As I walk up the steps in front of the few hundred guests and students, I am giving myself two orders over and over again:

Look austere. Don’t fall down.

Look austere. Don’t fall down.

Look austere. Don’t fall down.

Graduation robes are not made for short people. They are long and awkward. So while my hands are folded in front of me in a pose of academic integrity, they are really holding the robe up above my shoes. I am wearing a huge beret-like cap that belongs on Venetian merchant travelers who have water sports named after them.

Looking austere is not difficult. To look austere, one must appear to be unaffected, unimpressed, and intensely meditating a crime against humanity. Or math. Whatever the face, smiles don’t seem to be accepted academic fashion, and so I consider the plight of the Hopi Indians and step slowly.

It’s graduation day. I have been asked to represent the foreign languages department. It’s raining. I would bite the head off a live block of tofu to be in bed reading, but instead I dress as Dumbledore and tell myself not to fall down and to look austere.

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“Dinner!” my mother shouts upstairs to me.

“I’ll be down in 7 and a half minutes.”

“OK.”

When my mom asks about the seemingly random time, I explain that I was finishing a Pomodoro. She nods and hands me a bowl of asparagus. She doesn’t want to hear about this again, and is suggesting that I fill my mouth with food.

I have been quoting time in Pomodoros the last few days to the point where I may sound like the Count from Sesame Street.

“I have done three, three Pomodoros! Mwahahahaha!”

But you see, it’s necessary.

I have been in the U.S, or as I like to call it, Utopia, for two weeks now. I have spent some hectic days lounging on a rocking chair, reading, and greeting my dad’s patients as they arrive for teeth cleaning and root canals. When my mom gets home, she makes dinner and I bother her with questions about her day as she huffs around the kitchen cooking me things. Tis a grand life.

When I am visiting home my schedule is that of a retired beach bum. I am on vacation, I am treated like royalty by my parents, and it is as hot as hell’s space heater. Ideally, my mornings involve a good workout and writing, leaving my afternoons free to read and watch the Phillies get killed. However, I am sometimes carried away on the wings of lackadaisical slovenliness inherent to the summer vacation.

It’s on those lackadaisical days I speak in vague, lazy terms. I did a little writing. I did some work. I tried to get a bit done. It’s also these days whose events I can’t remember or whether they involved a shower.

Something needed to change. And it was on one lucky day in the middle of August that I stumbled upon Pomodoro, which is a time management system that entails focusing on one task for specific periods of time.

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I arrived at Philadelphia International Airport in the late afternoon. I had just stepped off of an airplane, and I was elated for that and other reasons. I was about to have a cheesesteak and see my family.

And, most importantly, I was looking ahead at an entire month of being home.

As I approached my parents in the arrivals lounge, I knew that how much time I had at home was going to be mentioned by my dad within a minute of greeting me.

Me: “Hey!”

Mom: “How was your flight?”

Me: “It’s over. That’s all that matters.”

All of us laughed nervously.

Dad: “Mom will order the cheesesteaks on the way home.”

Angels sang from Heaven.  

Dad: “OK, I’ll say it. You have more than four weeks before you go back.”

My dad and I laughed, my mother rolled her eyes.

I knew he would say this, because, aside from reading and watching baseball, my dad’s favorite pastimes are keeping track of how much time is between now and some activity in the future, and casually dropping the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, or his hatred of Donald Trump into any conversation, despite the topic.

In terms of obsessive time management, my dad is the tree and I am the apple that did not fall very far from it. It’s sort of an inherited obsession. Imagine an old man handing his proud son a cherished pocket watch. Now imagine them obsessing on what time they’ll go for dinner at J.B. Dawson’s.

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Langhorne, Pennsylvania

I spent the month of August in my parents’ house, living like a twenty-something college graduate in the room in the attic. My summer visits are often quiet, a time when I can recharge my battery to get through another school year.

My parents live in the country, head birds in an empty nest, my brother and sisters having long since moved out.

But this summer it was a full house.

My sister is transitioning between houses, so she and her two kids had been living there for about six months and were still living there when I visited. The second floor was occupied by my parents and the kids. My sister slept on the first floor.

It was the first time my sister and I had lived under the same roof in more than two decades. So I don’t know when she become obsessed with India, but a portion of my parents’ home is like stumbling into a Jaipurian Mahārāja’s den. Her bed sheets are a horoscope tapestry done up in sari stripes, two mobiles hang above the bed in which elephants dance in permanent repose under purple umbrellas. The bureau holds Mendhi candles and sandalwood representations of both Ganesha and an elephant.

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I have never really cared about fashion. Neither did my family. I grew up in a house of short Hobbit-like creatures whose wardrobes consisted of sweatpants ranked in ascending order of formality. “Eatin’ pants” were a soundly logical dress requirement.

Additionally, the males in my household wore shirts with condiment stains with such ubiquity that they were like inherited brooches.

Moreover, fashion is not exactly aimed at the short and stocky, anything being marketed towards my ilk typically offer a “straight out of the Shire” look. So I never really bothered all that much. And no doubt, for those of us not model-thin, “fashion sense” can mean an attempt to hide doughy parts of our anatomy, which often involves wearing dark, baggy, or large items of clothing in hopes of pulling off a smoke and mirrors sort of act.

In the past year or so through adherence to diet and rigorous exercise I have gotten into better shape, so I have gone from stocky to stocky. More specifically, I’ve gone from stocky (as a euphemism for fat) to stocky (broad and sturdily built – aka: its real meaning). There’s nothing like working hard for two years in order to make it out of euphemism.

Still, the clothes I owned were now so large and baggy that I looked like a little boy who had sneaked into his daddy’s closet and played a game of I’m Going to Work. These were not unpleasant realities, but the fact remained that I needed some new clothes.

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Dear Mr. Trump

I am writing this letter to apply for a position on your Deportation Force, which, I assume, will be promptly put together after your inauguration in January. I have a number of skills and qualifications for a position in this Brute Squad, oh, sorry, Deportation Force. I always get you mixed up with the Princess Bride. You see, you have a lot in common with that movie, only it’s funny on purpose.

The main factors which make me a highly attractive candidate for this Force are that I am an expatriate, a language specialist, and poassess a lot of motivation. I am seriously motivated because I once lived in Mexico cleaning parks and teaching English as part of a good-will gesture between the U.S. and Mexico. I was sixteen at the time and found the Mexican people to be embarrassingly generous and unwaveringly friendly and good-natured. You can imagine how disappointed I was to learn that all those Mexicans grew up to become rapists, criminals, and drug dealers. I realize the error of my ways now, and want to set that straight.

My experience as an expatriate will only help you out. See, the Czech people have adopted me (and about 6,000 other American expats) into their country and culture. Their chosen methods of punishment are bureaucracy and Moravian cheese, but if you can deal with those and speak some Czech, they’ll let you, and even encourage you to stay. Most of us then become constructive and productive members of society. As part of your DP, I plan on contributing to nothing of the sort. No, those illegal immigrants are in trouble because I know where to look for them. It takes an immigrant to think like an immigrant. Thus, as an expat I know where they are hiding.

Where, you ask?

Simple – at work. Your demographic of illegal immigrants will be found hiding and slaving in kitchens or picking grapes in blistering fields or hidden in plain sight on the side of the road selling oranges (or heroin!). They’ll be hiding in toilets and offices for ten hours a day cleaning them for a pittance. Or we can find them hiding outside a Walmart at 5 a.m. praying to get picked for a back-breaking day of labor and then thanking one of their weird foreign deities (there’s one called Hayzoos! Can you believe it?) to be chosen. What a laugh.

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My dad and I were having lunch at Chili’s. Amid the dozen or so menus on the table (for appeteasers, milk shakes, burgers, cocktails, pizzas, fajita, etc) there was a computer consul. It stood near the edge of the table and its screen constantly displayed dizzying and colorful advertisements. I thought they were for games and stuff, but I didn’t look more closely at it.

Our waitress was Janice. She was friendly, refilled our iced-teas with haste, brought me extra pickles. She didn’t dawdle at the table or tell us about her personal problems. AKA: everything one can want in a lunch waitress. At the end of the meal I asked Janice if I could pay.

“Cash or card?” she asked.

“Card.”

“OK.” She pointed to the computer consul. “Have you paid on the computer before?”

“Um. No.”

Janice walked me through the payment process. She stood next to me and told me each step. I finished, tipped her (I think, unless the computer gets a cut) and then got pressed (by the computer) into filling in feedback. I finally gave up after 6 or 7 questions, since I wanted to get home by dinner time. Janice had already left and gone to chat with her robot manager. I left the receipt on the table.

Later in the day, when an ATM machine kept hold of my debit card, I got a little panicky. The same panicky anyone gets when their entire fundage is being held captive by a thing that can’t enact reason and hand it back to you. I went in to the bank and informed the teller, who sent out the manager. The manager came out and gave a shrug that conveyed impotence.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she said.

What I said: “Um…”

What I wished I had said: “If this ATM’s name is HAL, I am fucking out of here.”

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It’s not hard to think about death while visiting my parents. My dad brings death into every conversation on any topic. Now, Teddy Ruxpin was developed by a guy who was beaten to death by a tribe of aboriginal tribesmen near Camden. Or he punctuates sentences with death. John Smith, he was killed in 1993, used to sell Hallmark cards to orphans. They are also dead. 

In my early forties, I seem to be well on the way to this. I find myself having the middle-aged conversation more and more. Pain. Changing times. Active notification of the fact that time flies. My back hurts. I remember when this was a rollerskating rink. Wow, was that twenty years ago? What’s your retirement plan? 

It’s really only a matter of time before I start having the old person’s conversations, which will (I have observed) involve parts of my body that are falling apart and dead people. Part of this will be my deliverance to the next world, or, at the very least, my reassignment as worm food.

If asked about their post-death plans, many might suggest cremation or traditional burial. Some might, before you slowly back away, tell you that they are going to be carried away on a space ship. There’s always donating one’s body to science, but the thought of medical students poking at my giblets and making fun of my pancreas for a decade is distasteful. I’ve always been sensitive about my pancreas.

Depending on one’s culture, one might be put in a stone tower to be eaten by vultures. Or they might be put on a boat with their armor and belongings, sent out to sea, and set afire. If they are Hunter S. Thompson they might be fired from a cannon.

While those might seem a bit odd, we are at a time in human development and culture in which outside-the-box thinking is enormously celebrated. (I mean, I’ve have recently seen a dead cat made into a drone). This thinking, along with creativity, and desires to preserve the environment and cash in on the fashionable art of death, has already led to several more options for leaving this world than our grandparents had.

If you want a modern version of the Viking sea burial, there is the option of firing a shot (.25 oz) of your ashes out into space for $3000 or so. In that limited amount of space, you won’t be able to bring your shield and armor. Also, if you’d want to be like the A-Space Crowd, you can pay a little more ($10,000) and go to the moon or to deep space. Boldly going, evidently, where no shot of ashes has gone before.

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We had been planning our trip to Paris and London for about four months. And when I say “we” I mean my dad and my sister, for whom outlining a schedule and researching excursions are essentially heaven. I reaped the benefits of this and was able to sit back and get briefed on exactly what each day of our holiday was going to look like. For four months. I drank a lot.

So when my dad had a health issue a few days before our departure and it became clear that he wouldn’t be able to go on this trip he’d been planning and excited about for so long, we were all devastated. It was a real kick in the shins.

But, the outside-the-box thinkers we are (read: weird), we decided to figure out a way to have Dad on the trip. So instead of wallowing in sadness, we brought a picture of him along and made sure to enjoy all of the things that Dad would have done on the trip. Just to make things a bit more realistic, we also occasionally obsessed, talked, griped, and joked about things that he most certainly would have touched on.

Here are some snaps of the Old Man’s European Tour

Dad’s Traditional “My flight landed” Drink

First and foremost, Dad arrived safely in London and had his traditional “Holy shit, the plane landed safely” drinks in the hotel. This was accompanied by his oft-mentioned thoughts on landing: “Once you’re up in the air, there are several ways you can reach the ground again and my favorite option is landing.”

For prosperity’s sake, I have removed the “fuck” the “motherfucking” and the floating “Shit” that usually accompanies this observation.

Meeting of the Minds

Right at the end of Bond Street we bumped into two of my dad’s heroes – Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. So we would be remiss not to let him sit in on a bench meeting with the two old dudes.

He did. And he filled them in on his feelings about Donald Trump. Also, we’re pretty sure that Sir Winston copped a feel.

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