*Gasp* A New Posting

Ni hao, everyone.

Well, I'm exactly one week to the day away from boarding an airplane bound for the other side of the planet, and I'm already exhausted. The upside of the situation is that I'll be able to kill most of the 18-hour plane ride sleeping. The downside is that I'll also kill most of the rest of my last week here sleeping. Materially, I'm ready to go, literally shopped out (which as most of you know is a considerable feat), but I'm afraid that when the actual day arrives it will find me woefully unprepared both mentally and academically. I keep having dreams that I forget my passport or I get stuck at the airport in Tokyo or I lose my luggage. Of course, whenever I start getting stressed out I just remember my flight to Beijing last year, which I survived with almost all of my limbs more or less intact. This year's flight might be as bad, but there's not much chance of it being any worse. And I've been chanting this like a Hindu mantra.

On a totally unrelated tangent: I was at the mall the other day when I saw an Indian family (Indian Indian, not Native American Indian) walk by me. The dad and mom were in regular American street clothes, but the grandmother with them was dressed in traditional Indian dress. It's not really so unusual a sight around here, but on this particular occasion it struck me - it's weird how random situations will do this, just walk up and hit me upside the head for the fun of it - that you almost never see a young Indian woman in traditional dress. It's always the elder women. I could certainly be showing my cultural ignorance here, but that's neither here nor there. The point is that I wondered how, if I ever have kids, my children's world will be different than the one I see now. Will my daughter ever stand in a mall watching a woman in traditional Indian dress, or will this sort of thing have died out by the time she's 24? Me, I take it for granted. If little Lucy (the pre-determined name of my future hypothetical daughter) sees a woman dressed like this, will she gape and stare because it's such a foreign sight to her? And what other things in the world will have changed? Will China be the new superpower, and will Lucy be forced to take four years of Mandarin in high school (poor kid)? Will they invent lima beans that taste good and chocolate ice cream that makes you lose weight? And how many of the changes will be for the good, and how much of it for the bad?

And of course the most pressing and slightly disturbing question: how much of the change for the good will I personally have inspired, and how much of the change for the worse will I have failed to prevent?