I just sent off an email update to my family about what I've been doing and what my plans are for traveling this fall and winter, and I couldn't help wishing that some members of my family would be a little more chill about me doing my thing.

I'm thinking about traveling in SE Asia during my winter break, for example, and not coming home for Christmas, and when I wrote that, I tensed up, thinking about my relatives' reactions to that: worry, stress, fretful anxiety, mixed in with some anger, some feelings of abandonment and sadness about me not being there for the holidays.

I wish we didn't have this tradition of being so tightly wound up in each other lives. Not that we are, actually; sometimes I feel like we're even more like strangers than actual strangers, not knowing what we should know, not speaking what we should speak, not showing what we should show. But despite this odd distance, this masking, the bonds of family and obligation are like tentacles of a giant octopus, against which I'm struggling, down to my last breath, to escape. The guilt holds me underwater where I can see the gently undulating surface, filtering light in uneven patterns, so promising and tantalizing.

I know I sound ungrateful. It's always a battle, balancing irritation and a desire to run with an appreciation of all the love I've been blessed with. I try to remember that. Even as I tensed up, thinking of their reactions to my plans, I thought too that this is their form of love -- no, that this is an outgrowth of a love so deep that perhaps it hurts to show it too plainly. I think that's possible, don't you?

So I update everyone, and I try to be honest and straightforward, and I try to appreciate. That counts for something, doesn't it?
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Epilogue to the Pointless and Gross Skeeter Story:

Hanging out with Maiko and Etsuko on Sunday, I told them about trying the Japanese method of dealing with mosquito bites, only to have it backfire on me and create the Foot from Swollen Planet.

"I guess 'cause I'm Korean, the Japanese method doesn't work for me," I said.

Etsuko, laughing, said, "It's not that you're Korean, it's that the mosquitoes are Korean! The Japanese method apparently only works on Japanese mosquitoes!"

Heh.

Apparently Japanese mosquitoes are tougher and more vicious than Korean ones. Remind me again to never go to Japan in the summer.