I’m up and running — literally — at the buttcrack of dawn, putting a couple miles on my crosstrainers, scoping out the traffic flow and store parking lots. Koreatown is a gridlock of orgiastic consumerism and atomized families commuting back together. I’m the fastest-moving thing in sight.

I know exactly what kind of scanner to buy for digitizing the maquiladora archive. But calling around to check if retailers have it in stock is pointless. I listen to muzak loops long enough to know they’re loops. I don’t blame the clerks. Much. The customer in their face is always more important than the customer in their ear.

Half a day and a whole tank of gas later, I’ve got the goddamn scanner.

Waiting for me in the mailbox is a Christmas card from Phoebe. The kind with her employer’s logo emblazoned across the front. Straight from the heart, baby.

I kill the rest of the afternoon writing a grant application. Some foundation in south Texas I’ve never heard of. They make grants up to $500 in support of border cross-migration research, mostly in the Rio Grande corridor. I put my odds at about 2%. Slightly better than playing slots in Vegas.

Later I call my siblings to remind myself that I have some.

Wendy is out having dim sum with her eternal boyfriend. She talks about him like he’s not sitting right across the table from her. “…but I’m like, we’ve got a good thing going. Why screw it up by getting married…?”

Brian is already psycho about the impending Christmas Eve dinner with Mom and Dad, a traditional spread of lefse and Swedish meatballs and passive-aggressiveness. Meanwhile he’s got pain flaring down his left arm and shortness of breath. Cause and effect, dude.

Brian hangs up without asking if I want to speak to Mom and Dad, because he already knows I don’t.

There’s almost nothing on TV to indicate that it’s Christmas. I flip aimlessly without watching, making bluish patterns that flicker across the walls and ceiling. The effect is claustrophobic, shrinking this studio apartment even smaller. For three years I’ve been sleeping in the kitchen, dressing in the living room, eating in the bedroom.

A few minutes before midnight my cellphone beeps with a text message. r u up. It’s Nooshin. I message her back, letting her know it’s okay to call.

Her voice is an excited whisper, trying not to wake her sister’s family. “I was just trying to go to midnight mass at this Catholic church a couple blocks away, except I missed it because get this — they started midnight mass at 11 PM! Isn’t that the funniest thing ever?” Then her voice catches. “Or does midnight mass always start an hour early? Are you Catholic? Do you know?”

And I start chuckling, a little at first, then harder and harder, until I’m almost sobbing in relief, because Nooshin’s voice is a lifeline, and suddenly all I want for Christmas is a starlit conversation with her about why the hell she’s interested in midnight mass.