Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls

by David Sedaris

Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.

This was not a real stove but a symbolic one, used to prove a point at a management seminar she’d once attended. “One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.” The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful, you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful, you have to cut off two.

I should be used to the way Americans dress when traveling, yet it still manages to amaze me. It’s as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge saying, “Fuck this. I’m going to Los Angeles!”

I mean, please! This was what a chicken might wear to a Halloween party if she had ten minutes to throw a costume together.

Everyone swore that the food in Beijing and Chengdu would be different from what I’d had in the United States. “It’s more real,” they said, meaning, it turned out, that I could dislike it more authentically.

There are problems everywhere, of course. It’s just that without my passport I can’t adequately appreciate them.