#159. A Fishy Weekend (Sunday, June 28, 2015)

#159. A Fishy Weekend (Sunday, June 28, 2015)

What was your best day…of remembering how awesome normal life felt?

In the past three weeks, I had finally rediscovered what freedom felt like, in a way I never appreciated before. But this weekend was something a bit more than that.

Technically, it was almost four months of freedom, since Chenling had let me off the hook from eighteen months of misery (#87) by breaking up with me in early March—following my disastrous visit to Duke (where she had started her PhD) and our even more disastrous trip to Asheville (my first time there, #34). But, apparently too addicted to the torture, I didn’t fully take it. We remained talking off and on for a good two months, before all that built-up emotional stress came out at once on my brother’s seventeenth birthday (May 14, #40), severely dampening the day, leading me to cry about everything to my parents and unilaterally cut her out from my life later that night. (Followed by three weeks of intense cramming for my CFA exam in early June. Then I was actually free.)

Naturally, with all this newfound freedom, I have no plans on this Saturday (and am perfectly happy with that). So one of our neighbors, Fang Xu (my parents’ age), randomly invites me to go fishing with him in Smiths Falls, an hour north of the city. I haven’t fished in fourteen years, and did not fish again for eleven years after, but at this time I sense within myself that doing something different, insignificant with any person that was not Chenling was an unequivocally positive thing. So we walk through a lot of tall weeds, catch a small handful of rock bass (and maybe some other fish, but Fang was especially excited about the rock bass), and head home. That’s it. And it does feel great.

Sunday, it’s a pre-wedding reception of Mark Liu—the older guy who introduced Ghost Recon and Heroes and Might and Magic to me a decade ago (#93, #37), and longtime family friend. Their actual wedding will be in Toronto, because he recently moved there to live with his fiancee, since she did marketing and they didn’t have jobs for that anywhere else.

Before we head over to Mark’s parents’ house, I half-joke about calling Mark whipped because of how much he’s accommodating his wife, and my brother goes, “Don’t be fucking idiot, man.”

So, I don’t do that. And when I see Mark—who I haven’t seen in years—he greets me very warmly, and can polite congratulate him, he instantly starts asking me questions and showing interest in my job and my institution (which I had started sixteen months earlier). The whole reception, where I meet several of Mark’s family friends, has that vibe, much like the rock bass expedition the day before, where everyone and everything just feels happy for no other reason than simply being there.

We have dinner at the very mediocre (but large) sushi buffet at the strip mall near our house. I share a table with my dad and Mr. Jiang (another longtime family friend and Carleton professor, who got me my first research assistant job1). For such a mediocre buffet, the sushi spread tonight looks and tastes especially nice; and the three of us just banter for hours like old friends, which is NOT something I typically do with my dad.

But the most defining moment of this whole weekend comes near the end of the dinner. I turn to see the highlights of today’s Blue Jays game on a screen above and behind me, and see that the Jays have beat the Texas Rangers 3-2 to win the rubber match of their three-game series.2 And almost immediately, I turn to my brother two tables away, sitting with Mark’s brother Tim3, Mr. Jiang’s son Alex, and a few other good friends.

Side Note: My brother is surprisingly happy to be eating in this restaurant (I’m actually slightly surprised he’s here). Over a year ago—right around the time I returned to Ottawa—he took a job as a busboy at this very restaurant (which my parents had found through a friend and encouraged/forced him to take, as his first ever job). And after a week of poor busboy-ing and not understanding the managers there because they all spoke (an incomprehensible form of) Mandarin, he was fired. (Fired, as in, he went to the manager at the end of a particular rough shift, asked him if he needed to come in next week, and the manager went (in Mandarin), “No, it’s okay. You don’t need to come in anymore.”) That said, he took the escape from that job about as well as I took my latest escape.

And right away, I catch his eye. We give each other a quiet, blunt nod of mutual recognition, like we’re both saying, “Yeah, that’s right,” before returning to our respective feasts of raw fish.4

  1. The summer before my fourth year undergrad—validating a small handful of R code for a friend of his at Loyola Maryland for a chapter in a textbook he was writing on financial modeling with R. I got a nice acknowledgment in the book and a free copy, which has remained forever on my desk at work (due to laziness). I did actually use some of the formulas there as a starting point to learn about liquidity proxies, which ended up becoming the topic of my first paper with Jaward (#67).
  2. The Jays win the deciding game of a much more significant series against the Rangers three months later, #13.
  3. Two years later, Tim takes his turn in potentially ruining my brother’s birthday, albeit completely inadvertently and ultimately with the exact opposite result, #74).
  4. Which I’m also surprised he’s devouring so happily, since his one month there gave him enough horror stories about their food preparation and cleaning methods to never make someone want to eat at a (mediocre) sushi restaurant like this one again.