My Year Abroad: A Novel

He tailored these pitches for sure but what I admired was that they weren’t in the least fake or overflogged. Pong offered them the angles they needed and wanted to make a free and confident decision that you could see became ultimately theirs and theirs alone. Pong, I realized, made himself their partner, not the other way around.

I understood at last that it was a con I needed. Now and from the beginning. For maybe your favorite teacher or coach or best friend conned you, too, into believing in a version of yourself you hadn’t yet imagined, a person many factors more capable, a person who might not have otherwise bloomed.

opium bed

expurgated

Keep on singing, bromeo.

be greedy in your appreciations. Practice extravagant gratitude. Savor whatever your portion. This may sound like carpe diem but what I really mean is for the dies to carpere te, to have the moment, the person, the world, grab you right back in their full rankness and glory.

“You have a business,” Pong said to me quite seriously. “You just don’t know what it is yet.”

Val encounters life and persons as they come to her, this total acceptance of the fact that you’re here, that you belong to the space you’re taking up, that it’s all and only yours. A rare thing, IMHO. If you think about it, most persons, including many of those who say they love you, can’t help but question your particular coordinates in whatever

haole