Say your madras shorts are dirty and I hate those shorts
I could write
Love is why I refuse to do the laundry
or
If you love me, you should wear chinos.
It’s painting to avoid a conversation.
Like when you tell me the milk is sour, and then put it back
In the fridge, I might write an ode to [...]

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 spend three months living in Paris. My family is only a husband and wife. Their son has joined the French military and is now training to fly helicopters to Afghanistan. My host father, Laurent, is sixty-five but quite vigorous and robustly French in all its stereotypes—he speaks not a word of English. His wife Philippa is a naturalized Norwegian whose fluent French, like her broken English, is overwhelmed by the rhythms and intonations of her native tongue. Since my arrival I am worrying about communication, reminded of what I have read in the translator’s note of a great novel: foreign languages are so difficult to translate not because of the differences between the words, but due to the incompatibility of their sequences. I tend to speak in basic sentences, noun-verb-noun, noun-verb-adjective, noun-verb-adverb, the simplest paradigms shared by French and English. Reduced to these three act tragedies, my first two months show me that my words no longer carry the texture of my thoughts.

This summer I spend three weeks doing political science research in Dakar, where I don’t know a soul and not a soul knows me. When someone asks, I confess, Yes, this is my first time in Senegal. (I visited Mexico, once, when I was eleven years old.)

I pass hours in the courtyard of my hotel, which has everything I need and could be possibly entertained by in Africa. A wireless internet connection, which they call wi-fi in French, so that it rhymes with leafy or beefy. A bar and a barman, who meets me with a beer at my preferred beer-drinking and wi-fi surfing table, near the hanging vines but not so near that a mosquito could lurk in the greenery and launch a surprise attack on my upper neck. I am terrified of contracting dengue fever, yellow fever, or malaria.

The barman is convinced I neither speak nor understand a word of French, no matter how many times I talk in French to him. [...]