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On a restless whim, I decided to fly to the Philippines. When I arrived, my parents practically followed me there to make sure I was okay--after all, I didn't tell them where I was going. Once there, I met up with my grandmother, the one that is currently dead. She was younger than I remember her, and her voice was husky, pretty, lively, and remarkably American. This is the grandmother that I look exactly like, and that I suspect I am a lot like. We talked comfortably about this and that, about her history, about my relationship with my family. She had a small place, with a lofted bed, on which we sat, hanging out. She introduced me to some friends of hers, young filipinos about my age, and they were totally cool. They took me in immediately, like, You're Cecilia's granddaughter? Rock On!

They took me to a hamburger joint, where they introduced me to Joe, who flips burgers. He said Hey and gave us all our meals without asking for money. They said, "That's our Joe."

We moved on to a shopping mall, where they were going to take me to their hangout home base. We went to the elevator, and they got in before I could, and so as it went down, I kept up on the stairs, and they communicated what floor they were going to by knocking the appropriate number of times on the elevator doors. Apparently, we were going to the 57th floor down.

The stairs ended at the fiftieth floor, and they also got out at the fiftieth floor, where Snoop Dogg was hanging out in a round glass room with some friends and ladies. The people I was with all just gave him a nod as they met up with me and we went to a different elevator to continue our descent.

We got out, and walked a seriously labyrinthine maze of corridors, slanting up, down, turning in every direction, painted with millions of different designs and colors. As we walked, I said, You know, there's no way I could figure this place out if I weren't with you guys. And the guy sort of leading us, who reminded me for some reason of Mark Ruffalo, explained that, yeah, they keep it that way on purpose. This is their place, a secret hideout as it were, where they went to discuss and work on things and change the world. He didn't say it in a way that made you think 'idealistic', he said it in a way that made you think, Oh my god, so this is the seat of power. How lucky am I. We finally reached our destination, which was actually a very small, heavily painted room that felt more like an attic than a basement, seeing as how there were small windows all along one wall through which light was streaming. You really felt like this was where some interesting decisions about the future of the world were made. By these incredibly well-connected, intelligent hipster refugees.

10:58 a.m. 2004-04-24�

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