In the sunny San Francisco spring day, Jeff was at the cafe, waiting for me because he was prompt, as usual.
As usual, I was not.
He was several kilos heavier, his smile was broader and his hair was now curly.
When we last saw each other 10 years ago, we were students in a California university. He, from Ipoh, spent most of his time teaching or doing assignments in the computer labs.
He was also the one we went to when we needed posters for our International Club events, costumes for concerts, and when I was down with the flu and felt the only knwn cure for that was Jeff's century -egg porridge.
After graduation, he got a lucrative job offer from a Silicon Valley company that would have put him in the ranks of BMW owners by now. But he had turned it down.
"I wouldn't have been happy doing the corporate thing," he said, pensive, stirring his cappuccino.
He had taken up a graphic design job for a small company in Seattle.
Now he teaches computer graphics part-time at a school and spends the rest of his time doing his stuff: freelance graphic designing, printing, and looking to import Peranakan antiques.
He keeps busy. The only reason he could meet me in San Francisco was because he had a meeting in the Bay Area.
The money is not wonderful -- but it pays the rent for his apartment by a lake.
"It's great," he said, grinning. "I can take off any time I want, I can take the jobs I want.
"Last year, I spent three months in Europe."
Throughout my three-week holiday in the US, people like him kept popping up -- school friends who ended up doing their thing or going against the grain.
Some were doing it because they wanted some control over their time and their lives. Some did it because they wanted to do something they believed in.
Many, foreign students who had stayed, were doing all this in someone else's country, which make it twice as difficult. This despite the much-publicised bad economy and the much-talked-about stackness of Generation X.
There was Steve, raised in a traditional immigrant Indian family in which boys were meant to be doctors, lawyers or engineers. In his early 20s, he had a well-paid engineering job in a computer multinational.
Then, despite much argument and parential disapproval (we are talking tears and shouting and rebel yells and guilt trips here), he took an enormous pay cut and went into journalism.
When he finally worked his way into the Chicago Tribune and got a decent salary, he took a cut again to work in New York for about US$2,000 (S$2,750) a month for a tiny but well-regarded weekly covering urban issues.
Anyone who has even breathed in New York knows that that kind of money does not get much elsewhere in the US, let alone the Big Apple.
Now he is doing some on-line stuff for a big publishing corporation.
He is also doing a volunteer project informing urbanites about city emergency services.
He is happy. Finally, he has found his niche.
No one had told them it would be easy -- and it is not.
For a while, Fati, my former housemate from Iran, worked nights at boutique chain The Gap, after her regular job duties, to gain retail experience so she could set up her own baby boutique.
Morad, her husband, works two jobs.
He does engineering for a company, and works outside his regular hours at a small company he set up.
Both have lived in northern California for more than a decade, but sometimes it is difficult for them not to feel like outsiders.
The day the bomb went off at the federal building in Oklahoma City, man-on-the-street news interviews garnered quotes like: "It's those Muslim fundamentalist fanatics again, let's get rid of them."
Then the evidence pointed to white supremists, the Michigan Militia.
"Remember the guy on TV who said we should find out who didd it, deport them and bomb the country?" one of their Iranian friends said one evening. "Do they mean we should not bomb Michigan or something?"
There was uneasy laughter around the table.
"Sometimes, I wish I could just pick up the phone, call someone and say: `Don't go anywhere, I've got some popcorn and a video and I'm coming over'," said Evonne, who, at 22, wants to set up a theatre group there someday.
But she needs to pay the rent, so she works as a marketing executive in a bank.
Many of her friends are here in Singapore, where she went to school, worked on a radio show and dubbed English voice-overs for Chinese soaps. And life away from The Gang can be lonely, especially when she had built up an extensive social circle here.
"But I just don't want to go home to a place where all people talk about is how much you earn, and how many zeroes you have in your bank," she said.
So she is staying put.
Sure, many of my friends there are doing the corporate thing.
Many, like me, also came home because we were seduced by life in the smooth lane, by having a home where everything is pretty much done for you and where you have the family car to drive at least some of the time.
You can argue that it is the cowboy spirit in North America that gets people there to defy convention. But the friends of miine who broke away are all transplants who grew up in conservative families.
If it is possible in slow-growth-but-competitive US, what more here, where we are reminded constantly that growth surrounds us and where opportunities grow in our backyard?
A couple of my friends have started their small business here.
One of them, in computers, struggled for years before turning a profit.
Sure, you may become stressed out and neurotic navigating rough waters, swimming against the current by yourself.
But who is to say you will not end up that way going with the flow, when you would really rather break away?
So the next time you find yourself wanting out of the conveyor belt but believing it would be too painful, think again.
The bullet may be worth biting.