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diary<br />
Cheever in a marble bathtub at a hotel<br />
in Los Angeles when I realized that<br />
there’d been a change. I was living in<br />
New York, but it hadn’t quite taken, and<br />
a weeklong stay on the West Coast had<br />
entered its second month. “When you’re<br />
in one place and long to be in another, it<br />
isn’t as simple as taking a boat,” I read,<br />
as I sat in the lukewarm tub. “You don’t<br />
really long for another country. You<br />
long for something in yourself that you<br />
don’t have, or haven’t been able to fi nd.”<br />
In my case, that wasn’t quite true.<br />
Instead of longing for something inside<br />
of me, I had been avoiding the search<br />
altogether. Adventure had somehow<br />
become an escape from life, a way of<br />
standing still. While my friends were<br />
getting married, having children,<br />
paying mortgages, losing jobs—all the<br />
sloppy things of life—I had abandoned<br />
any sense of permanence in exchange<br />
for perpetual motion. For the fi rst time,<br />
the travel felt compulsive, involuntary.<br />
The joy was missing.<br />
At a wedding in Florida around<br />
Valentine’s Day 2007, I had a revelation.<br />
Surrounded by old friends and<br />
classmates, I stared up at the dark<br />
cloudless February sky on one of the<br />
coldest nights on record and began<br />
to think of the fast-moving clouds as<br />
they crept across Cape Town’s Table<br />
Mountain, and the dawn casting its<br />
orange light through a lace curtain in<br />
Rome. I thought of the endless lime<br />
green of rice fi elds after a downpour<br />
in southern Japan, the corn fi elds and<br />
wheat fi elds, Niagara Falls and Iguazu<br />
Falls. With Cheever’s words ringing in<br />
my head, and with the faces of loved ones<br />
before me, I felt that I found what I’d been<br />
wandering for. As we talked long into the<br />
night after the wedding, I realized that in<br />
all my ramblings and peregrinations, I<br />
had never been as content as I was at that<br />
moment, among people I knew and loved.<br />
Man, I thought, if only I could<br />
persuade each and every one of them to<br />
come with me to Corfu. It’s absolutely<br />
gorgeous in the spring.<br />
MARTIN MARKS divides his time between<br />
Palm Beach, Florida, and New York—<br />
depending on how much laundry he has.<br />
www.ibear.com<br />
213-740-7140<br />
ibearmba@marshall.usc.edu<br />
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HUI RONG (ROMMY) DAI, IBEAR MBA ‘09<br />
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SURESH JEYACHANDRAN, IBEAR MBA ‘09<br />
Prior to entering the IBEAR MBA, Suresh was chief consultant,<br />
Corporate Software Engineering Center, Toshiba Corporation, in Tokyo.
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