Thursday

We just caught the Livingston Father-N-Son Duo, the band Sunshine’s just spent a week chaperoning, singing Country Roads to twenty-five thousand people at a Hà Nội music festival. We just turned on the TV and there they were. Today also represents a new domestic turning point, separating the life I live now from the kind of life I used to have. This might be construed as bragging; I only claim that homesickness makes me want to stress these salient points until I internalize them. Some previous turning points include: giant furnished houses, having two suits, and weekend getaways to Hong Kong. One major turning point was the day we finally hired someone to clean our house. I had to face facts: the mere act of employing a maid rendered my present circumstances something unforeseeable to the me of the past. The apartment complex we live in now--no longer that giant house--is run like a hotel: we have daily housekeeping service. They make the beds, change the towels, vacuum, and do the dishes. Everything Rosy did in México except laundry. This has left us with plenty of free time, sure, but also in search of that next preposterous step into the life of excess we claim between spates of abject poverty back home. Today we managed to hire a cook. It was an impulse buy: we don't even know what we are spending. She'll come once a week on Tuesdays. She was very excited to discover we were interested in trying local home-cooked cuisine. The real dealmaker here is that she will also do our grocery shopping for us, a chore rendered so prohibitive by the sheer distance between specialized markets, and the need to haggle in Vietnamese, that we've never actually gotten around to doing it. [Cavin]