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. The Existential Barf
The only free seat on the bus is by a sullen boy who doesn’t turn his face away from the window as I slump down next to him. His Converses are dirty. As I shove my bag beneath my seat he scoots his feet out of the way and the phrase F*CK [...]

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