Aug 2008 - How I Met Your Mother

My parents first met in 2008 while they were both traveling - not too dissimilar to many of my American readers who were lovechilds of College Spring Breaks gone awry but born too early to reap the publicity and stardom that accompanies being on MTV's Teen Mom.

Around 5 years ago, my father had been working on Wall Street after graduating college and saved up some sheckels by living in a modest studio apartment, shopping at Old Navy, eating Chef BoyRDee spaghetti for dinner and only taking girls out on 1st dates (before things got serious/expensive). He tells me he didn't love his firm and quit suddenly one day (same day his 2007 bonus check cleared interestingly enough) to "walk the earth," but I know the truth. He was inspired to find the woman who would one day become his baby momma.  That and his company's IT guy got a hold of his Google searches at work and the list wasn't pretty.

My mother was also traveling (sort of).  She was on a group tour with her school classmates going from one end of Israel down to the other.  She tells me that originally she didn't want to go on the trip, but thankfully for me, she did.  As you can see from the photo, my mother is stunningly beautiful.  Even though my father doesn't know much about football, he still tells people that he "clearly outkicked his coverage on this one."  (I'm not sure I understand what it means, but it sounds like something a douchebag would say).  But nevertheless, my mother is undoubtedly out of my father's league but for some exceptionally odd reason, she was born with some horrible disease called "yellow fever" which clearly proved to my father that there must be a God.

While my father was planning his world adventure, he randomly decided to go to Israel despite being neither Jewish nor fond of aggressive Middle-Eastern taxi drivers.  Nevertheless, he had always wanted to visit the Dead Sea and have that generic photo of him floating with his feet out of the water (so lame), thus he stopped at a nearby hostel near Masada.

For those of you bad at math (ie, non-Asians), I wasn't conceived yet in 2008, so I can't tell you the exact details, but here's my father's account of the story.

August 12, 2008 (Masada, Israel) - Many of you I've spoken with over the past few months have expressed a common desire to venture off into the nether regions of the world; some even told me they were thinking about doing it solo (we're still talking about traveling here).

However, these tepid individuals (just like myself before I first attempted doing so) also conveyed an uncertainty if they were the type of person who could strike out on their own for extended periods of time and be outgoing enough to actually meet new people along the way sans a Wingman.

When I tell them anyone can do it, they look at me like I just took some crazy pills. Because of my apparent (and self-imposed) reputation of being Socially Aggressive, many of my friends feel like only someone outgoing like me could pull off this kind of solo adventure. They'd be wrong.

I fully believe, like many things in life, being extroverted isn't something you're inherently born with, but rather, in many situations is completely an active choice that you decide to make or not. And honestly, you can fake it when you're not really feeling the moment. Case and point: yesterday when I arrived at the Masada Youth Hostel at the southern base of the ancient mountain fortress.

Because I didn't realize the last Jerusalem bus to Masada left at 1PM, I had to arrive much earlier than I anticipated to the hostel and consequently, my room wasn't yet available and I was sent off to the pool while I waited.

Now, as I approached, I heard the yelling and screaming, so I knew there were going to be young teenagers poolside. Just great. Given my stressful morning journey fighting with locals to get on an overly crowded bus, I wanted nothing to do with their nonsense. I found my quiet corner in the shade to hide from the 95 degree desert heat and hopped in the chlorinated water at the shallow end of the pool along with the Israeli version of the AARP who looked like they were about to go watch Murder She Wrote at 3PM before having dinner at 4.

As many of you know, one of my biggest fears is the Elderly. So after about 30 seconds of being way too close to anyone who may have lived in the 1930's, I contemplated making my way to the deep end and possibly mixing it up with some kids who were probably born in the 1990's.

It was at this precise moment, when I was literally in the geometric center of the pool, that I had to decide which direction to go both physically and figuratively.

I could either (A) stick it out in the shallow end with the Day of the Living Dead and keep to myself or (B) head over to the deep end where they were blasting Flo Rida and Israeli dance music from their mobile phones and try to make some new friends. And I had to decide quick because I'm not a great swimmer and my feet couldn't reach the bottom. 

 I distinctly remember telling myself, "Songer, let's go do what you do best" and swam up to make friends with the teenagers. Unsure of how to approach this particular situation, I threw down my "I'm an American from New York City" card pretty early on.

All of a sudden, as if the music stopped, all the teens turned around and I was the new star of the pool. They started all swarming around me like I was a teen celebrity. So this is what it must be like to be R Kelly.

They were all pre-Army age (which I think means under 18 years old) from Haifa (up North) and on some sort of a Israeli Teen Tour headed to Eilat the next day. Coincidentally, I too was going to Eilat the next day. And to answer the obvious question, yes some of the girls were jail bait-quality. Then, Ellie (the angry looking 250 lb Tour Leader/Chaperone) came walking down the pathway towards the pool. I wasn't a social scientist, but I was pretty sure that he wouldn't approve of a 29 year old adult male fraternizing with 15-17 year olds. Looked like the party was over before it started. 

But before he got there, I pulled out my waterproof digital camera and started taking photos of everyone while in the pool and even dunked it underwater a few times. The Israeli teens stood there stunned like I had just turned water into wine. 

So by the time Ellie got into the water, there was already a powerful buzz going around about the American with the magic camera. The large portly man swam up, looked me up and down and approached to speak to me in very broken English. Frightened of being yelled at for being too old to hang out with these kids, I looked attentively at the man....And the tension was finally broken as he smiled and said, "Can you make photo of me under water?" 

Suddenly, I was back to Hannah Montana rockstar status in the group. I continued to be their paparazzi and took an assortment of pool pictures for them and fielded their hundreds of questions about Manhattan, the 9/11 tragedy, Obama (who they disliked, by the way, out of fears of him being pro-Muslim), NBA basketball, Justin Timberlake and American movies. Ellie liked the waterproof camera shots so much, he made me take about 10 of him underwater. 

But this foreigner connection paid dividends. He invited me to join them all for dinner (I would have had to pay for it otherwise) and also offered to take me to Eilat with them on their Teen Tour Bus the following day. Nice, free ride! Oh, but there was one more thing...

Maybe it was because I started looking decent in a bathing suit again, or the fact that I was an exotic Asian-American in Israel, but there was this one girl who seemed to have developed a crush on me - she actually told me she really liked my slanty eyes. I mean, seriously, I couldn't even make this stuff up.

Of course, just my luck, she was about 5'6", Uzbekistanian, a former model, fluent in 3 languages and had a body that would definitely inspire searches for "Israel age of consent" on Google.

So for those of you who scored well on the Reading Comprehension sections of standardized exams, the message is that I definitely made a conscious decision here and it paid off.

I always have doubts about approaching strangers and putting myself in situations outside my comfort zone. But in this case, I actively chose to be outgoing against my general inclination to stay in the shallow end. But because of putting myself out there, I got a free dinner, a free bus ride to Eilat, and met a beautiful girl. As Virgil said, "Fortune Favors the Brave."

So that's apparently how my mother and father met that fateful summer day and 3 years later in 2011, I was born.  Given their relationship started while on the road, they feel that Travel is something meaningful for their lives and consequently have decided to force it down my throat from birth.  Given I have neither the life experience or verbal communication skills to argue otherwise, I have reluctantly gone along with their madness as their Lap Child Infant.

Let's just hope my father stays this cool and open-minded when I turn 18 and want to meet older international guys.