Is Gas in Malaysia Cheap?

Compared to the U.S.? Excuse my French…but hell to the yes.

I have been asked this question numerous times since I landed in Los Angeles. Let me start with some simple math (this is ironic since it is my least favorite subject).

In Malaysia, gas (or petrol I should say since we are country once ruled by the Brits) is gauged in liters. Currently, the price per liter for RON 97 premium petrol (3.8 liters equals to a gallon) is Malaysia Ringgit (RM) 2.60. That is 0.83 cents! The price depends on average global crude prices. The retail price for premium petrol is decided by a “managed float” mechanism, in which its monthly price fluctuates according to market forces. In Malaysia, the price of gas is standardized nationwide.

The price of RON95 petrol and diesel, which are subsidized by the government, is currently priced at RM1.90 per liter (US $0.60) and the subsidy stands at 70 cents (US $0.22 cents) per liter. The Malaysian prime minister had pledged to maintain the price of RON95 petrol in the near future despite soaring global prices. RM17bil (US $5.4 billion) was provided in subsidies for petroleum products under Budget 2012.

Now let’s see how much my monthly stipend goes towards gas in California. The average price of gas per gallon in California is 3.88 (which is RM12) and it is rising! In Los Angeles, it is 3.85. What is interesting to me is that according to GasBuddy.com, South Carolina has the cheapest state average price of gas, which is 3.19 per gallon and Alburqueque, New Mexico, has the cheapest city average at 3.13. Hawaii has the highest average at 4.10. Of course, we can expect fluctuations. I remember a couple of months ago, the price of gas touched on 5.00 a gallon in downtown Los Angeles!

Having been here for four months already, I am aware as to how the price of gas is like a roller coaster ride. They’re down one month and up the next. According to the Motor and Equipment Manufacturer’s Association (MEMA), Americans drive nearly 3 trillion miles per year. That’s about 820 trips from the Sun to Pluto and back.

The United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil products per day (bbl/d), according to the Department of Energy. Almost half is used for motor gasoline. The rest is used for distillate fuel oil, jet fuel, residual fuel and other oils. Each barrel of oil contains 42 gallons (159 litters), which yields 19 to 20 gallons (75 litters) of gasoline. So, in the United States, about 178 million gallons of gasoline is consumed every day. That’s is a $%^& load of gas!

According to USA Today, the fluctuating phenomenon is called “rockets and feathers,” and industry analysts say it has been at work for a long time. The news website said “gas stations make most of their profit from attached convenience stores, according to Jay Ricker, who operates about 50 gas stations in Indiana. If a sign boasting low prices draws drivers to the station, they’re more likely to spend money in the store.”

But it’s not all cut and dry. USA Today quoted that the Federal Trade Commission is still conducting an investigation into the possibility of price manipulation in 2011 after increases in crude oil and refined petroleum product prices.

I guess I won’t be complaining that much when I return home in a couple of months. 

 

 

Is it like Black Hawk Down?

“So man, will you be going back to Africa when your fellowship is finished?”

“Yes. I will.”

“How is life in Africa man?”

How do you begin to come with an answer to a question like that? The continent covers an area of 11.6 million square miles. 30.2 million square kilometres.

“Is it like Black Hawk Down?”

That’s when I started laughing as I prepared an answer that I hoped would adequately paint the picture for the 25-year-old chap, who had just finished cutting off my hair and beard, coaxing me into accepting two thin lines of hair for sideburns.

Barbershops are very interesting places. Because the barbers are engaged in manual work, it frees their brains to wander and their mouths to chatter. For people who make a living off what other people say, it makes for interesting listening because there is no shortage of stories and storylines and no shortage of characters to tell them.

I was preparing to unleash a made-up narrative involving lions and elephants but Glenn E. Rice, the colleague who volunteered to take me to get the haircuts, intervened.

“John is from Nairobi, in Kenya,” he said and steered the conversation away from Black Hawk Down.

The barber, one Draque, must have had in his mind images of people testing their AK47 rifles at the open-air Bakarra market in Mogadishu, grenades piled like onions at the River Market and the sweaty, grimy faces of the cold-blooded men who make a living selling arms and related merchandise.

Foreigners in the U.S. have their fair share of inane questions about their countries of origin.

One girl told me she kept a story going about boarding the plane from their house on a tree, another amazed colleagues with stories of fighting off lions during her childhood and there is no shortage of those who make up tales about their fathers being chiefs and tribal lords.

It is all done in the spirit of good fun and somewhere down the line the ignorant fellow is told the tales were simply tales and the truth is only a Google search away.

One could argue, correctly, that this happens because the U.S. is so far away from the rest of the world apart from Canada and Mexico. Nairobi is more than 7,000 miles east of Kansas City.

One could argue, also correctly, that this happens because the U.S. media is not interested in the rest of the world unless the rest of the world needs  the help of the U.S., as Africa is mostly thought to do, or it is hosting a major event such as the Olympics or the World Cup. That’s why television is happy to run the same news over and over the whole day as if nothing else happened.

It makes for interesting times, though, because a black man such as the fellow asking about life in Africa probably does that because he feels a connection to the continent.

For many Kenyans, and Africans in general, living in the United States has also come with the realization that they are black and that they come from Africa. We certainly don’t consider ourselves representatives of our countries, let alone the whole continent, but that often ends up becoming the case.

On the day I came back to Kansas City, Lewis Diuguid, the colleague who picked me up at the bus stop, took me on an impromptu tour of the poorer side of the city.

These were the places, he said, that most of my other colleagues would not be too interested in showing me.

We drove through the east side, through neighborhoods where houses had been vacated and the doors and windows boarded up, others where the houses had been pulled down and bushes allowed to grow wild in the empty lots. At a plot where a line of shops once operated, and which had since been closed and boarded up, there was a policeman in a patrol car, smoking. He might as well have been waiting there because it seemed like an area that needed him around. We drove through places where there were shirtless men lounging on their cars’ bonnets, smoking, chatting and looking keenly at us as we drove by.

“The only businesses that do well here are liquor stores and fast food places where they sell fried chicken,” Lewis said. It seemed true; at liquor stores, there were plenty of drunk fellows in old clothes, faces withered by too much hard liquor and little food and eyes glazed over from being too drunk most of the time. As we drove west towards my apartment, the change in the standards of living were obvious; there were more nicely painted houses, manicured lawns, better pavements, traffic lights, and as we got to Brookside, where I live, the stores were open and the restaurants had outside seating.

The poor areas in Kansas City are obviously a far cry from the poor parts of Nairobi. They have water, electricity and wide, smooth roads. The houses are more decent. They are comparatively more comfortable, but I wouldn’t advice someone living in Kibera or Korogocho, Nairobi’s more infamous slums, to ever imagine that life in the poorer parts of the US is much different from theirs.

 

Growing Up Dallas

Growing up in the ’80s in Malaysia, I looked forward to Thursday nights to watching”Dallas.” Rich American families plagued by sex scandals, murder, mayhem, family squabbles and manipulation fascinated me. The seedier the plot, the better. Don’t get me started on “The Bold and the Beautiful.”

“Dallas” was the biggest hit in my family and I watched religiously with my parents and two older sisters. (I can still hum the theme song). But all the nighttime dramas, including “Dynasty,” “The Colbys,” “Falcon Crest” and the “Dallas” spin-off “Knots Landing” had a fan base within my immediate and extended family alone. It was a pleasurable escape from our uninteresting lives to watch the heroines with their perfectly coiffed hair and the heroes in their Stetsons float across the TV screen for an hour in the evening.

Not missing an episode of “Dallas” took some planning. If I wanted to watch it, I had to make sure I finished all my homework, ate my dinner, and freshened up in my PJs. Social gatherings outside our home would be cut short to allow us time to get back and plunk ourselves down in front of the TV. If we couldn’t be at home, we relied upon VHS tapes. Our worst nightmare was running out of tape or, worse– a broken VCR. 

J.R. Ewing, the scheming, Scotch-chugging oil baron played by Larry Hagman, was the pinnacle of all villains in the eyes “Dallas” fans in Malaysia. My mother even took a picture next to J.R.’s image at Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in London. This was after the famous Season Three finale cliffhanger, “Who Shot J.R.?” As a precocious 9-year-old, I almost believed that America was full of wealthy oil tycoons walking around causing trouble in their three-piece suits and living in palatial mansions like Southfork.  

I can laugh now at the nail-biting and gasping every time the camera closed in on the characters being cryptic or suspicious. It was cheesy, but so much fun! The history of who-married-who-and-is-the-half-sister-of-who was convoluted, but the twisted Ewing family tree and their messed-up alcoholic lives had us glued. 

After 13 seasons, three “Dallas” reunion movies and 21 years, the Ewings are here again to entertain us Wednesday night on TNT with the premier of the “Dallas” re-boot. Larry Hagman is back, and now J.R. and Bobby Ewing’s sons – John Ross and Christopher (played by Josh Henderson and Jesse Metcalfe, respectively) – will resurrect history with freshly minted plots of power struggles and family feuds.

I am glad that I am here in Los Angeles to catch it. I felt anticipation and a hint of nostalgia as I watched the new series take its course. It is as good as the original too, with new and modern lines and cinematography to boot.

 

The Nosebleed Section

One of the mandatory cultural experiences, I was told, was to go to a baseball game. To see the people, the colour, the passion for this American sport and to understand the game, even if just for day.

Sports events are among the most interesting places to go. The people are uninhibited- and if they are not, a bit of beer loosens them up- they do everything possible to influence events on the playing surface and will leave either crying their eyes out or shouting for joy.

So when Daryl Levings, one of the editors here, suggested we attend a Kansas City Royals match, I jumped at the idea, cleared my Saturday afternoon diary, which was empty,  and grabbed a cap.

Several hundred feet above first base.

We could only get seats in the uppermost tiers of the stadium, accessed via a long walkway or up the crammed escalators and settled in Row PP, with the diamond at the Kauffmann Stadium below us. As we trudged up the long walkway, beer in one hand and a hotdog in the other, Levings remarked that we were headed to the “nosebleed section”.

It’s called that because it is so high up that it could be compared to the top of a mountain, where the atmospheric pressure is so low the body’s blood pressure sends it running out of your nose. It could be said to be the farthest from the action. In Nairobi, we call it Siberia.

It was a good day, not too sunny, muggy and depressing like the past week. Women preferred either sun dress or hot pants and I think I was the only man in trousers.

Now a bit about what I had expected to be tight contest between the Royals and the St Louis Cardinals, referred to as the I-70 clash or something of the sort and an equivalent of the turbulent derbies of the English Premier League.

It wasn’t.

The Royals got a royal whipping. An elder gentleman on our right had been on bad terms with some loudmouthed Royals fans behind us and for the six runs that were scored after they clashed, he would celebrate by clapping in the direction of the drunk youths.

That was probably the best show of passion that day. Levings did cheer his team though, but when a fan starts hollering and clapping during the last innings and his team is down by six, it can only be sarcasm.

Passion is what I saw the following Tuesday.

Sporting Kansas City, the local football team, was playing the Dayton Dutch Lions and a colleague, Glenn Rice, had tickets.

Football fans like to live it up and although Livestrong Sporting Park was half full, the die-hards in the north end kept the singing, complete with drummers, chanting, singing and some unkind words for the opposite team.

Cheering them on.

I was also happy to note that Lawrence Olum, one of the few Kenyans playing professionally, is at Sporting KC, and he started the match, was involved in the first of three goals and was generally impressive. We ended up clapping and singing along.

It was the first football match Glenn would be attending. I don’t think he enjoyed it as much as I did. I’ll be sure to grab any other opportunities that come by.

Visitors to Kansas City are encouraged to visit the vibrant jazz district and see the Negro Leagues Museum. I went to both places last Saturday with Mara’ Williams.

The city was one of the places where jazz music grew and you can spend hours just listening to the old tunes at the many stands in the museum downtown.

The Negro Leagues Museum is about the baseball teams and players who were in the league when baseball was segregated. It was fun going through, reading their stories, watching the videos and generally getting to appreciate their story. Then we took a photo, walked out and saw the No Photographs sign.

The heavy hitter in the Negro Leagues.

 

 

Immigrants’ stories

Zain

Zain is originally from Iraq. He came to the United States in 1991 in the days of Operation Desert Storm.

He lives in Kansas City with his family- a wife and three kids- and the taxi is his main source of income.

He likes that he is able to earn a living for his family here and is able to send a little back home for their relatives.

Zain’s family moved here about seven years ago and he is happy that the kids can go to good schools and get the education they might not access in Iraq. He is also happy that as long as he stays on the right side of the law and fulfills his legal obligations, he can live comfortably in the land of the free.

But he is also a sad man.

Zain’s wife and first born son really want to go back and live in Iraq. It’s all his wife talks about: how much she misses their relatives- she is her husband’s cousin- and probably the laughter and language in Iraq. Their son does not like to play with boys her age and would rather spend his free time watching CNN with his mom for news about Iraq.

But Zain is not willing to let them go back. He thinks of the harsher and probably restricted life they would live there. He knows the kids would not have access to the quality of education and healthcare they have here. He also does not want to live in the United States without his family.

Zain told me his wife has developed a mysterious illness. Migraines that just won’t go away and swelling in parts of her body. They have been to numerous hospitals and the doctors have tested her for everything, and found nothing wrong with her.

Zain’s friend, who came from Egypt, has been frank with him. He thinks there is nothing physically wrong with Zain’s wife. She just wants to go home and this need manifests itself in the form of the psychosomatic illnesses she suffers.

“She is going to die here,” the Egyptian man has told Zain several times in the past.

It’s possible that she will, Zain says, but what will he do now?

Noor

Hefty and with a pair of earphones hanging around his neck, Noor likes to chat, and very enthusiastically spoke in Swahili after I told him I am Kenyan. He is from Somalia, and like many of those who fled the infamous state, has lived in many places before moving to the United States. He was therefore well acquainted with Nairobi and had recently been in Mombasa, where he spent lots of time relaxing.

Let’s not go into details but he was emphatic that a good time was had by all and another trip is planned.

Somalis are scattered all over the world and Noor said the Somali community in Kansas City is so big he feels very close to the home he will never return and settle in. But he keeps an eye on events in Somalia.

“Al Shabaab. They are motherfuckers,” he declared when I told him about the efforts of the Kenyan army in Southern Somalia. They probably deserved that expletive because at the time were speaking, there had been a bombing in Mogadishu.

Noor said his father was a diplomat in Cairo when Siad Barre’s government was overthrown and the country plunged into its eternal chaos in 1991.

He was also a wily businessman, and spoke proudly of how he bought his taxi by showing up with the money in cash and sweet-talking the owner. “The American man. He can’t refuse cash,” he said proudly, chuckling like a kid.

He dropped me off, ignored my suggestion that he need not wait around for me- no need to pay the waiting fee- and went to grab a bite at McDonald’s.

He got lost for a short while on the way back downtown. When the dispatcher called to ask why he stayed on to wait for me when he shouldn’t have, Noor had a ready-made explanation.

“This guy…he is from Africa. He don’t know this place, man, he is new here. He is from Africa,” he said.

He spent the rest of the journey in a loud conversation with Yusuf on his phone. Either Yusuf was hard of hearing or the connection was bad.

Paul

He has very vivid memories of the violence that engulfed parts of Kenya after the General Election in December 2007. He got his green card visa the same year and travelled to the United States.

A Kenyan woman living with her husband in New York had agreed to host him for a while as he got his footing and settled in the US. She is married to an American, a white man, and he knew he couldn’t stay longer than the time the couple wanted.

He was getting desperate, and then his wife’s cousin said her husband’s brother was living in Kansas City and wouldn’t mind hosting Paul.

He quit his job at a shipping yard in Brooklyn, bought a plane ticket, bought another for his wife and child to come from Kenya. A few days later, they landed in Kansas City. His wife was pregnant.

They were welcomed by Ngatia and his wife. Paul had a job at Target within days of arriving in Kansas City and they soon moved out and started living by themselves.

Paul was a mechanic and welder in Nakuru but he found his certificates didn’t count in the US. He is now going through college and hopes to have a diploma by the end of 2013.

Paul worries that his son might forget Kikuyu, although they speak to him in the language, and his grip of Swahili might slip even further. The young man was a Swahili expert in their first days in the US.

Paul often thinks of going back to Kenya. He would need a sufficient amount of money to start over another life back home, he says, but the decision will be made when the time comes.

For now, he is happy to get together with Ngatia’s family and other Kenyans in Kansas City, buy and slaughter a goat and then have some nyama choma and ugali.

A good time was had by all. We’re all smiling inside.

I write this after the end of one of my most interesting weekends in Kansas City and, indeed, the United States. It started with a day spent roasting meat with Kenyans on Saturday and ended with having a good laugh and a happy day with Mara’ Williams, one of my mentors at The Star, and her two boys. It certainly helped forget the homesickness that had begun to set in after two months. Zain, Noor and Paul did not have the comfort of knowing they would eventually go back home, and certainly not that of the mental preparation for a culture that’s completely different from what they were used to.

Mara’ and Trey

 

 

 

Beach and Funnel Cake

Funnel Cake. This is something I don’t need to consume again for the rest of my life. EVER. I tasted it. Didn’t really like it. Moving on.

It’s not like me to not research any new food I intend to embark on trying. But in this case, spontaneity was the word of the day. I just finished visiting Fox Studios in LA and since it was a great day (weather-wise), I thought why not visit Santa Monica Pier? The place is a carnival every day! 

So while walking along the pier enjoying the fresh ocean breeze and wind blowing in my face, I felt a bit hungry. Something about the beach and water that makes my tummy rumble. Anyway, I passed by the Funnel Cake stand and thought “hmm…maybe I should try some.” After paying $7 to the cashier only did I realize that funnel cake is not cake. I had imagined a cakey consistency being squeezed out of a funnel and not batter deep fried and served with sugar. This is apparently a delicacy at carnivals and amusement parks in North America. After the sticky gooey caramel topping got on everything (my pants, handbag, steering wheel) I thought this was  going to be a challenge. 

Suffice to say, I couldn’t finish the funnel cake. Also, I really didn’t need to up the ante on my sugar levels. But the chips and salsa and margarita made the afternoon a whole lot better. 

 

Very American, only a little surprising

He said he does this for fun. Hard to believe when he has all this equipment.

There are 26 big television screens on the walls and four bigger ones hanging in the middle of the bar. It is packed on weekends and big game nights and there is a band playing good music on Fridays and Saturdays.

It is also about 200 meters from my apartment in Brookside in Kansas City, Missouri, and it feels good to sit at the counter and watch people watching sports. Sporting KC was playing Portland Timbers at 9.30 pm on a Saturday two weeks ago but when I stepped in, it was not on any of the screens.

Instead, the management had elected to have its clientele watch the very violent and bloody Ultimate Fighting Championship. The UFC is something else.

Two fights after installing myself next to the busy counter, a bunch of people approached.

They were about six women, and they had broken off a larger group having fun at a table in front of my position. The older, motherly ones were on my left and the younger ones, the ones nearer my age, on my right.

“Excuse me. We are sorry to interrupt you. We want to ask you a very personal and embarrassing question,” the woman on my immediate left began.

“But you don’t even know me. You can’t just ask a stranger embarrassing personal questions,” I protested, but smiling because they were looking pretty harmless.

“We just want to know,” the younger, blonde one on my right started, “What your sexual fantasy is.”

This was not on the list of what to expect from Americans. Gary Weaver did not warn about this.

“What the hell?” I thus responded, backing away against the counter as far as I could.

The blonde girl explained that she was a bachelorette and she was out on a party with her mother and friends. She had a list of tasks on a card on a tag around her neck in addition to a pink sash with “Bachelorette” printed in silver.

Later, the girl came over and introduced herself. She is getting married soon and is thus deemed to have entered the “Bachelorette” stage of life. She recalled going to college with a Kenyan also named John.

She couldn’t remember his second name. He married one of her friends.

That said, it’s interesting to know that you can be sitting in a bar in the MidWest and a bunch of women can ask you about your sexual fantasy because one of them is going to be married in a few weeks.

Very American.

 

Little Miss Tardy

 

Malaysians have a penchant for being fashionably late. If you go to a Malaysian wedding (regardless of it being Malay, Chinese or Indian) where the dinner is supposed to start at 7pm (because it said so in the invitation card!), rest assured that you will only be eating about 9pm. I would suggest chomping on a Subway sandwich some crackers before the shindig to hold you over.

We often blame the traffic jams as our excuse for tardiness or some unforseen circumstances…or just other reasons which don’t require any reasoning whatsoever. This is how the term ‘Malaysian Time’ was coined. Those who are on time are pre-dispositioned to suffer through the waiting time for those who are chronically late. It’s all just a vicious cycle to be honest.

The concept of being on time was drilled into all of us fellows on our first day in America. 10am does not mean 10.15-ish and 9.30 does not mean 10am-ish. Of course there were some inevitable teething problems in the a.m. itself. It is always harder when you have to be on time as a group because when one is late the rest are too. Nonetheless I was getting stressed out of sticking to my newfound habit of being on time. They say that it takes 21 days to form a habit but then again it all depends too on the individual.

All I can say is I am almost there.

 

A polite kind of culture shock from Kansas City

“I’m very embarrassed to ask you this question and I hope you are not going to judge me for asking, John. Please promise me you will not,” she said.

I was rather surprised and anxious to hear what this potentially dangerous or embarrassing question would be but nonetheless promised there would be no judging.

“How do you pronounce your second name?” she asked.

We then went through the complex process of making the “n” in Ngirachu silent but remain in the background to make it sound something like gee-raa-shuu.

I wouldn’t mind my name pronounced any way.

Even the pronunciation above is quite not how it is said in Kikuyu, my first language, and only if you come from a small province in the middle of Kenya would you get the pronunciation 100 per cent right.

In my part of the world, we have a saying that goes, “A child will grow up no matter what you name it.”

But that conversation on my second day in Kansas City best summarizes something I noticed since landing at Dulles International Airport on a sunny Thursday afternoon two weeks ago: people here are much nicer and polite than I had imagined.

In my part of the world, we have learnt from the endless stream of America that we consume through movies and TV shows that Americans are generally self-centered and rude.

We have learnt from the comedy shows that their laughter is mechanical and requires an applause card to come through.

We have learnt that their politics is a no-holds-barred contest where anything can be said about any aspect of anybody’s lives.

Let’s just say that this perception has been changed over the past fortnight, except the part about politics anyway.

Even in D.C., where most of the people are in a hurry, people generally hold doors open for each other, are patient, queue without prompting and smile at strangers.

That has been a bit of a culture shock. It is much better to discover that Americans are indeed very polite and helpful to strangers.

The other difference has been on the bus I now ride daily to work and back to my apartment.

Anybody who has been to Nairobi will tell you that using public transport there can be both intimidating and frustrating.

While $50 monthly guarantees endless journeys on the comfortable metro bus here, the fare in Nairobi is dependent on the time of the day and the distance.

It is guaranteed to increase by up to 100 per cent if it rains, or there is an accident somewhere and the traffic increases. Against that backdrop, having a bus service that works is a very good thing.

Well, my friends back home keep asking, whenever we meet online, what I miss most about home.

It must be the truthful sunshine. Truthful applies here because while it might look nice and warm from inside the room, one cannot tell that it comes with a freezing cold.

It has outwitted me several times, when I have to go back for a jacket, but I have been told it will get better in the summer. That’s why I’m praying summer gets here sooner and I will not have to wear a jacket in the office or shiver as I wait for the bus.

That said, I look forward to five happy months in Kansas City.

 

Hello America!

I never thought that I would set foot in the US of A anytime soon let alone the city of celebrity-dom – L.A., because coming from Malaysia, it is very expensive to travel all the way here. But guess what? I am finally here, thanks to the Alfred Friendly Press Fellowship and Daniel Pearl Foundation.

I’m in the land where the press is free, tap water is safe to drink, sulphate-free shampoo is cheap and most importantly – the weather makes my hair behave. I am so lucky to be living with my foster family – Chris and Corie Fager, who are such gracious and kind people. While their homely and beautiful house is nestled within the confines of a plush suburban neighborhood in Los Angeles, it is great to see that they remain ever so humble by welcoming me and making me feel right at home.
As I landed at LAX, I was pleasantly greeted by Narda Zacchino, the executive director of the Daniel Pearl Foundation. I have the utmost respect for this lovely lady who had previously worked at the Los Angeles Times for over 30 years.
Ten days have gone by since I first landed in D.C. and I am looking forward for the days, weeks and months to come. It’s funny but I remember the evening I arrived at Dulles Airport in D.C. and met Katie Rudolph from Alfred Friendly Press Foundation for the first time. As I walked with her to her car, and being from Malaysia where we drive on the left (wrong) side of the street, I gravitated towards the right side of her car completely oblivious that I was in America. I hope she didn’t think I was trying to hijack her car. I can still laugh about it to myself like a blithering idiot.
I am writing this while feeling a bit anxious as I will start my stint at the Times in 12 hours and counting. Let’s just hope I don’t get lost on the subway getting there as I have yet to get my car. More importantly, let’s hope I don’t drive on to the pavement.