It is Thursday night on the University of Southern California campus. My friend Caroline, a member of Kappa Alpha Theta, accompanies me down Greek Row, telling me what the strange symbols mean as I point to each house like a toddler at a new playground. I can’t tell you much about the rest of the night except that I jumped into a grocery cart filled with ice at a frat house.

For now, I treat death the same way as Woody Allen’s nervous-wreck-of-a character in Manhattan: slightly aloof with a touch of dark humor. In one classic scene, Isaac (Allen) stands next to a skeleton in a classroom, describing its life as one of the “beautiful people dancing and playing tennis.” He follows this with a healthy dose of fear: “It’s very important to have some kind of personal integrity. I’ll be hanging in a classroom one day. And I wanna make sure when I thin out that I’m…well thought of.” 

It is my family’s second day in Siem Reap, Cambodia. We are four pasty foreign intruders, standing before a bridge that will lead us to Terabithia, or perhaps to glimpse the faded footprints of Angelina Jolie’s stunt double from “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.”