Kuala Lumpur.

Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia, is one of those magical-sounding places that sounds like it shouldn't exist--like Timbuctu or Translyvania. Just saying it feels sexy on the tongue and lips. Try it.

Kuala Lumpur also has strings of lights hanging from the palm trees that outline their streets, so at night the city is in a state of perpetual golden rain. In the evening, women dressed from head to toe in black intermingle with men dressed up as near-grotesque caricatures of women. Homosexuals do this to avoid persecution because while it would be socially unacceptable for two men to hold hands in public, no one bats an eye if two mannish-women donning eyeliner and high heels walk down the street as a romantic couple.

Apparently, it would also be strange that a brown girl and a yellow girl would be walking down the street together as friends because here in Kuala Lumpur, the different ethnicities tend to stick with their own kind as much as possible.

Nabiha and I should guest-star in a Malay Sesame Street episode where we teach Malaysians the importance of interracial friendship.

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Nabiha and I have been friends since we were in first grade. While our lives have taken us to very different directions since we graduated from high school, it was by pure happenstance that for a window of time she would be in Malaysia and I would be in Singapore.

I can't tell you enough how much I love this girl to death.

Who would have thought that two childhood best friends from the suburbs of Southern California would, years later, end up smoking hookah and sipping Bloody Marys smack in the middle of Malaysia? We both relished in this happy twist of fate. Over the weekend, we did girlish things like shop for shoes, strip down near-naked to get cheap body massages and gossip about everyone we've known since elementary school. We wondered outloud what random country we would both end up meeting in next.

Being twenty-one is a ridiculously young age.

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On my first night in Kuala Lumpur, we tried durian for the first time. Durian, for those of you who don't know, is a thorny Southeast Asian fruit with a distinctive pungent smell that has been likened to rotting sewage, gasoline, stale vomit and other unflattering things. In Southeast Asia, it is illegal to take a piece of durian on the train or on the bus because its overpowering odour might be mistaken as a gas leak.

In spite of is notoriety, people seem to like it here. A lot.



We bought a plastic-wrapped package of it from a random fruit stand for five riplings. I said it looked like mini pig fetuses. Nabiha said it looked like a shriveled, jaundiced penis.

In spite of forewarnings from fellow exchange students who have sworn that they will never eat such a nasty-tasting piece of shit a second time, my virgin durian experience was rather anticlimactic. It had a strange, nutty-flavor with a slimy, porridge-like consistency. I expected for it to taste like rotting flesh, or at least burn a hole in my inner cheeks.

It didn't taste that great, but a morbid curiosity made me keep me eating it. It was like the gustatory equivalent of watching a bad B-movie: you kind of want to walk out, but then you kind of want to see how it ends. And you're too goddamn cheap and too goddamn lazy so you're just going to sit through the whole thing anyway.

I hope my next relationship isn't like that.

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I've been thinking a lot about why people get so wrapped up in storytelling and why we still need them in the first place. One of the many conclusions I reached was this: we need good stories because we wish good story structure for our own lives.

We crave recurring motifs and place unnecessary significance on them because it makes our lives seem less random. We wonder if minor, arbitrary coincidences are foreshadowing of something bigger and better. We hate it when there are loose plot threads, unresolved chapters or lack of poetic justice. We both love and dread suspense, embrace closure and laugh at irony, so long as it's not so tragic and it doesn't happen to us.

My current tentative post-graduate life plan of the moment is to find a random job in Japan. Work hard, get to know the language better. See what happens.