Nebraska

Last weekend I went to Nebraska for the first time ever.  Until then, it was merely a myth, a hidden land somewhere between my house and the Pacific Ocean.  When I got there, those myths became truths.  However, they were pushed back a few hours due to a delayed flight which resulted in me having a four hour layover in Detroit.  Always fun.  I watched Just Go With It, which was not much of a consolation.

Anyway, when I got off the plane at Eppley Airfield in Omaha that Friday night, I was met by masses of families with giant “It’s Hug Time” and “Welcome Home” signs.  I didn’t know those were still a thing, but apparently they are.  I picked up a few Visiting Omaha guidebooks for the novelty before heading out to meet my friend.

The next morning at my interview, I met many Midwesterners. I had never been surrounded by so many Midwesterners in my life.  They were all so…..nice.  After my interview, I met up immediately with my friend Andrew, a native Omahan, to drive down to Lincoln and attend the Nebraska vs. Wisconsin football game.  We were joined by two additional folks, Andrew’s friends.

We drove for about an hour through corn and finally arrived in the state capitol.  The scene was incredible – swarms of people in Husker red.  We passed a vintage car with a custom Nebraska paintjob and Dixie air horn.  Everything was ten times crazier than the football games I attended in college.

It took a little while to find parking.  We drove through some small streets a ways from the stadium and tried squeezing into a spot that was evidently too small for our car.  It was then that a friendly middle-aged balding man came up to our window and offered his private space in a parking lot.  We gratefully accepted.

Fast-forward to after the game, which was great fun (I ate a food that they call “Runza” – still not sure what it was – and got a souvenir cup!).  Andrew and I made haste to O Street, where all of the popular bars in Lincoln are located, and met back up with the other two folks. 

We ended the night at allegedly the best college bar in the United States (as voted by “Playboy,” so who knows about the credibility there): The Brass Rail.

I was greeted by a sticky floor and the sound of a Top 40 remix blasting in the background.  The place was packed with college-aged kids and smelled of fine spilled beer.  We finagled our way to the back of the bar, where the DJ and dance floor were located.

After I tore up the dance floor, it was finally time for the place to shut down.  The DJ stopped the music, and to my humorous dismay, the lights came on, revealing a river of broken beer bottles, wet napkins, and who-knows-what littered across the dance floor.  In an exhausted end-of-night haze, everyone on the dance floor began filing out.

At this point, it was 2AM.  After standing in the cold for an hour looking for a cab (there were none free because, again, it’s Lincoln), we decided to walk back to the car and drive to Andrew’s friends place nearby to crash.  However, when we got to the car, I accidentally popped the hood instead of the trunk.  As we were standing there trying to close the jammed hood, the middle-aged man who lent us his parking spot appeared out of nowhere.  This is 3AM, mind you.

“Having car troubles?” he asked.  I gave a look of astonishment/confusion to my friend.  Just like that, the man went from “friendly middle-aged balding man” to “creepy stalker old guy.”  “No, just trying to get this hood back down,” we responded as my friend then jammed the hood down.  “Got it,” he said (it wasn’t fully closed).  We anxiously thanked the man again and got out of the parking lot as quickly as possible.

Upon arriving at Andrew’s friend’s house, the place was, as expected, sound asleep.  There were a few other guests passed out on couches, so we carefully navigated to our respective sleeping areas.  In the basement, one of Andrew’s friends was half-awake.

“Hey Cecilia, where can we get blankets,” he whispered.

There was a moment of urghs and grunts and then she began spewing out what I swore was Parseltongue.

We started laughing.  “Okay, seriously, where are the blankets?”

“Hesh gykta flaq trizv dehtrop yes,” replied Cecilia.

Recognizing a lost cause when we saw one, we decided to just make do with what we had.  The next morning, Cecilia had no recollection of our conversation.  “God damn it.  Sometimes I sleepwalk and sleeptalk,” she said.  I was thankful that I hadn’t been killed in my sleep, considering I had taken the couch next to her.

Anyway, on Sunday we went back to Omaha, and Andrew showed me around the city.  It was a rather relaxing day.  Then I flew back to Philly.  The end.

Written circa 1999

Hi!  I’m David.  I come from the planet Zoder.  My species is the Fonidon.  Now I’m gonna tell you about the time I had a big adventure.

I was outside trying out my new Zodabike.  All of a sudden, it burst into space with light speed.  Well, of course I can survive in space without air.  We don’t need it!  My species doesn’t breathe!

Well since I was already up there and knew the whole universe, I went to Icix2 to meet my friend, Steve.  He has a metal body and a head that can repair itself.

When I rang his doorbell, his mom answered.  She said Steve wasn’t there.  She said he was at a mission in space.

So I somehow made it back to space (don’t ask me how).  I saw a green blur in the distance.  I knew it had to be Steve’s Icitron.  I zoomed at it at 3 trillion light years a minute.  I was there in 0.2 nanoseconds.  I knocked on the metal.  A grumpy Zingbat opened the door.

It wasn’t Steve!  But it was his ship!  At once I thought that the Zingbat robbed him.  Where could he be?

Out of nowhere, the Zingbat attacked.  I took out my Super X200 Laser Blaster and poked him with it.  He let go and started crying.

I thought he was a wimp!  The most treacherous animal of all!  Crying over a little mark!  Now that was something to laugh at!  I couldn’t resist laughing.

Then, the Zingbat revealed its true identity.  Steve!!  Steve always playcries!

Then we went to hang out at the Black Hole.  All of a sudden we got sucked up by gravity.  We were in the center of the Black Hole.  There were many other Fonidons, Zingbats, Itoteers, and Jotrits.  Itoteers and Jotrits are both from Numid, a planet 1 light year away from Zoder.  Then I saw Shawn the robot.

He came at me, shaked my hand, and said, “Hi.”  Steve and I got bored so we left.  Then when we were flying, we saw Bob’s burnt head flying in space next to his demented leg.

We both jumped.  Then, I drove back to Zoder at 700 billion light years a millisecond.  We got there in negative 1 trillion nanoseconds.

Right when we were landing, my brakes stopped working.  So then we crashed into the ground and there was such great force that when we crashed, we made a hole all the way to the center of the planet.  We were stuck!  And to make matters worse, the Icitron broke down.  The batteries were dead and there wasn’t any fuel left.

[Not to be continued…]

The Proudest Moment of My Life

Lately I’ve been working on a lot of application essays, and a question that keeps coming up is, “What is your proudest achievement?” This is the story I wish I could tell.

When I was about 8 or 9, my parents often took my family to Taiwanese Association events. These included cookouts, festivals, culture shows, and general happy times with all the other Taiwanese community members. One weekend, the association set up a big cookout at a nearby park. After a while, as the adults mingled and served us shaved ice, a voice shouted, “Let the watermelon contest begin!”

We all turned on our park benches to look at the field event that had been set up. About thirty feet from the park benches stood a chubby man holding a blindfold, facing the crowd. Between the crowd and the chubby man was a watermelon. “If you can walk to the watermelon and stab it, you get to take it home!” he exclaimed as all the kids began to get in line for the challenge. Being the natural competitor and lover of watermelons (still unaware of my allergy to the damn fruits) that I was, I hopped in line.

The first girl was blindfolded and spun around many times. As she began walking toward the watermelon, she veered off course, heading frighteningly toward the crowd with a knife. She got closer and closer to the crowd, still unaware of her ocean of a distance from the watermelon. Finally, the adults let out a collective laugh when she stepped on the rope demarking the boundaries of the field and stopped. The girl took off her blindfold and realized that the watermelon was about fifteen feet to her left.

 

 

Child after child went on like this. A few succeeded in walking right to the melon and stabbing it, but most others walked to the rope and failed. When it got to be my turn, there was only one watermelon left. “I could be a hero for my family! A breadwinner!” I thought as the chubby man spun me round and round.

Finally, I began to walk in what I thought was the direction of the watermelon. I took slow steps. The crowd was silent except for a few peeps and chuckles. I could sense that I was getting close to the park benches. Getting this watermelon’s gonna be so sweet. With the next step, I felt a rope under my feet. No watermelon. I was devastated.

But then I remembered that the watermelon was sitting on the rope. I just wasn’t sure if it was to my left or right. I took a gamble and started following the rope to the left. Sure enough, ten steps later I heard the glorious clunk of a fresh watermelon, and with a smile on my face, stabbed the melon with my knife. Everyone cheered. It was the proudest moment of my life.

I think the moral of this story is when there’s a watermelon on the line, follow the damn line.

Wiffleball is Dangerous

There are a handful of stories I could tell about my 21st birthday. This one is about how a wiffleball nearly ruined mine.

On the afternoon of my 21st birthday, a few of my friends went out onto the beach in Ventnor to play a casual game of wiffleball before heading into Atlantic City. No big deal.

We were cycling through the positions when it finally became my turn to pitch. By then we’d been playing for a while, and the game was just about over. The very first pitch I threw – underhand, mind you – was ripped back at me from 15 feet away and hit me square on the vein above my ankle.

I fell down, grasping my leg. My friends were laughing at my seemingly gross exaggeration. I laughed too, until I took my hand off and saw a giant bruise forming. Somehow, the wiffleball managed to hit in just the right spot to burst the blood vessel and produce a bump about the size of an old Nokia cell phone.

Panicking, I stood up and started walking back to the house. However, every step increased the pressure on my ankle, presumably squirting out more blood from my vein. I hobbled back into the house and tried my best to fix the peculiar issue before it was time to go to Atlantic City. Despite two hours of ice and elevation, I was resigned to limping around the casino with a wiffleball injury for the rest of the night, taking the phrase “injury prone” to the next level.

Encounters With Strange People

Today at work I walked past this girl that I see ALL THE TIME. But for some reason, we always give each other the awkward lookaway in the halls. This isn’t the case with most other people who work on my floor. I have no problem saying hello to relative strangers or people that seem nice. This is why I couldn’t understand why saying hello to this person became so impossible; she seems perfectly normal.

But then I realized a pattern: the people I felt comfortable acknowledging in the halls were the ones I acknowledged early on in our brief and utterly superficial relationships. Thus, there must exist a cutoff, a certain number of blowoffs, beyond which one can never say hi to a stranger…

But seriously, I think after four or five mutual lookaways, it just becomes weird if you randomly surprise them time with a, “Hey!”

I'ma Start Posting Some of My Creative Writing, Cuz That's What Blogs Do

Introduction.

Nothing crazy ever happened to me, and it probably never will. Then again, I did win those Phillies tickets one time, and I held the high score for an arcade game at the Ben Franklin Museum for a week. Oh, and I almost met Tom Hanks at a restaurant in New York City. But that’s about the extent of my thrilling lifestyle. Frankly, I’m okay with that. I’m not so sure I could handle the pressure of living an action hero lifestyle. I’ll admit, there are occasions when I come out of a movie – Fast and Furious or Harry Potter or some other flick that I unabashedly enjoy – wishing that my life was more exciting, that every day was a new adventure. But then I look around at all the other families, couples, and middle-aged single men walking alongside me, leaving behind a world of phantasm when the exit door closes, and remind myself that the real world is just that – real. Bland. Monotonous. Who in the world actually street races or battles villains in dungeons? Who actually falls in love at a record store? I pick a popcorn kernel from between my two front teeth and flick it on the ground. For now I’m content with seeing a minor leaguer at the mall and sneaking water bottles into art galleries.

Even though our lives might not follow the plot of Fast and Furious, there is something Hollywood managed to depict realistically: the mind. This is the only space in which we can escape the banality of real life, the stale taste of old coffee. It’s a place where we can mimic our big screen idols. The mind gives us much more control, at least most of the time, over what we see. Our minds can create illusions and choose what our world looks like. Our minds can create memories, most of them false, that can be manipulated by the slightest influence. These are the subconscious inner workings that fascinate me – how we construct stories about our lives, how we lull ourselves into a sense of security that our surroundings are as they appear.

As a kid I always wondered what life would be like from the perspective of another person. What does he observe? What does he conclude? What mistakes has he made? It’s hard to view others as sentient beings when all we know is folded neatly in our heads. These are the musings that inspire my stories. What is it like to embody a character in a fantastical situation? What goes through his mind that he is aware of? That he misses? I’ve found that flash fiction, short insights into a character’s life, are the most rewarding for examining these questions.

Okay, so maybe I enjoy living precariously through fictional characters a little too much. I think it’s fair given that I was never the high school quarterback or the hopeless romantic. When it comes to fiction, however, I can be. Or at least I can see what it’s like. Most of my inspiration comes from trivial settings, in which I summon the assistance of fictional detail and conflict. Because let’s be honest, most situations that people find themselves in are rather simple. It’s what goes on in the mind, the memories that are invoked, that makes these situations significant. My goal is to bring excitement and meaning back into the real world by adding more color.