It's All Geek to Me!

Here's an excerpt:

The pink and purple neon sign garishly proclaimed "I Ching House of Electronics: Far Ahead of Its Time." Taken aback by its contrast against the inky evening sky, I looked at my watch. My eyes weren't making a mistake after all. It was natural for it to be this dark at eight o' clock on a September evening. All summer long, I had been putting off my trip to New York for one reason or another. This morning, I finally left Fenway Park and Harvard Yard behind me for my first sojourn into the city of infinite possibilities. When Kiana told me about the cheap buses that plied from Chinatown to Chinatown, one bastion of the Asian-American dream to another, where the air lay thick with the smells of a firmly rooted civilization at once experiencing the past and the future, I thought she was not being serious. She was telling me that it cost less for me to take a four hour bus ride between the Chinatowns than to cross the cities they were in with a half-hour cab ride.

My busy schedule at work was relentlessly burning me out. When I was not spending nights staring at the wallpaper in my bedroom, I slept listlessly and fitfully. Things between Julia and me hadn't been very cordial lately. I think it was because we hadn't figured out how much space to give each other in two and a half years of dating on and off. Our relationship had its flaws, but I was deeply in love with her. Perhaps Prof. Eisenstein had started noting a decline in the quality of my research, when she suggested that a break and a change of air, however brief, might do me some good. On a whim I had called Kiana that afternoon and asked her for more details about the Chinatown bus to New York. Julia said she would miss me even though I was only going to be gone for a couple of days. It was but a matter of hours before I was on the bus, hastily packed bag and travel-time light reading beside me. I was leafing lazily through Time and Newsweek, with detailed analyses of whether Bush or Clinton would win the election, when it happened. Something in Manhattan's skyline flashed into the corner of my eye in welcome. I looked up just in time to catch the sun dive into shimmering orange and pink behind the World Trade Center towers. The bus was moving at just the right speed so I could watch the dying autumn sunlight glance off a few more sentinels of the city's opulence.