Stick and I went to Play! A Videogame Symphony at the Koka Booth Amphitheatre a few weekends ago. We joined the crazy quilt of blankets, over a carpet of drying pine needles, and unpacked our cheese, olives, Nintendo DS, and those mini wine bottles I keep calling chardonnay shots. We must have been flying the [...]
I was listening to Obama’s Cairo speech on NPR the other day when the radio cut out and it went to static. My first thought was not that I was driving through a radio dead zone, or that NPR might be having difficulties, but that Obama must have mentioned Tiananmen and gotten censored.
I am more [...]
As months go by, I’m getting more and more soured on the endless parking lots here, opening into shopping or office complexes and strip malls without sidewalks, a city designed for a life like that of the old Peking emperors, where our feet never touch the ground. My wanderlust is frustrated by roads that don’t [...]
When I went to the Arts&Crafts Conference a couple weeks ago, I took the bus from Raleigh to Asheville.
I tried to buy tickets on the Greyhound website, but every time I did, it returned an error and asked me to try again. Then I called their phone sales number, and spoke to some mindblowingly unhelpful [...]
Sometimes I forget how much having lived in China affects me. I don’t mean my new appreciation for bread and cheese, although I think Chinese food has something to do with that. I mean how out of the American loop I am, and how unfamiliar certain tasks are to me. Driving is the worst one, [...]
When I was a kid, one of my favorite jokes was about the Viper. A lady in a big house all alone gets a call from “the viper” telling her he’ll see her tomorrow… then tonight… then in 1 hour… then in 10 minutes… and then a man arrives to vash and vipe the vindows! [...]
I got my North Carolina driver’s license yesterday. I just can’t get over how polite and friendly people are here, even in the DMV. It was still a long process, partly because nothing n North Carolina moves quickly, and partly because I was trying to use a Yankee license and a Yankee checkbook, and I [...]
I planned to write a post about starting a job today, teaching SAT prep. Towards the end of the job interview, when we were talking about where to park and what time to arrive, the main teacher (I’m the assistant) happened to mention that it’s a Chinese Saturday school, hosted in the Sunday school rooms [...]
I don’t really like to drive. I think it’s that tiny margin of error between commuting and death that really bothers me. I try to accept that while the rest of the world sees “run out to the store” as one smooth action, I see it as a series of almost insurmountable tasks. Back out, [...]
I got my license several years ago in Massachusetts, but it expired while I was in China, and now that I’m home in New Jersey, I’d like to drive legally. Today I spent a couple hours on the phone with various DMV employees trying to make that happen.
My license is both expired and out-of-state, which [...]
