Thanks to my friend Rachel, I got to meet a lot of interesting people, people I would't naturally have met with my kind of blunt honesty and natural talent on pissing off people. One of them was a maid cafe girl called Bambi. Bambi is an Asian American girl in a cross section of a elder teen and a young adult, working at a Sanrio store, having a pair of giant eyes (at least when she put on her prescribed contact lens). Like a lot of young people these days, she's socially active, cheerful, enjoys alchocol breverage, and absoutely ready to try anything that doesn't kill her. You can be attracted by Bambi for tons of different resons. For me, it was a line she said to us last night.
"With GreyHound, I can go anywhere."
She said that during our conversation at maid cafe. We were talking about driving in general, as I always have an impression that all young people knows how to drive. In fact. some probably started doing it long before they got their driver licenses. Bambi, on the other hand, doesn't feel like she has a need to learn to drive. She commutes by bus to work during weekdays, and goes to mall or visit friends by bus during weekends. She doesn't have the luxury to impulsively decide to get to somewhere miles away in 15 minutes, and instead have to schedule her life around certain bus schedules. And there were times when she had to do a little bit hitchhiking so that could get home after 11 pm, as buses start coming by a every 45 minutes interval instead of every 10 minutes. Still, Bambi continues to manage her life, done what she wanted to do, and having a good time.
The reason why all these surprised me was because, while I had the similar bus riding experience during my college days, the memory and the feeling I have as I recall about taking buses was way different from what Bambi told us. Back then I had to squeeze a lot of college credit hours in my college study schedule because I need to get through college as soon as possible, before I ran out of money to fund my college education (I was a foreign student back then and there's no financial aid for foreign students). I found that having my life dictated by public bus scheduled being something that caused a lot of pain and agony to me back then. The inferior public transportation system in the city I lived at didn't help neither. Seeing my friends getting their own cars one by one, starting to have a brand new life that involved partying, dating and having fun made me depress. Eventually I got my own second-hand used car with the US$1800 I saved during my junior year. With this new freedom machine, I told myself that I would keep fighting in my life, and made sure that nothing in this world, particular not the stupid Metro Bus Schedule, would in any sharp of form control my life ever. I didn't want to rely on anyone to give me ride. I wanted to be the driver of my own destiny.
Such road map of living worked out fairly well for me throughout my life. Now I make a decent living, do and go wherever I found pleasing to me, and without no one holding me back, meaning no family no baby and no loan, I have the opportunity to make any major detour in my life. And since things worked out for me, I assume that it should on the others too.
But Bambi showed me another possibility of navigating life. I don't know how things will end up with her, don't know if she will still be happy with all the decisions she made during her post-teenage days 10, 20 or 30 years later. One thing for sure, though, is that she's hopeful about her life and the situations surrounding her. That is the power of being young: that everything is possible, and there's always a way to get through situations no matter how crazy and dead-end it may seemed. In the meantime, she just keep smiling, being cute, and having a good time. She doesn't have to take the owning a car and learning to drive route, because "with GreyHound, I can go anywhere."
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