, I spotted her grandma whose body concealed the only armchair. She sat there and looked at me without revealing any expression on her face. I tried to smile towards her, but her expression remained nondescript and unchanged. Her grandma's arm was all red, like a vein popped in her body and you could see the blood rushing up to the surface of the skin. An IV-tube made its way out of her arm, and at the other end of the IV was a bottle with medication sitting by her side.

"We just have to change her tube," Youa told me. I smiled and said that it would be no problem. I looked around the house, but there wasn't much to plant my eyes on. Her mom sat across from me cutting a cube of tofu into the thinnest slices I've ever seen. Her sister, father, and cousin were all huddling around grandma as they cleaned her tubes and switched them.

It's been exactly a year since I've seen Youa. And it was probably half a year since I saw her the time before that. We go back a long way, five and a half years, to my freshman year in high school. Being the nerd that I am, as a first semester freshman, I found myself in Precalculus with all the juniors, Youa included.

Precalculus was the first class in the morning. While most of the students were out socializing by their lockers until the end of the bell forced them into class, I used to head right to class in the mornings. It was a yet another new school for me. I knew no one, and I sure wasn't going to find friends hanging out by locker gossiping about who made out with who over the weekend.
Morning upon morning, I used to see Youa in the classroom, too. Sometimes her head was planted on the desk, covered by the hoodie of her jacket, sometimes she was working on homework, other times she just smiled to me as I walked in. Always, her short legs dangled from the chair seat. Never did they reach the floor.

Youa had big glasses, and the biggest cheeks I'd ever seen. She had stringy black bangs, and hair that could reach far lower than her dangling feet when she sat down. Even though her eyes slanted much more than mine, I thought to myself that maybe with her serious, studious, reserved demeanor she was the closest thing to a friend I could find in this strange America. With time I learned that her family fled the Far East during the Vietnam War and somehow ended up in the whitewashed upper Midwest.

December 15th

I rolled out of bed at 8 a.m., groggy, nauseous. It was cold outside, 19 degrees Fahrenheit, and snowing. Oh brrr, I though to myself. I went through the whole semester without pulling out my winter coat, but out it came this morning. Looking like a green penguin, I walked to the dining hall with my arms puffed out to my sides by my coat. I had a good breakfast, and then I walked back outside. Twenty minutes of walking in the snow up that steep hill again, but this would be the last time.

I rolled into the exam room like a white snowball. I tried to wake up, but I was too sleepy. The professor passed out the final exams, and I looked at it, and I gave it a first try. Too many questions left unanswered. Like during two of my other finals this semester, for a moment I just wanted to pause and cry. I inhaled deep and plowed through my final final.

By 11:45 a.m. I was out of the exam room. All downhill from here. I wanted to give myself a hard time over not feeling too good about that final exam, but before I even started I remembered that this was it. No more of this semester. I was officially done with it. While I can't say that I won't ever take an upper level science class again, I don't plan on taking three in one semester with two more classes "on the side" anytime soon.

Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm. A smile was all I could muster, and my heart felt light. While I was taking the test, the campus maintenance people spread sand and salt all over the sidewalks to melt the snow. The heavy gray clouds cleared up and the sun managed to poke out in between the falling snow flakes. Walking back down the hill I noticed that the sun's rays reflected off the wet, dark, brick sidewalk and made it look golden. That's it, I'm walking down a gold path, my yellow brick road, and I can't even help it.

Looking back on this semester, I find it hard to believe that something that started out so bad ended so good. From living in the campus slums, spending my days in the library and my short nights gripping my pillow tight as my stranger of a roommate slammed his keyboard in between bouts of cussing time and time again, to moving into my own place halfway through the semester, finding friendship for the first time in this cold place, learning to put myself first even when it meant putting my schoolwork second, and beginning to experience something like my own inner peace for the first time. It seems like I came a long way, and I don't even know what that means.

December 16th

Now two airplane flights and a refreshing 11-hour night sleep separate me from that weird semester. It's over, and most of all I'm moving on. But dang, I'm sure gonna miss those impromptu one, two, step dance parties with my neighbors. We turned it into quite a tradition during final's week! LOL. Aw shucks, I guess I’ve even got something to look forward to now. :-)

Sorry avid readers. I know I've been treating this blog of mine, my virtual home on the net, like some nasty old attic. So please excuse me as the dust settles down on this place. I'm going through final exams. First one started today, last one ends on Wednesday. Then it's home, back to the Heartland where the sun shines a bit brighter, and the bed mattress is a bit bigger and comfier.

Hold on tight!

Around 5 p.m. I ventured all the way to my neighbors' door. I knocked politely and heard a "come in." They were both there, the space cadet nutritionist and the chemical engineer. They were both sitting by their desks and looking kind of subdued. They both half turned their heads to catch a glance of me as I walked into their room. Oh boy, this might be a tough one to pull off.

"Hi," I said with a smile across my face that I couldn't contain, and one gripped hand behind my back.

"You guys!" I whined in protested to their apathetic mood.

"It's the end of the semester!!!" I shouted and tossed a handful of tootsie rolls in the air. Their eyes opened a bit wider and traces of a smile spread across their faces as they followed the trajectory of the flying toostie rolls.

"It's the last day of classes, and it's over!!! YAY!!!" I gave another try to spread my enthusiasm.

"Yay," the nutritionist said blandly.

"Oh yeah," said her chemical engineer roommate.

As the tootsie rolls settled onto the floor between us, so did a moment of awkward silence. We stared at each other.

"Well, that was a great party," I said in a dull tone, ready to turn around and leave. "Where's the music, the excitement, the enthusiasm?"

Cha-ching. The nutritionist, who's in a dance troupe, came to life. Two minutes later the three of us were standing in a line in the middle of the room getting our one-two step on. The music was blasting, we were stepping to the left, spinning the right, and jumping back and forth. Being on the top floor of the building I'm sure we managed to spread some of our excitement to the floors beneath us. But hey, sometimes that's just what people need.