I like hard work, but I just stare at my computer screen. I like to run, but I move like my joints are poured concrete. I want to cook biryani but I keep buying granola…
I slammed my 12-year-old fists onto the shiny Yamaha piano keys, the polyphonic dissonance echoing my frustration. “Would you please stop speaking Cantonese to me?” I yelled. “From now on, I only want you to teach me in Mandarin or English.” My piano teacher looked at me, her eyes scintillating with disbelief and something else I couldn’t quite grasp at that age.
“It’s not the calm before the storm, but the cohabitation of serenity and calamity. It captures the future’s grasp on the present; anxiety is in the very air.”
There’s a particular brand of shame that comes with being a tourist, particularly as an American. Especially in Europe, American tourists are almost universally received with a mixture of annoyance and exasperation, the kind usually reserved for flies buzzing around the ear or children crying on airplanes.
Some of us seem to have our futures mapped out to a T, from the high-profile internship we’ll take after graduation to the suburban condo where we’ll raise our first yellow lab. But this summer, I didn’t have time to rehearse.
“Let’s try this again. I am one of many people in love. I am a human of being human. Skin like everyone else and lots of heart. Too much music might kill me. Too little too.”
“You are buzzed in after a moment, as if you are entering a doctor’s office, as if you are a patient, as if the Freud, whose eyes stare out from the tiers of brochures in the museum’s front room, will tell you in due time what your dreams mean.”
