Numbers
(12/09/13 9:09am)
“Excuse me.”
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“Excuse me.”
Instinctively, I retreated to my room. It wasn't really my room—just the place where piles of not-yet-ready-to-discard possessions accumulated, a dumping ground in a house I only visited. Getting from the door to my bed was like playing a game of Minesweeper. Several thousand dollars' worth of science textbooks lined my desk, and MCAT and USMLE test prep materials intermingled in boxes on the floor. Photos from my older brother's graduation and my senior prom flanked my favorite non-fiction from Atul Gawande and Sudhir Venkatesh, and a couple of Khaled Hosseini's books sat quietly between my high school and college yearbooks and now-obsolete cassette tapes. Mousey, my creatively-named favorite stuffed animal from when I was a kid, leaned against the Macintosh Performa 550 I got in middle school, and red, white and blue pennants from the Red Sox's 2004 and 2007 World Series victories (I still need to buy one for 2013) cozied up against framed and unframed diplomas that, like my personal bookstore, represented years of over-education. It was like a three-dimensional scrapbook of the last 18 years, dislocated in place and time. Early in my sophomore year of college, my mother purchased the house, giving me barely enough time to say goodbye to my childhood home over the Fall break. This was home now, but it wasn’t.
Am I racist? Rather than trying to preemptively rebuke criticism by evoking the cliché “I’m not racist but…” as if it were an excuse (and when has that ever not been followed by something completely ignorant?), let me admit that yes, there’s the distinct possibility. It probably depends on whom I ask, though. And with the song “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” from the musical Avenue Q playing quietly in the back of my brain, I’d hazard that at least I’m not alone.
A married father of two, an engineer living in Germany and a handful of college and graduate students in such places as Colorado, Ontario and Mexico. What do they have in common? They all strip nude for strangers online.
Buried under a pile of leaves in the woods near my house, we found it—the Holy Grail of the peri-pubescent crusade: a wrinkled copy of an old Playboy magazine. I was probably in sixth grade at the time, and in those pre-internet days (closer, it seems, to the Jurassic period than today), this was as good as it got. A happenstance discovery, my grade school friend and I wondered who had abandoned it. The glossy pages were more curious to us than exciting, though we knew their purpose in life was really to conjure up blood flow in the viewer, a modern twist on Medusa’s disabling gaze that turned men to stone. Scratching the freshly-sprouted hairs on my chest (they were two in number and just as precious to me as the pair Homer Simpson carried on his head), I quipped that I was just reading it for the articles. Really, it was like dangling a set of keys in front of an infant: I was certainly wide-eyed and distracted, but I didn’t know what to do with it just yet.
“Is it true that a lot of gays are in frats?”
Effectively, we just built a hospital. It wasn’t the mortar and brick we carried, but the smaller details that converted a concrete husk to a home for health: pills, stethoscopes, alcohol swabs, bed sheets. As over 100 would-be patients waited outside in the morning sun (many had been there since before sunrise), we scrambled to unload plastic crates from the vans and organize triage, exam and procedure rooms, a laboratory, pharmacy and waiting spaces.
There are some anniversaries that I wish I could forget. But Facebook will remind me. Or Google. Or MSNBC. Or The Chronicle. This Wednesday marks 12 years since the United States was rocked by four missiles, born from passenger aircraft, hijacked by al-Qaeda operatives and aimed at iconic American landmarks. Of course, I will never forget that day (I would hazard even those a generation my junior won’t either), so I certainly don’t feel like I need to be reminded. It will always be “too soon” to relive it. And though a solemn memorial service provides a deeply private moment to reflect and find strength as an individual, community and/or nation, the perennial media carousel of repeated footage and reprinted images from their archives represents nothing more than emotional abuse. It’s a graphic grab for ratings. Whether you knew one of the nearly 3,000 people who died that day, suffered health effects from the subsequent fallout or simply questioned the rebalancing of freedom versus security that followed, we were all affected.
Here we are again: the first day of classes. It seems like only yesterday I was writing my column for the graduating seniors, myself a return-to-school graduate student, brimming with nostalgia for my own college days and where I’ve been since then. And over a decade before that, as a newly minted high school graduate, I stood before my public school classmates in plaid, Converse high tops trying to offer sage advice in my salutatory speech to people no more or less experienced than I. “Watch movies in black and white,” I said, “but live your life in color.” Granted, it was a few months before I let my eclectic style give way to shaggy hair dyed blue for my first day at Carolina (to be honest, it was more of a Duke hue), but what did that really mean? It sounded pretty to me at the time, but advice like this is often completely impractical. Perhaps I hoped to be credited with an immortal quotation … or maybe it’s just much easier to tell people how to run their lives rather than to model it.
Wednesday afternoon in downtown Guayaquil: It’s hot and bustling, as usual. Men in business suits and women in two-tone work uniforms are walking back from their lunch hours, filled up on fish ceviche, rice and fried meat or potato yapingachos. I’m just now going to work myself.
Without intending to, I confronted my own mortality that night. I also came up against a stereotype I did not want to acknowledge. Is it my own prejudice in assuming one word begets another—at least in the eyes of others? Am I wrong for trying to be “better” than the majority in order to avoid falling into this stereotype?
Ten years later and I’m already “the old guy.” As my Facebook newsfeed flooded this past weekend with photos from Duke University’s 161st Commencement (as well as those from other universities), I couldn’t help but feel a mix of pride and envy for the Class of 2013. Behind the graduates’ smiles, sunglasses and tassels were young ambition, excitement for the unknown and the promise of tomorrow. Everything was fresh and everything a new opportunity. I miss that. Having already finished my doctorate and post-graduate training, I’m now several hurdles down the track, remembering with nostalgia how it felt to be just starting out.