North Carolina

The physical presence of a person is so important for any type of relationship. I frequently think about what it is to “know” a person and how well do I know my family and friends because it isn’t how much you know about someone; it isn’t even what you’ve been through together… it seems to be some sort of ethereal connection. I think that in itself is quite incredible. It's hard not to miss your family. So it was good that my mom, Sophia and I were going to visit another family member.

I rented a car for us and we met Kezia at Panera bread. Broccoli cheese soup in a bread bowl = delicious. One of the main reasons we were visiting Kezia was to help her with planning her wedding so we did the registry thang, checked out the event location, looked at a photographer and even went dress shopping. Since I know nothing about dress buying, I documented haha. We also got to hang out with her fiancé and get to know him better which was great. He is a very nice guy and easy going. We scoped out a few nice restaurants while we were there and went to the pool a couple times.

She also has two new kittens who decided it would be fun to run across my chest and bat my feet at 2 am. Scared the Beetlejuice out of me. Oh yeah, and I helped her set up her invitations and printed them out for her which I thought was a lot of fun. I did have to do some troubleshooting with the printer as it kept jamming but I like those kind of challenges.

And finally, I got to finish the book that Mike gave me for the summer, On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book...

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was-I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon. (15)

What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?-it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we learn forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. (156)

“Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there-and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them to no end…” (209-10)

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When our time had come to an end, we flew back to Wisconsin, I packed my things and a day later, I was bound for Taiwan.