When my grandfather came to this country, his cousins were in the furniture business.  “Up and down all those stairs, that’s tough,” my father tells me as we walk out of a 99-cent store in Bensonhurst.  “He didn’t understand why he would do that work.  He had a trade.”  These days, talk of my future over dinner tends to wander from Korea to LSATs, from the Dow to sustainable agriculture.  At school, in the midst of Muir, my father calls to say, “You’re at Stanford with all those nerds, you know, engineers or whatever, who may say they know what they’re doing with their lives, but that’s Mars and beyond on the Starship Enterprise.”  Sitting on my futon under a typewritten sign that reads No Talk of the Future Here, I tap the crust of microwaved tea off the mug’s lip and watch the fragments hesitate in the air like gnats.
I ask the majors of Economics, at what point do I go to the bank, take out all of my money, and put it under the mattress?  At what point, do I worry about sustenance?  Post-Graduation existence seems increasingly theoretical.  I’m not sure what future I’m looking for anymore.  My friend has been working for over a year in Antarctica, and I ask him: Do you Google truth?  He laughs, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by authenticity, hysterical Googling truth naked…”
When will we explore the mosaics in the abandoned subway stations?  When will we harvest for the New Year?  I frantically sculpt orange rinds in the Nevada desert, weld vertebrae in part-time studios, stash familial tintypes and polaroids in top-shelf first editions.  Clinging to the potential and the unease, the hazy and the untranslated, between the cellular walls and beyond the event horizon, I rummage the present.  I’ve never been mechanically inclined; my fingers tremble from cog to manual.  I follow the written word with instinctual faith.
On a road trip through New Orleans, we listen to the funk of enduring generations and discuss the supersymmetry of elementary particles. For the journey, I wrap my laptop in burlap.  I wear my sheepskin boots in preparation. Packing wool and propane, I find myself nourished by the panic, when what I really want is itemized on a to-do list: microscope, four-pound lobster, Pyrex, Alaska, and a mercury fountain.  “You can only put your pants on one leg at a time,” my father says, and to that, we toast.  From pronoun to preposition, from interjection to interrobang, we page through the appendixes, attentively.