I understood at last that it was a con I needed. Now and from the beginning. For maybe your favorite teacher or coach or best friend conned you, too, into believing in a version of yourself you hadn’t yet imagined, a person many factors more capable, a person who might not have otherwise bloomed.

Keep on singing, bromeo.

be greedy in your appreciations. Practice extravagant gratitude. Savor whatever your portion. This may sound like carpe diem but what I really mean is for the dies to carpere te, to have the moment, the person, the world, grab you right back in their full rankness and glory.

expurgated

a semidiasporic postcolonial indeterminate like me

Pong was generous because he had a bottomless wonder for our multitudinous human family, this perpetual appreciation of how people are. And maybe: can and will be.

“You have a business,” Pong said to me quite seriously. “You just don’t know what it is yet.”

He tailored these pitches for sure but what I admired was that they weren’t in the least fake or overflogged. Pong offered them the angles they needed and wanted to make a free and confident decision that you could see became ultimately theirs and theirs alone. Pong, I realized, made himself their partner, not the other way around.

the main thing you learn about yourself and everyone else toiling away is how much of your mental activity and chatter is about dreaming of doing something else, whether noble or debauched or downright silly.