Still Want to Hear about Throwing up in the Car While Stuck in Traffic?
It was barbecue all along
Previously on…
The car got towed and I opened the passenger-side door right onto a curb that took a little corner as tribute. Or maybe my door volunteered as tribute and had a little adventure we didn’t even know about.
Out of spite, we enacted the, “Well, let’s drive somewhere far to justify having the car.”
We spent the whole drive telling ourselves, “If we just use the darn car more often, it won’t be left unattended long enough to be towed again. Poor, neglected car.”
There’s this mountain with a big, antique train track winding all over it. I had the second-hand gossip that some of my peers had skipped Friday’s class to go to the big train mountain. They probably had to skip class just to make their bus or train. They’re in their glamorized-roughin’-it phase of life, where part of the point is enduring violently inconvenient travel and trauma bonding over it with diehard friends.
Sometimes they have to bring all of their luggage to class and then leave slightly early to get on the aggressively gaudy travel bus and go wherever they’re going. Good for them, living the dream.
I don’t really miss the cheap travel times when we had standing or sitting tickets on overnight trains. I’m happy to have the memory of the 40-hour ride to Harbin, back when I was young enough to do such a horrible thing to my body during sleepy time and still be able to turn my head for the next week. I was warned by my elders to enjoy that part of youth, and I believed them. They warned me that they can barely handle the jet lag of crossing a timezone or two without needing to sleep a week to recover. They warned me that their backs and knees hurt. I believed them. I took the vitamins and did the exercise. I’m still astounding my doctors with my ability to be so healthy despite being so fat. My arteries and my liver are doing much better than most people my age in my profession.
The expat lifestyle almost has to be unhealthy. Most of the people who were too cool and normal to be my friends could only cope with living abroad by binge drinking almost daily. I found other unhealthy methods, like buying a sewing machine in every country and then almost immediately getting fired for being bad at my job, then having to find another school that was sometimes in another country. Goodbye, little Brother. Be good to your new family. As much as Brother and Singer are great brand names for setting up dumb puns, I recently learned there’s a sewing machine called Jaguar that can run embroidery patterns from a Gameboy Color. How old does my kid have to be before I can give her my starter sewing machine and buy myself a gameboy sewing machine?
I don’t think I used to have so much trouble understanding what my husband had planned and what he was trying to tell me.
“Ok, it will take an hour and a half to get there. Can you go that long without a toilet?”
Surprisingly, yes.
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