#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?

Over the previous three weeks, I had finally rediscovered what freedom felt like in a way I’d never appreciated before. But this weekend was something a little more than that.

Technically, I’d been single for almost four months, since Chenling had ended our eighteen-month relationship in early March (#91). But I hadn’t fully taken the escape. We kept talking on and off for another two months, until all the built-up stress finally came out on my brother’s seventeenth birthday (May 14, #39). That night I cried about everything to my parents and cut Chenling out of my life for good. Then came three weeks of intense CFA cramming. 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 won’t fish again for another eleven, but at the time, doing something different and insignificant with literally anyone who wasn’t Chenling felt unequivocally positive. 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 is a pre-wedding reception for Mark Liu—the older guy who introduced Ghost Recon and Heroes and Might and Magic to me a decade ago (#120, #43), and longtime family friend. Their actual wedding will be in Toronto, because he recently moved there to live with his fiancée, since she did marketing and they apparently 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 a fucking idiot, man.”

So, I don’t do that. When I see Mark—who I haven’t seen in years—he greets me warmly. I politely congratulate him, and he immediately starts asking questions about my job and my institution, which I’d joined sixteen months earlier. The whole reception has the same easy feeling as the rock-bass expedition the day before: everyone seems happy for no reason beyond 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 a long time 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 the Jays have beaten 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: I’m slightly surprised my brother is even here, let alone having a good time. He had actually worked at this restaurant for one miserable week the year before, after my parents helped him get his first job there. He was bad at the work and couldn’t understand the managers’ Mandarin, and after one especially rough shift he asked if he needed to come in the next week. The manager replied, in Mandarin, “No, it’s okay. You don’t need to come in anymore.” He took the escape from that job about as well as I took mine.

And right away, I catch his eye. We give each other a quiet, blunt nod of mutual recognition—basically, “Yeah, that’s right”—then return to our respective feasts of raw fish.4

  1. The summer before fourth year, I validated some R code for a colleague of Mr. Jiang’s at Loyola Maryland for a financial-modeling textbook. I got an acknowledgment and a free copy, which still sits on my desk at work. Some of its formulas later helped me get started on liquidity-proxy research, which became the topic of my first paper with Jawad (#78).
  2. Three months later, the Jays would win a much more significant deciding game against the Rangers (#15).
  3. Two years later, Tim would take his own turn at almost ruining my brother’s birthday—completely inadvertently, and with the exact opposite result (#81).
  4. Which is also surprising, given that his month working there had left him with enough horror stories about the restaurant’s food prep and cleaning to put almost anyone off eating there again.