A Road Trip

If your friend suggests a road trip together during the holiday season to visit another friend in a different state, please be strong and deny it right away despite the fact that you heart is tinkling with the desire for some activities. You have to be firm and don’t betray any sign of hesitation or uncertainly, because if you do, you friend will use various tactics to convince you to go. And in a moment of weakness, you will give in. You hate yourself to be so weak and persuadable, but try to comfort yourself with some imaginary ideas that you may use the experience to write a book as popular as “On The Road” or write a script for a movie similar to “Road Trip”, even though you have decided long ago that you can never be part of the above book or the above movie–both are excellent, but unfortunately without any female characters that you can relate to. Of course you’ve never used anything from the trip since it was so dull that half the way on a country way, you started to imagine…

Another idea offered by your deceptive brain is that you are going to write diary everyday about the place you stayed, the friends’ conversations, the scenery etc. Of course that never happened. Your journal pages were as blank as ever. Not one word was recorded.

I am not bitter about that trip at all. I wish I were since being bitter is something one can write about; being bitter can be energizing, but I am not. Being bored means I didn’t have anything to write. How about writing about the boredom? That can’t work. Boredom is beyond writing. All the time I was feeling a sense of ennui and helplessness. If I didn’t go on this trip, I could be left behind to talk with a lady from Pakistan who came to the U.S. to investigate women’s shelter on a grant of some sort. I could also converse with the professor from Brazil who came for a philosophical training for six months and who believes in capitalism, communism and Catholicism sometimes simultaneously sometimes in tandem. Instead, I was sitting in the backseat of a car with a driver who’s so conservative that an innocuous book like “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” could upset him, a girl who mistook me for a stereotypical Asian woman of gentle silence but realized later that I am not, another girl who’s in some sort of romantic rivalry with the first girl.

The driving was uneventful and boring, then a word guessing game was proposed which soon descended into quarrels on the rules of the game. I was called upon to give an opinion, which I tried to wiggle out of. I didn’t want to support one girl and offend another, and my neutrality somehow only made the two girls dislike me in unison.