#165. Chiba Cod Abyss, Odd Wage Also, Longer Haze (Saturday, May 17, 2014)

What was your best day…of having the perfect time with the wrong person?

I could give you a million years to try and guess what this story is about based on the title, and I can guarantee you would never get close.

It wasn’t a hidden repository of (non-sushi eligible) fish creatures in a suburban Tokyo underwater canyon, which came with an atypical salary for excavation and an aftereffect of extended mental blurriness. It was nothing but a state of mind. A very naïve state of mind, with regards to my doomed girlfriend Chenling (#87), that governed my life the summer of 2014.

Chiba cod abyss (chief economist; that would be me in 10 years)
Odd wage also (Ottawa jiaoshou (i.e. [University of] Ottawa professor, in Chinese); that would be her in 10 years)
Longer haze (liang ge hai zi, Chinese for: “two kids”; yeah…)

It was first expressed by my dad around this time, with the correct juxtaposition of languages but without the nasally, ill-sounding exaggerations, in a semi-sarcastic manner (which I didn’t catch onto at the time). And would be used dismissively by me—with those exaggerations added—whenever I wanted to mock my wrongly idealistic past self.

But, let’s be serious for a second. If you completely strip out every flashing red light before and after it, this particular weekend in Niagara Falls on its own did make that nonsensical phrase at least somewhat justified at the time.

I had just started my first job in Ottawa two months earlier. She had just finished the final term in the Master’s program (I had finished a term earlier). With a girlfriend I considered serious (as the delusion above clearly implies), two months was far too long to spend apart. So, instead of me flying back to North Carolina so soon, we decided she would fly to somewhere closer to me.

Buffalo, New York, which was (1) Buffalo and (2) a six-hour bus and extended border check away from me… was not the most inspired or convenient choice. But somehow, that’s where we settled on. So, on Friday, after a half-day at work, I trek to the Greyhound station for the long journey. And when I see her in the lobby of the Buffalo airport hotel, it does sincerely feel like I’m seeing someone special who I’d dearly missed for the longest time.

No joke about that, and no joke about the next two days in Niagara Falls (U.S. side) feeling absolutely idyllic. We got along almost perfectly, with no real argument occurring during that time¹. We slid through those two days like a blissful couple unit: holding hands and making out a few times², while ambling through the state park and observing the falls from the balcony and Maid of the Mist. (We went to a few other places in the surrounding area, but I now forget.) She even happily joined me in my extreme gluttony, when at a Duff’s Famous Wings (the renowned competitor to the famous Anchor Bar, which claimed to have invented Buffalo wings) near our hotel, and ordered a bucket of forty of the best Buffalo wings I ever had.

I leave for Ottawa the weekend not feeling like I had the perfect two days. But two simple days with a person who would inevitably become the most important person in my life.

So now, the question is: how did this irreplicable weekend come about? And the answer in hindsight, is clear. It was the perfect convergence of me having finally started working a high-prestige professional job³, but not yet settled into the perceived childish state (in my mind and hers) of living with my parents in my hometown. And with her having gotten into the PhD program at Duke, and thus achieving a key milestone for emotional stability; while not yet having reached that elevated status of a Duke PhD student with its own high-prestige graduate school peer group that would very soon make me a disposable figure in her life.

Still, as unsustainable as it was, for those two days in Niagara Falls, I was allowed to envision that tacky, misguided, sickeningly optimistic future with full ignorant honesty. Before I realized that it was a future that not a single person involved in my life or hers, myself included, wanted.

In contrast to our trip to much more glamorous Las Vegas six months earlier, where the last night has a top-three spot on another and—in a world where I had any form of discretion—would’ve rendered this story non-existent.
I feel I need to state this somewhere here so the record is clear. But nothing more beyond that ever happened during the eighteen months we were together, by mutual preference (mostly mine).
My immaturity (implied and real) around not ever having had a real job one of the key triggers for that disastrous Vegas night.