Sino-psis

i'm not really sure what was real or imagined or dreamed. i coulda sworn that i woke up last night and the room was shaking. i then stood up and went to the side of my lofted bed and swayed there for a while. i then got a drink of water and went back to bed.

however, i just checked the earthquake tracker and there wasn't one anywhere near japan last night. if a dream, what a vivid one! could it be prophetic? or maybe i just ate some bad sushi and produced a tuna-inspired nightbear.

either way, earthquakes are fun! all danger aside (and of course, papa, i fully understand what to do if the room starts to crack in half), it'd be so cool to get some friends together and have a minute-long quake dance. impossible to coordinate, but cool. i should google quake dance and see if someone's done this before. ha! there are lots of dances called "earthquake" on youtube. they're pretty funny looking. if i ever get my webcam working again, i'll try to tape myself next earthquake, doin the dance.

oh, and i'm sad. the japanese marathon women's runner just dropped out cuzuva calf tear. i was looking forward to that. noguchi mizuki's her name. the male breaststroke swimmer just isn't as inspiring.

that's all.

poo poo. i've had a ticklish gestrum in the back of my throat now for a week, ever since that long run day. all i can figure is that i destabilized my immune system and now i'm paying for it. i tried to sleep it off on sunday, to no avail.

i've now had two days of teaching (long hours on monday and tuesday) and just this morning, maggie took off for england. i woke up at 5 to see her off to the station, further breaking up my sleep cycle and doing me no good. it was, unbelievably sad to see her go. it didn't hit me as she walked through the turnstyle, but as she went up the escalator to her platform, the weight of it (contributed to by the humidity in the air) hit me. we've spent the last year and three months near or nearby each other, and now no more. these moments in life, they hurt. never gets easier.

and it doesn't help having a mucus factory plugging up your brain. i wake up in the middle of the night choking and hacking. it's impossible to take. for the imaginatively inquisitive, put together a clogged drain and the old Nickelodeon products like Splat or Goo or Gunk or whatever they called it. that stuff that they had to swim around in on Double Dare to find the flag. it is kinda reassuring tho, to know that i am not just a sick man but also a toy factory. makes me feel more productive.

classes are good, but i have to push my energy up a notch to meet the challenge, and i don't think that does anything good for my white blood buddies. they get a step up on the germs, and then i make them take two steps back by delaying their reinforcements. i think there's gonna be a leukolympho coups pretty soon, unless i start displaying some better tactical judgement on the battlefield.

oh, and once i get back into running health, i think i found a track nearby my house, so i can finally do some track running on a regular basis.

and one of my students tonight is composing some new age music and he and i are going to stitch together some lyrics for it. and he just died his hair blonde for the summer break. he came in wearing a red shirt with a bright design and looked like a supernova. it almost made me forget how late he always is. oh, kazune.

anyway, sleep time. hopefully tonight's rest will be the one that will restore my soul. if not, tomorrow's gonna be another long daye

was cool. they were all superstars. many of them can run a marathon in under three hours. i'm so jealouss of their mad prowess. but the workout really kicked my ankles. we did 6 kilometers of running. 2 400s, 2 800s, 1 1200, 2 800s, and 2 400s. in between each run we jogged 200. and if you're not sure what those numbers mean, let me just say that it basically meant 30 minutes of continuous running. not jogging, running. an amazingly good workout, but i was already tired to start with.

then we went to a vietnamese restaurant afterwards. i was still sweating, but the place was a/ced, so i cooled off eventually. as i said before, the only problem with this group is that i usually can't make their wednesday night practice, cuz i teach til 9 or 10 and the track turns its lights off at 9. i'm gonna go to one of their sunday morning meetings, but few people show up for that, and it's not a track workout, so not too special.

my schedule leaves little time for extracurriculars, which is forcing me, grudgingly, to become a morning person. get up 530 or 6 and run, then do some studying or whatever the rest of the morning, and then go teach in the afternoon and evening, and then sleep. i'll either die doing it or become so superfit supersmart that no one will recognize me. i'm betting more on the former.

as for friendship, maggie's leaving on tuesday for england to try and get her us visa. once she's gone, i'm gonna have to find some japanese guys to hang out with. not that the other foreigners around here aren't cool and all, but i really need to go native. as i've planned it, i'll only be here a year. to learn high-level japanese in that time, while teaching, is relatively impossible, but i'll give it a shot. i've got a teacher set up for my thursdays starting in august. now i just need to find some retirees who have lots of free time to hang out with in the mornings and arrange flowers or something (maggie's idea :)

ok. i'll think of some more interesting things to blog about and get back to you.

e

today. i went for a run around town, just to scout out other places nearby and possible eateries (as there is a megadearth of food joints to smoke round here). so i ran past my station, then past another station, and finally found myself up somewhere in koshigaya that i'd been before. not lost yet.

but then i ran to a nearby river i'd walked down before and started making my way back home. i thot, well, if i just follow this river, it will lead me to the river that i usually run on, and then i'm home freaky-free. yeah. not so much.

the river split and i took the channel more travelled. that made all the difference, as it were. i ended up somewhere way way north of my house. admittedly, there were some cool riverside trails there to run and some cute dogs to dodge, but i was way lost.

so, i thot, hey, i'll just run til i hit a train line and then follow that home, no biggie. but running for two hours does odd things to my brain, and when i saw the first set of elevated tracks and the color of the train going down it, i thot it looked like a train line that goes nowhere near my house. so i kept going.

turns out that that Was the one i wanted, and the river i was following curved back a couple of miles later and hit it again. this time the name of the line was conveniently on the side of the track. i got lucky and guessed the right direction (after staring dumbly up and down the tracks for a few minutes) and just had to jogwalk three stations back. thankfully i took a 1000 yen note with me so i could get some aquarius, pocari sweat, and a couple of onigiri (rice balls).

i'm gonna go find a running group tonight that run track intervals every wednesday night. this week we have three days off in the middle of the week surprisingly, so i'm using this chance to go meet the group, as usually i'm teaching at that time. supposedly, they usually do a long run on sundays, but i can't find much info online.

i just googled them today, after my run. some kind of cosmic joke. i ran yesterday, too. my legs hurt.

Lately, as i've settled into life here in koshigaya, i've been starting up a running routine. This first week of work is kinda putting a crimp in that routine, but hopefully, once i get into the swing of things, i'll get back into running four times a week or so. Running truly is such a big part of my life, and i rarely write about it, so i thot i'd give it a shot.

the route i do here is fairly long, about an hour and a half, and is a there'n'back kind of run. i've done it a couple times now, so i've worked the kinks out and am able to really stretch my legs for most of it. it starts out going up this pretty busy highway that heads away from my station, past my house, and up north to wherevertheheckitgoes. i take it for about ten minutes, and then run down a sharp enbankment to a riverpath. i take this path for the rest of the run, save my last little run back down the highway home.

the path is fun. in the afternoon and early evening there are always walkers, runners and cyclists tooling about. i skirt, wave, and flick them off respectively. man, a well placed biker can really ruin your pace if you aren't totally paying attention. they really think they rule the path, expecting me to get my behind outta their way, when really, if you go by boating rules, the faster one should have to divert their course to allow the slower one to pass, ie the one with the wind to its back. and since bikes pretty much always have the wind to their backs, obstensibly, then They should be the ones to swerve outta My way. do i hear an amen? can. i. get. a.......... witness.

thank you.

seriously, tho. running on paths and sidewalks would be way easier if it were no holds barred. i'd chicken wing the slow runners, clothesline the walkers, and superman the cyclers. and if there were a biker who just happened to be going the same way i was, and also going at the same speed (which so many oddly do), i'd just hop on the back and get a breather. if you don't get in my way tho, be prepared for a stylish, magnanimous, earth-shattering head nod in your direction. oh yeah. you know it. don't be surprised if you get a little star-struck.

but all that's in my head, prolly due to the lack of oxygen created by anaerobic activity. my body starts lactating, or lactosinacidnating, or whatever, and then i stop thinking clearly. some little girl stops walking to look at a toad, "argh! what are you doing?! i almost smooshed you!" or some old lady on a bike pulls out right in front of me and "are you crazy! don't you look?!" and so on. it's a vicious lap.

and then sometimes little unexpected things happen to make the run more interesting. like last week, i was running after getting back from dinner with a guy i was training with. it was latish, and just getting dark, but i wanted to get in a run, so i went anyway. turns out, that was a dumbalicious idea. no sooner did i get to the river than i realized my mistake. every single midge, gnat, bugger, and whirlydig known to japanese men came out of the tatamiwork. they clustered in swarm-like windshield traps. but, not being on a road, they had to settle for meek runners who had their minds occupied with ducking the low-hanging, uncut cuz everyone's short, limbo tree-branches along the path that whip out of the dark at unexpected heights. after i swallowed, snorted, and porously inhumed the greater part of the mosquito nation, i figured i was in the clear. i had left the overgrown stretches of the path and was into the heavily travelled portions. lotsa people about and swerving to accomplish. it was then that it struck.

you really have to imagine it from its perspective. a peaceful evening, humid. all its friends are out flitting about. it can hear them all having a good time. so it puts on its sticky shoes and shoots off into the breeze. ah, the fresh air. ah, the light of the moon. ah, the slight chill in the air that comes with night. OH NO, A HUGE HUMAN EYEBALL!!! splat. ouch. man, that hurt. where the hell am i? ow, stop that. stop rubbing! you're, stop, no, no, oh no.... i'm trapped! i'm suffocating.. gasp. help. anybody. BANG BANG BANG. i'm trapped behind a big piece of... glass! no, plastic. no.. what the heck is it? cough cough, splutter splutter, choke. aaaaaaaahhhhh, i'm free, finally! fresh air! squish. flick. splat.

yeah, it got me right in the contact. i had to take it out to dislodge the poor fellow. and then, instant karma for killing one of the mosquito god's creatures, i lose my left contact. cue searching futilely through grass, embarrassed looks at passersby, and then one very long very blurry run home. delightful.

but not all events are that traumatic. i found a place to stretch out and do some mediocre exercises next to the path. apparently, it's also the place where this one old guy practices his croquet malleting. he's quite good at the long ball. practiced aim. but it's a little weird with him there, and some other lady cheering him on, and then some guy with an unusually attentive white ghost dog attached to a tree all watching me as i do some pullups and whatnot. and i'm pretty sure i gave a yelp of pain at one point that got their attention. i was doing situps, and somehow pulled my shoulder. i have no idea. i must have been tense. i didn't even know that situps worked that musclegroup. oddness.

and there are other little fun things. like the driving range that's lit up like heaven. brighter than a baseball field at night. wonderful for a landmark when it's dark and one is missing a contact. or the one road crossing that is ridiculous to cross. i waited for ten minutes one time for a gap in the cars. they have the timing down perfect. first a string of cars from the south, then a string from the north. i'm thinking from now on i'm just gonna run 300 meters down the road to the crosswalk and then run back to save time and frogger lives.

ooh, and then there are the two pedestrian bridges. these are nice. they go up and over to big thoroughfares, connecting the path alongside the river. quite nice. and you can get some cool views of the surrounding city/countryside. and if you run just a bit farther, there's a temple of sorts with various paths to run on. i'm not sure what's past that, but i'll find out one day when i finally get in shape enough for super long run.

all this writing about it makes me want to go run. i think i'll save it for tomorrow morning, tho, since by now, the squigglie-wigglies are out and looking for trouble. and contacts are expensivE

Here I am in Japan again. I feel as if I'm just going to type this blog out into empty space, a note on a bulletin board facing the wall, since anyone who might have ever read this Must have given up by now on checking for a new post. shoot, i would have. but then that's me. there are better. kudos to them. :)

I'm just gonna touch on two things: Melon soda and a Hanging pole. I refuse to go into any rants on japanese culture at this point. there are plenty of other blogs for that, and honestly, it's not interesting for me to write about, as I hear about it so often. So i'll hit closer to home.

When I was in tokyo in 1998, my favorite drink was melon soda. There was this guy named Chaz or Chester, prolly Chester, and he and I discovered a fountain soda machine on the ground floor of our Olympic Center Hotel that we were staying at. we just Had to sample the melon soda. needful to say, it blew our minds. pure sugar, and pure green, it has everything that both plants and humans need. in fact, it's parentage most likely has something to do with Slurm from futurama, coupled with time travel and holodeck technology. it's an evil, addictive biproduct of the japanese pension for over-the-top products.

Over the course of that summer, I happily slupped it whenever I could get it. My host family did its best to keep me healthy, but that bubbly toxin found its way into my belly through powerful means of seduction. i couldn't resist and didn't want to. it was never odd to me that the first half of fantastic is fanta.

But when i left japan, i never found it again. apparently, yumminess is not marketable in america. so i moaned for a month and then got over it. but whenever i saw a can of fanta soda after that point, i would always check out the flavors, just in case.

And now, ten years later, I'm back, and that delicious soda still remains. it's in internet bars, food courts, and a lot of convenience stores. i'm in heaven. but i didn't count on one thing. just last year, in training for my marathons and for my general health, i decided to give up sugar for a while. it ended up lasting a couple of months (except for some czech birthday cake, which mostly got smeared on my face) and totally changed the way i ingest words ending in -ose.

When i went to england, everything was too sweet. i thot it was just a british thing. then i went to america. it was the same. and then i came here to japan and got some melon soda at an internet bar. i barely could take a cup of it. i used to down that stuff, and now i can hardly gulp a mini gulp. i pretty much ruined sugar for myself. i damn near ruined japan for myself. if it weren't for salmon sashimi, i think i might just pack up and go home. and one of my fellow teachers almost ruined That for me as well, telling me about his experience in a salmon packing plant in england. i barely got out of that with my grizzly bear-like salmon-eating ferocity intact. a lot of ear plugging and chewbacca imitating helped with that.

but now i'm at a loss as for how to deal with my drinking life here in tokyo. it's dead useful to have a favorite drink to fall back on, and pocari sweat just doesn't do it for me. if not melon soda, then what?

Moving on to the Hanging pole. I got into my apartment here and found that it had everything I needed. Tv, washer, futon, internet, sit-down toilet, small stove area, the works. but when i washed my clothes, i found that there was no hanging line or anything, just some brackets outside the window that a pole or a line could attach to and fit across the outside, from which i could then hang stuff. so i set out to get a pole.

There're these nice stores five minutes walk from me, all scrunched together in one building with a cramped parking lot out front. I walk through the parking lot to get to the front entrance, and in the evenings i'm usually dodging vw beetles, those cube looking cars, and all kinds of expensive rides. there's a posh grocery store in the bottom, as well as a dvd/cd/book store next to it, but up above there's a 100 yen store (dollar store) with everything a poor english teacher in tokyo needs.

so i went up there in search of a rod. i scoured that place. i thought, well, let's look at the hanger section, there's bound to be one there. or maybe in the cleaning section. or maybe with the brooms, or the car thingies, or the tupperware. man, i looked all around that place and was ready to leave. but right next to the cashier was this garden section, and hidden in the corner were some green garden poles. the buying of it was uninteresting, but i got one that looked about the right size and got out of there.

walking around with it was kind of fun. i went down to the grocery store and trolled the aisles in search of food stuffs. the pole was kinda cocked at my side, ready to joust at a moment's notice. but no one took the bait, sadly. and then, when i was packing up my stuff and ready to head out, i almost forgot the thing, as i had put it to the side to work on packing my groceries perfectly in the plastic bags. it was only when i noticed that i didn't have to pull in whatever i was carrying in order to not hit another shopper that i realized i was missing something.

When i got home i went to the window to try it out and almost bit my tongue. i stuck the pole out the window and tried to fit it through the hole and realized that it was baaaarely big enough. it would fit through one hole on the right and then fall out of the other one on the left side of the window. for a moment, i was certain that i'd have to think up some other crazy use for that pole. like long distance cooking or moat depth checking. but then i realized that if i just wedge the thing into these little holes next to the big hole on the window's hanging fixtures, i could just prop it out there without having to thread it through. it actually wedges perfectly, taut enough that it won't fall down with a full load of laundry on it, and yet not so taut that it might hurt the braces. it looks very pretty out the window, too. nice and green. and if you look out through my window screen, it complements the yellow constellation of tape i put over the small holes in the screen to keep the mosquitoes out.

i'm pretty proud of my window pole. and when i walk by the complex and see my undies floating in the breeze, my pride knows no bounds. now if only i could figure out where to put my dishes to dry, i'd be set.

wow, long time no post. nuff said, i guess.

so i went to the grounds of the qingdao beer festival to check exactly how far away from the center of town it lies. one of the school i was looking at to become a possible place of future employment told me that they had an apartment for me out there, but seeing as how the bus ride took about an hour, so i wasn't really enthused to take them up on the offer. however, as i read on page five of the newspaper on the way out there (i had time to fully peruse every facet of that issue, including the personals printed column style down the spine of each page) the theme park attached to the beer festival was opening that very night! that at least warranted my sneaking in through a side entrance pretending to be with a chinese family to check out all the commotion.

nope, no commotion. hardly anyone was there. and that, if you have been to either the north carolina or iowa state fairs as i and many others have, is a damn good thing. nooooooooo liiiiiiines. every ride was instantly accessible in a kind of don't know whether to first eat the pizza or the fries way. everything looked deliciously intrudable.

but there are a couple of things that goes through one's mind when in a new city in china. in my mind, for example, at the moment that i was staring up at the G-Force/Joker, i was thinking "Gosh, 60 yuan is kinda expensive for one ride" and "Man, everyone is gonna stare at me as soon as i buy my ticket" and "Is it possible that I might be too tall for this ride? The sign has a height minimum but no maximum. Maybe they've never had anybody my height ride before and don't know what to do." and "Is it possible to throw up on an empty stomach?" and "I would hate having to explain as a ghost to my family and friends how it was that i died in a freak whiplash accident in a beer festival amusement park ride." etc.

But it looked like so much fun and i hadn't been on a ride in years, probably. So i went, and it was worth it.

It's the kind of ride that spins like one spoke of a ferris wheel, but much faster, and at each end of the diameter is a chair where two pairs of people can sit (strapped in) back to back. This chair can swing on an axis, so that when the spoke spins over the top of the ride, your chair will flip over a couple of times on the way down, thus adding to the g-force being exerted on your body and producing the name of the ride. I sat next to a random chinese girl and there were no people behind us. As we got on, there were four people hanging 40 meters above, waiting for the ride to spin them in the opposite direction. The scenery up there, is beautiful.

To one side of the ride, the landscape is a series of apartment complexes followed by beach and then ocean. The day was clear as a clear bell (not one of those dirty brass ones) and you could see everything. One the other side were a series of ridges/mountains that were shear and lush and majestic. The sun was hitting everything just right, so it was sad that it would be suicidal to have brought my camera up there.

The guy let me take my sandals off and then sat us down, locking the bars over my shoulders and buckling everything up. Tug, clank, he was satisfied that it was secure, and i've learned by now to just trust someone who looks good at their job to be good at their job. It might be the death of me one day, but until that day, I will trust in other people as much as I can.

The swing up was fine. We went forewards first, watching the people below get sucked into a whirlpool of noise and diminishing light. The sky above opened up and we could see everything. And then we blindly did a backwards dive into the pool below. That was mildly scary and elicited at least one curse word that my partner prolly didn't understand out of me.

We rushed by the crowd below and back into the blue sky. By this time I was whooping and laughing. My brain couldn't think of any other appropriate response. It was just plain fun. The speed and reversals of up and down were setting fire to neurons that usually don't get called out for duty unless there's an emergency of some sorts, eg tripping, almost getting hit by a leaf, grasping the pole as the bus lurches out into traffic. Needless to say, they weren't prepared for a situation of this magnitude.

And then we slowed to a halt many meters up. it was at this point that we had a breathy, hushed conversation that seemed rushed because we weren't confident how long we would have this brief respite. I spoke.

Wow, this is fun! Are you okay?

Oh, I'm scared to death! she replied. That was so scary!

Are you afraid of heights? I asked.

No, not usually, but this is different. It's too fast! And look at the people! Everyone down there looks so small.

Right! Like... ants!

No, she replied, bigger than ants.

Yes, you're right, as I sized them up below, More like cockroaches.

I don't want to do it again, she proferred.

Then get off the ride! I joshed.

No, she said seriously, Here would not be a good place to disembark. I think I'll wait for the ride to be over.

Then you'll be okay? I asked.

Yes, I think so, I'll be fine, she replied.

And at that moment, the ride took off again, this time dropping us straight to the ground, in the reverse direction we were going the first time. And it was only in this direction that I actually got scared into bringing out countless more swear words to be yelled into the turbulent air to fall onto deaf ears. In this direction, the ride gave you a terrible feeling of vertigo. You rose over the top, looking at the axle bar of the chair you were sitting on. Your mind instantly mistook that piece of metal for ground, back on firm footing. And then you mentally took a leap off the bar, over the edge, straight down onto the swarming cockroaches ready to feast on your remains below. That shiznuckle scared the bejeezus out of me. And it happened over and over again until the ride conductor got tired of hearing me scream and laugh and cry and mercifully stopped the ride. At this point, I was dizzy and my footing was uncertain and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to find my way into my sandals, let alone my bus and my hotel.

Thankfully the feeling passed and I was able to stupidly grin for a good hour or so. It was a good memory of exhiliration and beauty to have at the edges of my thought processes, so that when i got bored or started to daydream, it would rip into my consciousness and drop me over the edge again and again, making me laugh at the curses that streamed from my mouth and the curious smiles of the chinese onlookers below as i wobbled off the ride. It was my pickmeup for the next couple of days.

And I needed it. The next day was my big day of going to schools in the area and haggling over teaching hours and salaries and housing. I went to five different schools, teaching sample lessons to let them see my "skills" at some and looking at basic contracts at others. It was a hectic day chock full of "Oh, your chinese is so good!" and "How long have you been in China?". I've had to recap my three year stint in china so many times recently that it's prolly the most fluent phrase i have in my entire chinese arsenal at this point.

And this past week would have been much more miserable had it not been for the kindness of strangers here in Qingdao. Getting on the train coming over here, a girl helped me carry half my things all the way into my sleeper car, and then departed to go find her own car, no thanks required. Climbing the steps of my hostel, yet another person offered to help, but I refused as I was almost there and stopping would only halt my momentum.

But the biggest source of help has been a new friend named Shidong. He was helping out at a local Xinjiang noodle place and started talking to me. His english is passable, but we mostly spoke Mandarin. His is amazingly clear. In a lot of places in China, the accent spoken there always taints their mandarin and makes it hard to understand, but this guy has crystal clear, teacher-perfect mandarin. So we chatted and i told him what i was doing, and he said, i can help.

The next morning, he spent most of it in his office calling around and getting information. he tracked down 7 top schools in the area, two of which i had already visited, but five of which i had never heard, and wrote down a comprehensive list of all of it. telephone numbers, websites, everything. Without his help, i'd prolly still be looking at schools right now, but instead I just signed with one of the schools he provided. he is just a great person. i'm trying to help him with his english in return, but it really isn't enough to thank him for what he did. i'm sure i'll figure out a way, but it'll take time. he's better at it than i.

But this is all kinda boring, so I'm gonna talk for a bit about my hostel and then call it a post.

I'm staying at the Qingdao International Youth Hostel at the moment, though I checked out this morning and need a new place to stay currently. Figure that out later. The hostel, though, is funny. It's another example of reverse culture shock. There are so many foreigners staying there and they are all pretty new to china and have the excited, flushed, and slightly annoyed looks of someone who just arrived. There are certain local issues that become important when you've lived in China for a while, like mass kidnappings, mine explosions, typhoons, train tickets, housing prices, etc, that make other issues seem laughable, even though they might be very serious under different circumstances. It all comes down to what is closest and affects you the most. The things that are distant and foreign just kinda end up getting swept under the rug.

For example, I walked into my room last night, a room with eight beds in bunkbed four-by-two formation, and bumped straight into a heated argument. A danish guy was yelling about helicopter squadrons at an israeli guy i had met earlier named ori. At first I thought they were discussing video games. But in the end I figured out that they were talking about the israeli-palestinian conflict of the past couple of decades and even farther back into history. The dane was comparing sharon to hitler and ori was taking offense to that (rightly) and stating that the dane's facts were incorrect. There were two chinese tourists sitting silently in the room nervously watching.

It was such a weird room to walk into in China. The argument made little sense to begin with (I found out that the dane had drunk a bottle of vodka and punched a hole in the wall of a bar earlier that day) and was unbefitting a hostel of international proportions. People are supposed to be travelling and working together, not bickering. But that was not what bothered me the most. What irked me was actually my disinterest in the whole debate. I am so fully in China now that I have no idea what's going on in the Middle East for the most part. Oh, I'll gloss over nytimes articles and headlines and get the gist of the situation, but it's just nowhere in my radar. This is another difference of living in China and America. China's not so invested in the region, so we hear less about it here. But considering it's conceivably the next powderkeg of the world, I feel annoyed that I've been so negligent of that source of information.

But mostly the situation was laughable. The Chinese had no idea what was going on, except that it was generally about Israel. The dane was off his rocker, and kept using the word fuck in inappropriate positions in his sentences, and it was obvious he had never heard anyone actually use it like that before but was just constructing his own neophrasisms. Ori just looked bemused and beset, and pleadingly looked to me at one point saying with his eyes "I didn't start this. How do I end it?"

But then providence came in the form of two girls, obviously American from both dress and accent (even the Chinese picked up on that, speaking in a Chinese undertone "now those girls are Definitely americans"), who were asking the dane to come out with them to some club. they asked ori and i if we wanted to come out too, and i held in the urge to laugh. now, i wasn't being unkind here. sure, they looked like nice americans, but i just wouldn't be able to talk to them. one, they were much younger than i, and two, they knew little about china. at this point, in this place, there was no way i could communicate with them without feeling bored as hell. so i politely refused and went to bed. i was tired anyway.

This just further confirmed one thing for me. The only thing that i have to talk about with most americans is popular culture, and since i've been out of it for so long, i don't even have that. whenever i bring up china it's like someone bringing up break-through AIDS research with me. I don't really know what's going on in the field and it's something that interests me, but i've never taken the time to get an in-depth understanding of it and have no idea of the extent to which AIDS has spread throughout the third world. China is spreading just as fast and the research one needs to put into it is just as complicated. I can only talk to others who have lived in China for long periods of time. It is rare when anyone else gets it. Just like the Dane didn't get what Ori was talking about, because he had never been to Israel.

And of course, I'm still absurdly American. I'm sitting in a Starbucks right now writing this post, next door to a Pizza Hut. My clothes mark me and my white skin advertizes my presence wherever I go. it's hard to run away from that. and i've decided to stop trying. The shirt i'm wearing says polo jeans company on it and has an american flag in inverted colors on it. slightly reminds me of a painting emmet did in middle school or early high school that used to hang in one of the guest bedrooms. it plainly says "I'M AMERICAN". ah well. embrace your selling point. i'm getting paid ten times as much as most people in this city (200 times more than a good many) and i don't really have to do anything but speak and let some students listen to my pure raleigh yuppie accent. a globalized, bastardized form of the american dream.

hmm, this post kinda got dark at the end. let's just end it by saying, i've got a job, i'm going to have an apartment soon, and i'm waiting for a british girl named maggie to get her butt over here so that i can have my girlfriend back. if that isn't a perfect example of heteronormative living, then i've forgotten what that word actually means. which is certainly possible.

i'll try to keep up the posts. you never know, this time i might actually be true to that word.

e

Labels: Qingdao