Tuesday, July 18, 2006
a return
There are worse ways to spend one's summer. I am certainly at my leisure. I can go run around a lake when i wish, watch english language television programs as i wish, go to and from the fridge like an ant who found a farm-saving source of yummy sucrose/glucose/whatever it is ants eat, or i can just lie on a plush bed beneath spinning fan blades like a rotting possum carcass whose body slowly decomposes into the earth beneath. at first i was kind of bored here, but now i've grown accustomed to the inert inertia that moves me from bed to chair to fridge to lake to shower to toilet to fridge to chair to bed, and i've grown to like it. or, rather, accustomed to not being accustomed, as if i were on a mountain high, breathing in air too thin to live off of, whereas in reality, the air here is thick and silky, giving my lungs a rest from the pant-inducing altitudes of kunming and the harsh humidity of xiamen.
At first I was reading my collection of chinese books i brought home with me feverishly, hoping to stave off the lingual atrophy that comes with leaving a native land for a foreign one, but my fever has cooled, and my thoughts are regressing to a remembered state of monolingualism. It's nice to watch a television show and not have to constantly search through your mental lexicon for a possible meaning to a sound. It's nice to read a book and not have to refer repetitively to a dictionary. It's nice to talk to someone you've just met and not have to worry about misrepresentation or some slight misunderstanding. My brain is having a nice little break from the constant and minute barrage of mistakes that occur and have to be corrected and recorrected over and over in a land of foreign language and even more foreign dialect. It's just.. nice.
Though, that's not to say that I haven't had any intristing bits of adjustment to This American Life. Just at the Detroit airport coming home, I was doing what i would normally do in China when i get bored and just sit around with nothing to do, eavesdrop, and i couldn't understand a word of what this couple was talking about. They were speaking in such a hickville, northern, slurred speech that i couldn't even understand "standard" english. Chinese people say that American english is the most "standard" of all of the englishes, saying that british and aussie are harder to follow. I agree with that, normally, but I've forgotten just how garbled and vernacular Amerenglish can really be. lordie.
I even went out "clubbin" the other night. HA. okay, yeah, um, that was pretty mest up. People here, esp girls, have managed to dress up even sluttier than i remember. not that i minded it much, but it was just quite noticable. i'm vegetarian at the moment, prolly for a long while to come, and i just don't care if other people eat meat. they prolly shouldn't, it's not good for them and harmful to the world in the long run, but i just don't care if they do it. doesn't bother me a smidgeon. go on wit your bad self. but... wait, let me clarify, cuz slutty isn't the right word i was looking for. not that they aren't looking a tad... skeeze. but it was more the ridiculousness of the look, and the attitude, and the "miss thang" whatever they had going on. and the guys have gotten more effeminate looking, while still maintaining the machismo. very pretty boys. but i guess it all just goes back to the fact that i haven't seen this many Americans socializing together in quite a long time. everything looks comical.
and everyone has a friend, be it boy or girl. i've just come from a place where most people are single for some reason or another, and now everyone's got an other. i guess if you hang out long enuff in a place you pick up someone who is also hanging out in that place for a long period of time. i've been moving from place to place year by year and, luck being the way it is for me, i always just meet someone intristing at the end of that year and then move on. so, i guess, if i look at my past and anticipate a time in the future where i will be living in the same place for a while, expect me to find a girl i like ten months into the stay. but going back to what i was saying, it's odd to me to see so many people leading sedentary lives with complementary others. oh, and of course, people are getting married. oddness upon oddness.
music has gotten really bad here as well. at least, popular music. in the club, the only things i liked were the old songs. nothing new has the required amount of nostalgia for me to groove to. but on the radio, man are things sucking. it sounds like the music that was playing before i left, but now they've made it dancier and dumber. lyrics are incidental and melody is hardly required. kinda depressing, since i was expecting better than the current c-pop i've been harrassed with for years. i'll just need to find an underground source of music to suckle on during my stay. perhaps the internet will be the only way to find said teat.
continuing on with my rant, friendship is odd. i expected it to be tho, so it's not so emotionally scarring. everyone here has a job and a life and a direction, whereas i am floating in a little bubble of i'm-going-back-to-china and everyone expects me to pop as soon as they make contact. i must seem otherworldly to these citizens of the static life, eyes gleaming with memories of far-off lands, hair iconic with the sense of being without style or thought, words and accent unchanged by time (as they are the same as when i left) and speaking only of the past or the future. does time move more slowly when you stay in the same place, or do years pass by hidden underneath a layer of clouds as you pass over them, asleep, with no recognition. some people say it can't have been two years since i was last here, others can reconcile the time. i feel as if it has been five years, in truth. and so you have to ask, who are the people who live life as it actually passes, marking each day for its worth, judging each year accurately, never being surprised by nor underestimating the passage of time? i don't think i've ever lived that way, and i doubt i ever will.
harumph. this blog is getting boring for me, so i don't doubt that you're starting to yawn as well. i'll come up with some more fascinating things to throw at you in a while. more friends are coming to visit, so i should have shtuff to shay.
e
At first I was reading my collection of chinese books i brought home with me feverishly, hoping to stave off the lingual atrophy that comes with leaving a native land for a foreign one, but my fever has cooled, and my thoughts are regressing to a remembered state of monolingualism. It's nice to watch a television show and not have to constantly search through your mental lexicon for a possible meaning to a sound. It's nice to read a book and not have to refer repetitively to a dictionary. It's nice to talk to someone you've just met and not have to worry about misrepresentation or some slight misunderstanding. My brain is having a nice little break from the constant and minute barrage of mistakes that occur and have to be corrected and recorrected over and over in a land of foreign language and even more foreign dialect. It's just.. nice.
Though, that's not to say that I haven't had any intristing bits of adjustment to This American Life. Just at the Detroit airport coming home, I was doing what i would normally do in China when i get bored and just sit around with nothing to do, eavesdrop, and i couldn't understand a word of what this couple was talking about. They were speaking in such a hickville, northern, slurred speech that i couldn't even understand "standard" english. Chinese people say that American english is the most "standard" of all of the englishes, saying that british and aussie are harder to follow. I agree with that, normally, but I've forgotten just how garbled and vernacular Amerenglish can really be. lordie.
I even went out "clubbin" the other night. HA. okay, yeah, um, that was pretty mest up. People here, esp girls, have managed to dress up even sluttier than i remember. not that i minded it much, but it was just quite noticable. i'm vegetarian at the moment, prolly for a long while to come, and i just don't care if other people eat meat. they prolly shouldn't, it's not good for them and harmful to the world in the long run, but i just don't care if they do it. doesn't bother me a smidgeon. go on wit your bad self. but... wait, let me clarify, cuz slutty isn't the right word i was looking for. not that they aren't looking a tad... skeeze. but it was more the ridiculousness of the look, and the attitude, and the "miss thang" whatever they had going on. and the guys have gotten more effeminate looking, while still maintaining the machismo. very pretty boys. but i guess it all just goes back to the fact that i haven't seen this many Americans socializing together in quite a long time. everything looks comical.
and everyone has a friend, be it boy or girl. i've just come from a place where most people are single for some reason or another, and now everyone's got an other. i guess if you hang out long enuff in a place you pick up someone who is also hanging out in that place for a long period of time. i've been moving from place to place year by year and, luck being the way it is for me, i always just meet someone intristing at the end of that year and then move on. so, i guess, if i look at my past and anticipate a time in the future where i will be living in the same place for a while, expect me to find a girl i like ten months into the stay. but going back to what i was saying, it's odd to me to see so many people leading sedentary lives with complementary others. oh, and of course, people are getting married. oddness upon oddness.
music has gotten really bad here as well. at least, popular music. in the club, the only things i liked were the old songs. nothing new has the required amount of nostalgia for me to groove to. but on the radio, man are things sucking. it sounds like the music that was playing before i left, but now they've made it dancier and dumber. lyrics are incidental and melody is hardly required. kinda depressing, since i was expecting better than the current c-pop i've been harrassed with for years. i'll just need to find an underground source of music to suckle on during my stay. perhaps the internet will be the only way to find said teat.
continuing on with my rant, friendship is odd. i expected it to be tho, so it's not so emotionally scarring. everyone here has a job and a life and a direction, whereas i am floating in a little bubble of i'm-going-back-to-china and everyone expects me to pop as soon as they make contact. i must seem otherworldly to these citizens of the static life, eyes gleaming with memories of far-off lands, hair iconic with the sense of being without style or thought, words and accent unchanged by time (as they are the same as when i left) and speaking only of the past or the future. does time move more slowly when you stay in the same place, or do years pass by hidden underneath a layer of clouds as you pass over them, asleep, with no recognition. some people say it can't have been two years since i was last here, others can reconcile the time. i feel as if it has been five years, in truth. and so you have to ask, who are the people who live life as it actually passes, marking each day for its worth, judging each year accurately, never being surprised by nor underestimating the passage of time? i don't think i've ever lived that way, and i doubt i ever will.
harumph. this blog is getting boring for me, so i don't doubt that you're starting to yawn as well. i'll come up with some more fascinating things to throw at you in a while. more friends are coming to visit, so i should have shtuff to shay.
e
