The Plan

it all seemed seductively simple: move to india at the end of the summer. of course, everything that seems easy turns out to be excessively difficult and all of my good ideas sour with the light of day.

i guess that my wife and i were kind of bored with our current lives as law students and feared becoming just another annoying yuppie couple in chicago, taking in cubs games during the summer and sipping wine at a dimly-lit watering hole during the colder months. i've certainly never aspired to such a bland, bar-coded existence and, fortunately for my sanity, my wife felt the same way. india seemed a natural choice, as my wife's parents were born there, her grandparents and assorted aunts, uncles and friends still reside there, and she is fluent in gujarati. (gujarati is the language of the western state of gujarat, where we will be living.) and, in the end, it's fucking india. what could two young travellers want that india doesn't offer? (besides privacy, a sewage system, paved roads and racial diversity...)

after worrying about the reactions we would get from our parents - we thought mine would roll their eyes, shrug their shoulders and yell "again?," while we were convinced that her parents would melodramatically construct a funeral pyre and threaten suicide over the shame of raising such an unproductive and ungrateful child.

fortunately, none of this happened.

my wife is now studying for the bar exam, which she will take on the last consecutive tuesday and wednesday in july, leaving her about a week to slouch around the house, pretending to help me finish the packing job that it will have taken me all summer to finish. in addition to packing for the move, i am also in charge of packing up our entire condo, as we hope to have it sold by the time we leave. if this doesn't happen - and it probably won't - then we get into difficult financial times and will have to appeal to the better parts of our parents' natures for help.

and asking for help from parents while attempting such an irresponsible move is not something i am looking forward to.

so here we are. i spend most of time playing tiger woods on the ps2 and trying to look busy. this is more complicated than it seems, for appearing busy while not actually doing anything requires an amount of skill and deftness that normally evades me. but, no worries - i'm a quick learner and am enjoying the finer points of slackerdom.

life is good.