congraduation

wish i had some photos of graduation to post, but, er, sadly i was the least devoted significant other at the ceremony (i think there were 4 or 5 non-participants in the audience) and left my stupid camera charging at trevor's apartment. hey man, the ceremony was at 9:30 AM the morning after finals. everyone was out getting smashed the night before; my plane touched down after midnight and i had to roll my suitcase into a bar to meet t.

thank you. we hid my suitcase behind a large plant and ordered me a drink.

oh wait, thank god for f*cebook. one of the students uploaded her graduation album. that was nice of her. don't mind if i do...





pic doesn't tell ya much, does it?

after the ceremony broke we all boarded a nice little bus and went to this restaurant whose theme is based on the foods served to chinese royalty in ancient times. the staff wears reproductions of period clothing and it's in the gardens of what used to be the royal prince's palace. don't ask what dynasty, i didn't get that much detail. but it was a trip, pretty cool. we ate a salad made of flowers, to make you more beautiful, and goose liver, the goose itself, duck, and tons of other rich food. i did manage to take a couple of phone-camera photos of the waitstaff, but i just spent an hour trying to reinstall my bluetooth application and for some reason it's not working, so fuck it. MMS also not sending from my dumbass mobile device that i am mad at right now. i illogically blame it all on china mobile.

the rest of the time was essentially drinking, eating, or recovering from both. i feel somewhat guilty having such a carefree weekend when this upcoming week of the brand launch is going to be hellish, but i guess i just chalk it up there for 'why do i give a fuck since i just resigned.'

i wish i could be so callous. i dream of being so callous.

anyways, yeah, all of the non-participants except for moi were running around with high-powered lens cameras and snapping away. i snoozed until trevor's speech and clapped a lot to make up for how lame i was in the recording-significant-moments arena. i mean, people were taking hundreds of photos during a ceremony that lasted less than 90 minutes. i wanted to make a big foam finger to wave during the ceremony, but after seeing how small the room and actual graduating class was, i'm glad i was too busy at work to actually do it.

bah. i have a lot of thinking to do and so i will now give my brain a 7-hour rest.

afternoon headaches

up late-night. stressing over some triflin bullshit that won't matter to me in about three years. stress headaches are back but the only thing that gives me some peace is typing, and typing must be done on a computer.

the general mandate of humanity deems compassion to be a good thing, a worthy thing, something to be valued. damned if it doesn't just make your ass the weakest link in the world of business. in this whole mess of resigning and leaving the country and following the hearts-and-flowers path instead of the stress-and-paycheck option, i vacillate between wanting to hide from the real world of dog-eat-dog and pretend all i see are rainbows and angels... and wanting to crush those angels and then sell them some expensive furniture. free delivery.

right now the latter is not appealing to me. i went this weekend and did what i used to do when struck with a dilemma: jumped into a pool and tried to swim myself into submission and my mind into focus, but i forget how much leaner i used to be when the physical aspect of the repentance would last as long as needed in order to bring around the mental . i barely cleared 1000 meters before the physical part of me went kaput and the mind was still in turmoil. and the physical wanted thai delivery.

plus there were no pull buoys or a time clock or flags at the pool and it was really throwing me off. you can only placidly breaststroke for so long in 1.2 meters depth without thinking about pad see ew.

called trevor, who was oh so unfortunately stranded at a bar, but receiving half-sober bar analysis failed to lull me to sleep. you're on your own, sister.

to continue with my griping, sometimes i feel that i was granted half-talents. there is no one thing so keenly developed in my brain, nor so deeply entertaining that i'll throw all of my energy into honing the skill, and so i feel that i fall between kinda wanting to do this but knowing it'll eventually be annoying, to maybe falling back on that bullshit i used to do way back when. what was it again? oh yeah, buying sheets for people or something.

clearly, having a path of some sort matters to me - why else write about it to a cheering crowd of about 4.3 people - but i'm not convinced that the junctions i've visited have involved an interstate of deeply compelling potential goals. i'm in a minivan and it corners like a horse cart.

anyways... enough complaining. there's enough of the middle-class or middle-management or gen X malaise to thickly spread every bagel in the factory, and the truth of the matter is i need to be somewhat alert tomorrow so i can negotiate my way into what will likely be a big fat shaft in the quadriceps. mine, of course. the good thing is that my quads are so under-utilized lately that the shaft will just slide in, easy as butter.

muggy

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/magazine/15parenting-t.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087&em&en=04b9e97c4ed5ef60&ex=1213502400

just finished this article in the ny times magazine. been interested in the media coverage on gay and lesbian marriage dynamics since the very very recent ruling on gay marriage in killa-cali. experts believe that same-sex marriages make good role models for hetero marriages (mixed-sex marriages?) whose members are concerned with equal roles in the house. this particular article is about equally shared parenting. have a read, it's worth it.

guess this has been top of mind because i'm coming up on a move-in with the bf in a few months. i know from past roommate experiences that i'm super partics about things, and trev is, well, trev. he thinks water coolers are great for hanging your coat on, and doesn't bother to check which toothbrush he happens to be using. a toothbrush is a toothbrush, and it's located near him, so he'll use that shit. when we first started dating, he tried sitting on my bed with his jeans on. uh uh. he learned about that one real quick.

most people reading this who know the extent of my OCD about cleanliness and hygiene are shaking their heads. no way, girl, you trippin if you think this relationship is going to last through co-habitation. but in imagining my future apartment strewn with law books and coffee cups and holey socks, feel like things might be alright. trevor, being a big picture kind of guy, is pretty concerned about how i like things done. he learned the no-outside-clothes-in-bed rule with a rapidness that impressed even my mom (who's been struggling with that one for over 35 years). we've had successful tutelages on his weekend shaving kit - aka plastic grocery bag - and where his items go on the bathroom counter once the trevor tornado hits the placid peaceful calm of carolynville. trevor is much less stubborn than me and my kind. it's a good thing - a somewhat foreign thing - but good nonetheless. we thinks we might be able to work with this material.

fresh water well

children get up early. we have 6 new folks downstairs in my neighbor's 'apartment,' as it were, relatives of the sichuanese wife who lost their home in the earthquake. two of them are kids - two boys around 9 and 11 - nice kids so far but weekends sleeping in are bye-bye. they roller blade in the courtyard, play swords running up and down the stairs, you know, kid stuff. noisy, thumping kid stuff.

life after the quake is simmering down. the two flat-screen tvs on every bus has stopped playing new daily slideshows of photo footage set against sad music. my company - as most companies - has gathered donations from employees, matched the total, and sent them to the red cross. the three minute moment of silence, which was not silent at all but filled with screaming air-raid sirens - has come and gone, the three days of remembrance is over.

clinton lost. i wonder if, when running for president, someone on staff is responsible for counseling the candidate about the possibility of a loss and how to manage. i wonder if preparing for losing is part of the game; or if the candidate is treated much like a coddled athlete and shielded from anything that might affect the mental state needed for wins.

sherry and i scoffed when we heard clinton and obama were in a runoff. america would elect a black man before a woman, and although i wasn't totally convinced, damn it if we weren't right. i am sure that sexism played a part in it, just as i'm sure that the clinton name was an enormous hurdle - we californians love the clintons, it took me a while to understand that just as we love them, many many other people loathe them - and her confrontational stance, her tenacity that translated negatively in the press. i do not personally support girl-power rhetoric, i find it to support negative generalization and to not be representative of my views, but as a girl, i am positive that it would have been enlightening to have a woman in office. gender matters, even if we like to believe it doesn't. in this race, there were many aspects to her personality, and obama's, that led to the results as we know them today. his ability to appear transcendent, just as she appeared to be rutting around in the bi-partisan dirt, was as legitimate a factor in the race as her faultlessly impressive preparation. i wanted to support the practical - her strong foundation of experience and provision - over his idealism, but in the end it was the practical interpretation of that practicality vs. his optimism that forced my hand. his platform of transcendence, as gossamer as it sounded, translated into leadership, and that is what will matter in the bi-partisan election. facing off a rottweiler with a pittbull isn't a guarantee. maybe a unicorn will work better?

i can't say that i ever would have believed that before. so i suppose we will see.

subvert

watching 'the wire' makes me feel like a future of my horn-dog husband strutting around town and nailing everything that walks while i wait at home with 3 kids and some tired-ass hair is inevitable.

i mean, i know, i watch chris rock. a man is as faithful as his options. but it's sad to think that some people believe that once you have kids and/or are married for more than a decade, you need to put a tracking device on his ass just to make sure he keeps his pants on.

the 'we miss pho' club

so my mom, in a mom-like quest, decided to bring pho soup spices with her to china because she'd heard through my sister my many laments about a lack of vietnamese food in shanghai. don't get any bay area kid started on how shitty vietnamese food is here - and we aren't even vietnamese - so addicted are we northern californians to our weekly pho lunches. and dinners. and saturday brunch. the only way to roll my ass out of bed on a saturday morning is with the promise of food, and good pho i will rise for. i will even shower.

we couldn't actually track down any beef bones for the broth until the last day of their visit, when my mom happened to wander into a hair salon for a wash 'n set that was owned by a fellow cantonese. they got to talking and he tipped her off to both an excellent nearby guangdong restaurant and a local butcher who sells beef.

when we finally located this 'butcher' i was a bit doubtful... he was completely passed out on his butcher block with one lone leg bone hanging on a meat hook behind him, and several empty seafood buckets in front of his shack. who sells beef AND seafood? as it turns out, cantos never lead other cantos astray, and he quickly whipped out an assortment of bones appropriate for soup, multiple strands of tendon, and several hunks of beef. despite lacking any proper tools (who says you can't beat a leg bone with a hammer?), we quickly made the guy's day by dropping over $10 USD on a ton of cow parts. beef in china is not cheap. and it's actually more like veal.

we spent part of their last day cheerfully lamenting the size of my soup pot (the bone stuck way out of the pot in some grisly jeffrey daumer way) and debating the wisdom of my mom's pho talents, browning the onion and ginger in my toaster oven, and taking turns sticking our faces into the pot.

today it was ready and i invited the girls over for dinner. one conference call, a huge thunderstorm, and a last-minute project later and it was just me and viv inhaling that distinctive anise-cinnamon-clove-meat broth smell that only fellow pho addicts understand as delicious. the approximations of the other ingredients were rough - the basil missing, the onions sliced too thickly, the bean sprouts overly mature - but the broth was there and right now i'm appreciating my mom and dad's thoughtfulness in lugging such a finely curated assortment of expat goodies for their kid.

thanks mom and dad.

ain't trying to hate

"Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints members left the courthouse on Thursday after a ruling in their favor in San Angelo, Tex." (unabashedly ripped from the ny times, both image and copy.)

...but i mean, damn. if any sect told my ass that i would have to sport THOSE outfits and that HAIR, i would immediately tell them to get lost. pound sand. stop freebasing. get real.

sometimes i wonder if general guidelines for life can't be at least somewhat based on the rules of fashion? like, when crazy people dressed like this tell you that you are going to be the 4th wife of some old fat fart and your 12-year old daughter is going to be married off to some beer belly crazyman, you take one look at the getups they're sporting and the warning signals go off.

right?

moms and dad

going to hangzhou tomorrow. no work for 2 days!

photos to follow.

half man half amazing

i dreamt (dreamed? my spell check gave me the thumbs down) that my sister and i had a well-swaddled baby in our trunk, and it was a really hot day. my sister wouldn't let me take her out of her many layers of clothes and blankets, but i unwrapped the baby and was showing my sister how sweaty she was. we were in a parking lot somewhere, and the baby was a newborn little girl.

it was the weirdest thing.

9:12 am and i'm leaving in an hour to pick up my parents at the airport. i hope my mom survived the flight ok.

the silence that follows

just got back from our friend viv's birthday dinner. everyone else headed to shelter to see cut chemist, but i bowed out. i love being around my folks, plus a few others that were visiting, but damn. it's really like jumping off a bullet train into the hush of being underwater. i was so hyper stimulated i had to come up with something to do (apply face mask and sit in a chair) to switch from 11 people talking all at once to me in my quiet apartment.

i wonder sometimes how mental illness isn't something more widespread. the swing from just the two environments had me off kilter for a minute. someone with more social anxiety would be in a bad place. i can't say that i'd ever notice something like this except for the fact that i live in the extreme right now - my social life here is like the bay area super-mellow scene x 1000. and my apartment that faces the garden courtyard is so quiet. i hear some noise from the street, like the rumble of trucks going by every so often, but silence in shanghai is hard to come by and this is damn close.

i'm stuffed. we ate at el willy's, one of the newer places that's opened up recently, a spanish tapas joint that features an actual spanish chef. it was delicious, but so rich. plus i fortified with some bloody marys and topped everything off with a slice of chocolate mousse cake. sleep actually feels like it may be an exercise in corralling the unwieldy.

chewing tea leaves

people in this country don't use tea bags or strainers. they just pour directly in the cup and top off with water. i don't understand how they are able to do this without eating a salad of tea leaves constrantly, which is pretty much what i do. its awkward, too; sometimes i take a swig while a coworker is around and try to talk around the branch hanging out of my mouth. so slick, this one.

speaking of eating, i just ate about a pound of eggs with chinese sausage (lap cheung for you cantos) and cha siu (also for your cantos). in mandarin they are something like la chang and cha shao. whatever. at any rate, it was delivery for dinner at the office and about 10000 calories but i don't care. i'm tired and my eyes ache and that makes me a big baby, which therefore entitles me to eat like a ravenous wolf.

i should shut up and finish my project and go home. bok bok.

abc bbd bbc

i get my info on the earthquake just like you - i watch my pirated philippines satellite channels - bbc and cnn - and read the times. the english-language local papers are fluff and useless.

it happened during work yesterday morning and i didn't feel a thing. some media folk who came into the office for a meeting said they felt it quite strongly, and they are in high rises. our office is in a heritage art deco building and on the fifth floor. i feel somewhat better - which may be completely unfounded - that our buildings are old, and i feel, more solidly built than a lot of this new construction. it goes up so quickly sometimes, you wonder what it's made of. when there's a new construction site, the first thing that gets done is a solid brick wall is erected around the whole thing, and then plastered over. usually - can't tell if this is just from a lack of foresight - no door appears to have been planned into the blueprints of this wall, so the next day or so after that lovely wall goes up and is plastered over, you see a big smashed-in part so the construction workers can actually access the site. trev and i usually have a good laugh over that one.

been watching the footage of the rescue efforts for those kids down in sichuan. sad stuff.

i won't say amen

"Whenever I conduct workshops with any group, I ask people how free they feel and to rate themselves on a scale of 0 to 100. The responses are usually about the same whether I am talking to people in a correctional facility or at a workplace."

- alison link
"why leisure matters in a busy world;" marci alboher; May 5, 2008; the new york times

...but i think the point miz link is making in this article is essentially what i learned on my own since i quit my job in 2006 and came to asia to 'unwind.' as most people observed, asia is hardly relaxing, but it was just what i needed for a switch in gears. and sometimes asia is very relaxing. i learned to be human again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/business/smallbusiness/05shift.html?em&ex=1210478400&en=113569eae516e8a2&ei=5087%0A

this zen minute was brought to you by FRIDAY after a 6-day week, a pending weekend trip to visit cyn and puppies in zhuhai, and the hope of wakeboarding or other relaxing 'leisure activity' that is open, as has just been reinforced, to each person's interpretation. i find getting my ass beat in the water to be relaxing.

update:

it smells and tastes like a sweet potato hyped up on sugar. i think i may use the smaller sugar rocks for tomorrow's brew.

the cure

at dinner over at my ayi's house over the holiday weekend, she prescribed this for my asthma:





one pear (she prefers organic) cut up into pieces, one lump of rock sugar, and a piece of some herb that looks like an albino bamboo stalk. located at 11:00 in the photo. i'm boiling it right now, and i have to make it every night and drink one cup.

eat your heart out, glaxo smith kline! advair 500/5o ain't got shit on bamboo and pears!

i'm not making fun, tho. chinese herb medicine does work some crazy wonders. my uncle swears by this tonic that my pah pah makes from baby mice marinated in liquor. i am not joking.

those of you interested in beijing

part of an email from t-money yesterday morning:

"So [it's] storming, little bit of thunder [and] lightning. But the crazy part is at 10 am it is twice as dark as it was at any point last night. I'm serious, I've never seen anything like it. The last two days it has been gray with this heavy smog that blocks vision past 10 feet."

coming for the games? i recommend buying a totobobo, altho sherry prefers the look of a respro.

gimme salami

i didn't know chinese people made prosciutto. especially on street signs at busy intersections.

day 7

...and almost there.

oddly, my cravings today (if i can call them that, i've been feeling alright today) center around fish, not meat. i might go for some sashimi tomorrow to celebrate, instead of plunging full-force back into meatism. might be a better, less extreme, way to ease back into things. as some of you know, i'm not good at easing into anything.

speaking of which, we've been coached by that damn book to avoid exercise or anything besides rest. i took a hot core yoga class last week, and i decided to take a full-length hot class yesterday because i was feeling antsy. considering my absence from full-length hot classes of late, i did pretty well, although the last 20 minutes of the 90-minute class i spent laying on my back. a little too ambitious in my weakened state? a victim of the mental game? who knows. anyway, it sucked.

this weekend (starting tomorrow, thursday, through saturday) is the labor day holiday. we have to go back to work on sunday to make up for the days we get off. (lame.) people keep asking if i'm heading up to beijing, but t has his thesis due soon so we think not. i'm going to let other people (his friends and program-mates) absorb the shock of his crankiness and cabin fever (hehe). there are a ton of yoga workshops going on, and most of my friends are in town (where you going to go with 1 extra day off in a country of 1.4 billion?), so i thought i'd make it an active-slash-relaxing weekend with no running around to airports.

sounds good, right? plus the parents are coming into town in 2 weeks and the only thing my mom asked me when i called the other day was, 'what are you planning for us?' not high-maintenance or anything. i could use some strategy time when it comes to my mom. no telling what's going to bother her about my apartment or lifestyle or food choices the most. i should place bets.

alright, i'm hearing that shorter is sweeter when it comes to my textual gripes about life. so here i go.

day 5

this morning was difficult. i wanted to hunt down a cheeseburger, spear it, and devour it while still standing, then chase after some seared foie gras and then maybe a roasted chicken. lunch hit and my stupid brown rice and sweet potato was for the birds. i ate it but i felt like throwing it across the room at the unsuspecting contract sales team. i was too tired after 3-full scale kitchen cleanings yesterday (vegan cooking is a bitch for cleanup, you have to make like 13 dishes to be full) to cook up the rest of the tofu for protein, so i had a very carb-intensive lunch.

meh.

been a bit homesick today, not sure why. and, even more inexplicably, i decided to peruse bay area dog rescue websites to quell the feeling. it didn't help the homesickness, but it did entertain me while at work, when i have 100 other things to do. i am feeling unfocused, clearly.

i've been wanting to go home and see my family and have a bbq in the backyard. i want to pet the dog and harass my cat and listen to my aunts talking smack to one another. i want to walk around grungy-ass lake merritt with my sister and my cousin, and go to brunch with them on the weekends.

not sure what's causing the sudden surge of nostalgia; i had a lovely weekend with great weather. lots of bike riding and produce-buying and sitting in sunny courtyards eating rabbit food. no swim in jill's pool yet (hehe), but we have a short week with the may holiday starting on thursday (when the cleanse is over, YES). i've already signed up for 2 yoga classes this week with 2 good teachers, i should be feeling content and even somewhat sanctamonious about my willpower and veggie-containing insides.

mysteriously, i'm not.

day 4

see? i wasn't lying.

so, day 4 of the cleanse. days 2 and 3 were projected to be the toughest, but i have to say we're doing pretty well. except for the chu toro and otoro lapse that was mainly due to ignorance (we thought we could eat fish, but i guess that was decided before we focused on one approach, and turns out according to mr. reid, we can't). anyway, yesterday was saturday and i woke up and had oatmeal with some banana cut in (no milk, no sugar, kinda dry) and one cup of black coffee. my caffeine 'wean' hasn't been too bad in terms of resisting temptation (not so tempting if it's just straight up without milk), but the physical dependency has proven wicked, with piercing headaches starting in late afternoon/early evening and lasting all night. friday night i woke up out of a sound sleep because i swear my head throbbing was making the bed tremble. but, yesterday the headache didn't start until late night, and it might've even been because of the 7 back-to-back episodes of 'the wire' watching, not because of the caffeine. who knows.

i met the girls (sherry, jill, sarah) on the terrace of the element fresh joint nearest us around 2 pm yesterday after watching parts of 'in pursuit of happyness' and eating oatmeal. it's been so pretty outside lately! nice. since i'd eaten i had an all-fruit smoothie and some crudite from sherry's plate. we then biked/strolled (jill was without bike) to pantry magic, one of the biggest williams-sonoma ripoffs i've ever seen. you literally feel like you're inside a w-s. it's expensive and ridiculous, but nice to know it's there in case you get a hankering for a silicone cake mold shaped like the sydney opera house. steph and shawn met up with us there, and while they shopped sherry was showing jill how to ride my bike up and down the sidewalk.

we went then to some german beer garden, where i had some item vaguely resembling orange juice, and a lot of water. i'd gotten hungry by this point so sherry's bag of produce she was carrying around in prep for dinner-making that night proved useful. with a steaming basket of cross-cut seasoned french fries in front of me, i managed to not touch a single one and ate cherry tomatoes instead. that took willpower, fuck.

sherry came over after and we made a vegan feast. she made a great pot of soup, and i roasted more of our yams and a pan of baby potatoes with whole garlic cloves and parsley. we had a vat of leftover brown rice, so i pan fried some extra-firm tofu until crispy, then sauteed shallots and garlic, and threw in the leftover brown rice for our vegan version of fried rice. added some frozen peas, and chopped the tofu into smaller squares and threw that in as our protein. it came out quite well, despite the lack of soy sauce (not allowed unless its preservative-free, and i'm too cheap/lazy to buy an additional bottle of soy sauce, which has to be of the imported - aka japanese - variety for me to believe its actually, authentically free of preservatives).

we then vegged to 'the wire' until 1:30 am.

during the cleanse we're supposed to be resting. since we have jobs, we're not resting all that much, but this weekend we aren't supposed to be super active (although we're trying to work out passes to jill's pool! wouldn't that be nice). either sherry or this reid guy came up with the analogy of an engine whose system is being cleaned - during the 'servicing,' the engine should be off, but once all the fluids are changed out (or cleaned), back up to normal with a super-clean system.

i'm not really buying into the toxin shit, but i do think this is a good exercise in perspective. it's easier - if your tax bracket allows - to be healthy in the states (especially california), but china is different. it's difficult and expensive to avoid msg in food and eat 'whole' versus processed when you need to cover all of your nutritional needs, and the average local person doesn't understand the nutritional concept. they can't afford to, either, from what i'm seeing. also, we're not sure how 'organic' we're actually eating when purchasing organic foods grown locally. as i understand it, china does currently have guidelines for what is organic and not, but there is no enforcing of these guidelines and its really up to the integrity of the farm you're buying from. on the flip side of the cultural examination, i suspect the chinese diet consists of a lot more vegetables and fruit than the average american's. there is always at least one plate of all-vegetable on the table, most meat dishes are small pieces of meat cooked with vegetables, and everyone has access to fruit, and enjoys fruit immensely. that's definitely a difference i see here. it's not unusual to see fruit eaten on the bus, on the street, in the office, just as much as you will see processed snacks. one of our office receptionists eats a huge mango a day, it's her treat to herself.

another thing i'm noticing - because we're not seeing as much flavor through the usual channels in our food, i've been appreciating naturally sweet and fatty things so much more. oddly enough, i'm craving sweets... and i'm no sweet tooth. give me a steak over chocolate cake any day. it's weird. eating peanut butter this morning tasted damn luxurious. i had a piece of yam for 'dessert' last night since it was the sweetest thing i could eat (and i'm so sick of cherry tomatoes). sarah was asking why we aren't gorging on avocados day and night... which i considered, but they're RMB 18 a pop (about $2.5 each).

gotta hop in the shower... sherry's coming over and we're biking down to the wet market to poke around at the vegetables.

post-post

a couple of pics from the wedding. trevor and i are always too stupid to take pics together for some reason, unless we're in a taxi and stuck in traffic. for the record, chinese weddings are rarely this western. i've never seen an actual western-style ceremony at a chinese wedding before (and i didn't see this one, either, because we showed up 10 minutes late and it was OVAH).

considering i've only been here 1.5 years, i've been to a record 4 weddings. that's a lot for me, who holds the record as girl-with-the-most-single-friends for some reason. and i'll go to a wedding, believe me. i like to eat and ogle.









trevor and our friend jason (in the seersucker and bowtie. don't hate, he's southern) with the newlyweds

cleanse

sherry asked me tuesday night if i wanted to go on a detox diet with her. having already bitched very publicly about my gut on multiple occasions, and feeling like this two-week cold is lingering just a wee bit too long, i said alright. the schemata was no preservatives, no additives, lots of fruits and veggies. sounds harmless but very unlike me, you say? the girl who's only purchased fruit twice since moving to shanghai?

i'm on day 1, having been caught unprepared on the actual day 1 and eating everything in sight. (i had to get mentally ready.) what we didn't know about the detox thing (because we weren't adhering to a specific diet, just kinda reading shit online and deciding whether it sounded right, yes we are retarded) is that dairy and meats are pretty much no-nos (this was a consistency in my online trolling of weird hippie-dippy websites and insane people's testimonials about the lemon/cayenne pepper 'master cleanse' business). so here i am, committed to a week of essential veganism. one of sherry's coworkers (no doubt alarmed at the randomness of our 'detox plan') handed her a book on detox, something like the tao of detox although i could honestly be making that title up completely. and we are essentially adhering to that book's rules, which bans refined starches, meat and dairy, and processed shit. ('processed,' by the way, is a mighty wide definition. olive oil is apparently ok but whole wheat flour is processed. aren't they just squished versions of the original item? feel free to set me straight.)

anyone that knows me well will laugh when they read this. i put the prime in prime rib. i put the rib in, too, for that matter. i can eat more red meat than any woman and most men i know. i like vegetables and fruit, but i'm chronically lazy and chronically busy, and produce is perishable. so i stick to things with long shelf lives, like ramen (i buy the good ramen imported from japan, ok? lay off), and, uh, eggs (i eat them way past expiration dates), and... hm. rice? frozen peas. freezer-burnt chicken if i'm lucky. and tasty things that they serve in restaurants.

anyway, today is my first day so i will list for you what my diet has consisted of thus far (oh, and i got a nice delivery of organic produce today in preparation for my fas- sorry, cleanse. whatever. just read.)

• banana and natural peanut butter
• steamed asparagus and cherry tomatoes
• hummus (i'm pretending hummus is ok but it's probably not, although this hummus was inarguably just blended white beans and no tahini) and tabbouleh which smelled + tasted like feet so i threw it out.
• more hummus
• another banana
• raw almonds
• dinner was kale cooked with shallots and white beans. and a piece of sweet potato.

wtf? i can't eat tofu for some reason (maybe i made that up, i've noticed the only side effect i've been suffering from is acute memory loss), so i'm really up a creek on protein. i'm going to be a beanatarian for 7 days.

i'm including below the rather impressive and happy delivery i received this morning at 7:30 from american gardens, this great little organic produce farm near SH. see? i'm eating both locally (earth day) and i'm being healthier. sorry about the fact that you can really only see bag and not produce, but it was 7:30 am.





apparently days 2 and 3 are the hardest. i'm pretty energetic today but sherry is on day 2 and looks like she was flattened by a large and angry person, and she has a raging headache. apparently tomorrow and saturday i should feel like shit and be one of the bitchiest people on the planet (done and done). i dare to say it's not the toxins causing this, but the pervasive sense of COMPLETE AND TOTAL DEPRIVATION.

i can't believe i ate beans and friggin kale for dinner.

still sick

koff koff koff. that’s all i do these days.

t-money was in town this weekend, and like the gentleman he is, gamely indulged his girl when she decided she needed to hit up ikea this weekend (sorry, kate!). ikea on weekends in china is far far worse than at home, if you can even fathom it. however, we get through the maze in about an hour, checked out, downed hotdogs as is the routine for any ikea visit, and got in the taxi line. it looked to be about an hour long, as it was raining outside and causing a taxi shortage. one of those illegal drivers came by and wanted 60 kuai for our 20 kuai ride. t got him down to 40, which he considers money well spent for saving an hour. i didn’t mind waiting, but once we got home i decided that was a good idea. the guy was nice enough.

my burning desire to hit up ikea was for the purpose of finding a bath stool in preparation for my parents’ upcoming visit (may 17… ya heard?). i shower in what t refers to as the ‘crying game shower,’ essentially an old-fashioned claw foot tub rigged with a shower that manages to completely flood that corner of the bathroom every time a person showers, unless said person holds the stupid showerhead in her hand and sits down in the tub to bathe, japanese style, only without japan and its good design. this is not a fun daily ritual, and trevor, at 6’1”, hates it far more than i. rightly so. at any rate, the tub sits high off the floor, and successfully vaulting out of the tub soaking wet is tough enough on someone my height. my mom is about 5 inches shorter with bum knees… i could just picture her falling out of the tub onto the original art deco tile floor with a broken appendage. so i bought a sturdy little rubber stool/bench item which i hope will alleviate this little challenge during their stay. i’ll report back with results.

i was also in need of some mugs because my ghetto ass insisted on buying only two when i moved in, one of which i have since broken. oh, and a small expandable breakfast table, also for my parents’ impending visit, because i know my mother will heartily object to eating her morning toast on the couch like normal people.

yesterday late afternoon we went to t’s former coworker’s wedding, which was held at a small hotel not far from my place. i even spent 20 minutes blow-drying my mop of hair (have i ever ranted about the fact that women are slaves to their blow dryers?). i’ll get to that at some point, i’m sure. i can’t believe people do that on a daily basis. anyway, the wedding was fun and good practice for what will likely be a lifetime of law firm dinners and polite chit chat since all the folk we hung out with were firm people or firm spouses. the firm girls didn’t know what to make of me – i gather i was an interesting subject because t’s chinese language skills made him one of the gang and they were wildly curious about who the hell his girl is – until one of the partners asked about my surname and i explained the whole korean thing. this explanation was met with a chorus of, ‘so you’re korean!’ as if i was all figured out or something.

on the food note, i must be used to cantonese-style weddings, where the food is the highlight of my attendance so all i do is eat the whole time. the table was packed with food, but most of it was in gloppy sauce and relatively tasteless. prawns, crab, goose, ribs, shark fin soup, pork shoulder… how can you manage to get them all wrong? anyway, we ended up at cotton’s after the wedding, having stolen and finished off amongst the three firm tables all of the wine from the other tables. jason – a non seafood eater – starved through the 2-hour meal and ordered rounds of fries, chicken fingers, and onion rings once we landed at cotton’s. if i hadn’t of insisted on trying every dish at the banquet, i would’ve partaken in a cheeseburger, as that’s been on the craving list lately.

friday's list

when my godbrother and his mom, nancy, visited shanghai about a month ago, passing through after a few days' trip to beijing, she remarked after dinner banter with a few of our friends that we seemed very cynical about our lives in china. i'm the worst offender of the group, i'm sure, so i thought i'd take a few moments to appreciate some good things about living here, and why there are so many of us lao wai in this town, anyway.

my why-i-love-china list

1. chinese folk are unapologetic about eating. Slurping, spilling, speedily spooning, it’s all fine and good at the Chinese table. Nothing dainty here, it’s about efficiency: I’m hungry and I’m not ashamed to show it. I love this, because I’m the same way. If there’s food on the table, chances are I’m silent and stuffing my face. If I’m talking, I’m secretly irritated that social graces demand that I speak to you when there’s perfectly good food getting cold in front of me. Eating immediately after food lands in front of you and downing food rapidly are two of life’s great pleasures. My life, anyway.
2. China is kinda wild… and it can be fun. It’s true. You can drink booze on the street, in a moving vehicle, if you like. You can cruise onto the metro, a bus, or into a cab with a plastic cup full of fish balls on a skewer and a beard papa cream puff. You can bring your own popcorn to the movies. You can pair your new marigold-orange suit with your new burgundy hairdo and ride down the street on your bicycle without a single stare. You can sing at the top of your lungs at noon on a crowded sidewalk and no one will even blink (unless you’re not singing in Chinese). You can throw an entire bucket of dirty water on a passer-by and only elicit a mild protest (it was dark and rainy, I was screaming curses at the offender… but in China, volume bears no relation to rage level and she just laughed heartily and went back to what she was doing).
3. Napping at work is no big thing. Seriously. It’s even normal. After lunch I peek my head over my cubicle wall and see about three people (on average), heads down on desks, taking a little snooze. After 20 minutes or so they pop back up and it’s business as usual. Makes you wonder why the same thing can get you fired at home.
4. Men raise children and clean house. Especially in Shanghai, where men are famous for being responsible for all housework, including cooking the meals, I see dads and grandpas on the bus cuddling babies, carrying bags of vegetables and mian bao and dofu, hanging the wash out on balconies overlooking the street. It’s not a novelty, it’s normal.
5. It’s a grassroots experience. And by this I mean industry. There are factories and huge manufacturers galore, but it’s just as easy to find a person parked in a random lane with a sewing machine and a selection of replacement shoe heels, waiting for business. There are fruit stands on every block. You can stumble around a random corner and find the trimming street, where store after store carries only buttons, ribbons, crocheted collars, leather for belts. One street near my office houses all of the color pigment vendors, where you can buy bags of loose pigment powders to use in god knows what.
6. It’s humane… and I’m not being ironic. Go past the di-ethylene glycol and fucked-up blood plasma and pet food horror stories and take a look at the people. I don’t feel like I’m in the rat race, and I live in a city renowned for the fiscal trickery of its people – blink too long and suddenly your taxi driver is taking you ‘round the block once more – I feel like I’m being understood as human if I call in sick, or announce that I can’t focus until I’ve eaten dinner, or can’t meet a deadline due to a hectic week. Heads don’t roll if I show that I’m human. It’s not as efficient or cost-effective as applying undue pressure and unrealistic expectations, but it’s life and I don’t feel guilty for living it.
7. You don’t take your wealth for granted. I’m well off here. I afford my own 80 square meters of luxury living including an oven, a clothes dryer, satellite TV, and about 5 different facial cleansers. I pay $10 USD for my Lavazzo espresso beans, have a yoga studio membership, and own about 45 pairs of shoes. I ride my bike for fun. I don’t share my kitchen or my bathroom and my plumbing is indoors. I have an ayi who cleans my house twice a week, cooks for me, pays my bills, arranges my water delivery, and cusses out the landlord when he needs to be cussed out. I’m incredibly lucky, and every day I realize this. I realize it when I line up at the convenience store and see the reconstituted paper soles on the shoes of the old man next to me, or when the company driver drops me off at home in the A6 next to the neighbor who cooks outdoors year-round on a single burner. I don’t bitch about the bald spot on my velvet ballet flats because my ayi is still rocking the shoes she wore to her wedding… and her son is 17 years old.
8. Everything is recycled. And this isn’t eco-chic I'm taking about, its survival. The old people digging in trash cans with pointed sticks isn’t a phenomenon exclusive to San Francisco Chinatown. The Mainland takes it a step further, where landfill warlords employ scores of people to scour through mountains of trash for anything recyclable. Not just cans and bottles, but cardboard and building materials, old computer monitors, used refrigerators, steel and aluminum, wood scraps, nails. All of the demolition sites around the city are sifted through for anything reusable. ‘Sustainability’ in the western media is a tag word, but those men bicycling used scrap metal through the streets don’t have the luxury to learn the concept. For them it's about making a few bucks and surviving. It’s a simple and very direct reminder of that I am a product of marketing drives and consumerism. I didn’t know you could re-use a goddamn nail because I never thought about people who needed to do that.

olympics... and outta here

cyn and i joked all the time about how we were going to be as far away from bj as humanly possible when the olympics came. we made jokes about how the government was going to paint the grass green and 'relocate' millions of factory workers by shutting down all the industry in the vicinity to clear the air for the lao wai. can't look bad in front of foreigners. of course, we joked with an air of cynicism, halfway serious.

after a long weekend in bj, where i experienced the dust and grit from the construction sites on every block or so, i am officially concerned. trev and i frequently discuss that shanghai is much better organized as a city - the airport, the way you pay your bills, the traffic, whatever. the metro in beijing alone is cause for alarm. you pay only by walking up to the booth and fighting your way to the front of the crowd, and then correctly shouting the name of the stop you want to go to. they don't speak shit for english, so good luck with that strong northern errrrrrrrrrrrr accent. you have to know where you want to go in terms of metro stop, and you have to say it legibly to the metro worker, who is not a linguist and doesn't give a fuck about you. to enter the metro paid area, you hand your little ticket to the girl standing there. there is usually only one girl. no turnstiles. one person at a time. and they plan to support 2+ million foreigners? i don't know about this.

taxis will be another problem. the city government has started early and hands out pamphlets as you head towards your taxi at the airport taxi line. i haven't read the pamphlet, but i assume it will be relatively useless against taxi drivers who are renowned in the country for being crooked, and who don't speak english, aren't linguists, and don't give a fuck about you. there's also a huge shortage of taxis during rush hour, and bj is a city much like LA: spread out and impossible to navigate without a car. see above if you plan to travel by metro.

lastly, the government is 'cracking down' (and thats no joke in a country like this) on foreigners without visas, and trev warned me that maybe i should start carrying my passport with me while in bj. the police will be randomly stopping foreigners and demanding to see their entry visas. i made some comment about sewing the star of david to my clothes, which of course was a whiner-lame comment for obvious reasons, but i feel a little scared about the liberties with which police can take. if i was white, i would be less worried, but looking asian and not being local presents a lot of issue here. on one hand, if i were alone i probably just wouldn't get stopped for obvious reasons. but with trevor, i might. 100% of chinese believe that i'm being some snotty local who refuses to speak chinese because i have a lao wai boy at my side. they are more baffled when trevor speaks chinese to them and then translates to me in english. you would need to see how white foreigners get treated here vs. local chinese to fully grasp what i'm talking about. once, after checking in at the airport counter in guangzhou, cyn and i headed towards security. a man stopped us and put our bags on a scale, and told us we were carrying overly heavy bags and to go back and check them in. meanwhile (as we're arguing), about 37 lao wai businessmen with huge carry on suitcases go rolling by us, very clearly over the 10 kilo limit. we then go back and check our shit in, and witness the same man who told us there were no earlier flights to ho chi minh (our layover was 6 hours), allow a white couple on a flight to ho chi minh that was leaving in an hour.

this shit is typical.

i'm not just china-bashing (which i do a fair share of, i know). i know greece isn't exactly a model for municipal organization, and athens went off fine. i know bringing their cities up to par is forcing china to engage in a value system that, while considered a figment of the current western paradigm, is largely believed to be the right direction (hello, environmental controls). it is bringing a huge injection of significant architecture to the capital city. (speaking of which, i just flew out of the new wing of the bj airport. very cool. it's totally a copy of hong kong's airport, much like SFO's new international building is a copy of narita, but it's very nice. hk has such an amazing airport, copying it wasn't a bad idea. i insisted on going to the burger king, so trev and i shared a whopper tao can and walked around admiring everything.) it's a boon for the image of the nation and playing a part in driving the skyrocketing economy. but being here, living here, knowing how already difficult and poorly planned so many aspects of the actual day-to-day logistics are, and knowing that china holds that additional complication of a censored media and corrupt government and a lack of infrastructure... i'm just saying that maybe you want to bring your respro, load a crash mandarin course on your ipod, and be very patient.

beijing

hollering from bj. sitting in a cafe with t money. he's working on his thesis. i just spent the last hour troubleshooting my wireless. finally fixed it and reading perez.

yeah yeah yeah. i ain't apologizing for reading trash. i re-worked my 2008 unit projections first, so there.

in a bit we'll head out and head to the gym. my first gym in china experience! should be interesting. if i have space on the bb, i'll take some pics.

the week was hectic, but lots of things got done. la honcha will be in milan for the furniture show the week after next, so it should be chill for a while. we shall see.

long weekend today due to qing ming jie - aka tomb-sweeping day (today). i find it ironic that in the states, i go to the gravesites for qing ming with the fams religiously. now in china, there are no graves to visit, so i shoot up to bj for the bf.

i also find it funny that most of the ABC families in the states do the same thing, treat it all seriously and shit, be respectful of the traditions. here, half the people use it like a vacation day off and head for the hills! my tix to bj reflects that trend, damn. i had to pay about 2000 rmb to cart my ass up here, and it took 6.5 hours of traveling due to delays and traffic and shit. flights were delayed all over the place. my flight wasn't delayed, but we sat on the tarmac for an hour. isn't that the same as delayed?!?! bastards. i rolled in to trev's at around 2 am.

ps - you can't carry on any liquids at all on airplanes now here in the see-en so you have to check everything. rumors are flying about why; the one i heard was that a woman carried on an amount of gasoline in a coca cola can (which she shouldn't have been able to bring on the flight anyway, according to the new flight regulations that were put into place in july, but i carried water bottles on all the damn time), and once the plane was in the air, she went into the bathroom and doused herself in it. allegedly she crew smelled it on her and caught her, so she wasn't able to light herself on fire. and, of course (the censored cherry on top), it is said that she is tibetan. i'm sure there's a similar rumor circulating where the woman is falun gong.

anyways. we're abouts to head out.

kiss kiss.

pillowfight shanghai!

some vids from last week:

cushion team vs. purple team

frosh

i've been reading celebrity blogs way too damn much. my brain is mush.

its friday night and i couldn't be any happier with my grandma blanket bunched around me on the sofa. fuck that party girl shit. i'm too damn tired.

went to yoga at 7:45 tonight and had a mildly bizarre experience. i say mildly bizarre because after 1.5 years here, it takes some serious weirdness to be rated really bizarre. the teacher was some lanky white dude who spoke his shitty chinese fearlessly, and proved that really large flexible people are just odd. it looks strange, too much going on, too much muscle and flesh and skin all warping matrix-like in front of your face. also, instead of your standard-issue triple ommmmm chant, this motherfucker made us chant the vowels of the alphabet. i'm not kidding. i kept expecting someone to jump out from behind a door and tell us we're on that british show, 'just for laughs' (and damn do i roll when i watch it on the plane).

he was like, 'everyone say ah.'

'ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...'

(i felt like i was at the doctor getting a physical.)

'everyone say eee.'

'eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...'

'now oh.'

'ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...'

i'm glad he actually stopped after u. i was halfway expecting some 'and sometimes y' bullshit. after he later made some crack about how his job was so easy, he just says stuff and we do it, i knew he was just jacking around, using us for his own petty satisfaction (he also informed us that this was his last class because he got canned). i knew it!

weirdos abound.

what's been going on... not much. work has been getting busy - i spent most of the day running around like some fool trying to hustle sales for a company i don't own.

speaking of weirdos:



this broad had the nerve to sit in front of me on the bus yesterday. excuse moi? this is just furthering my disbelief about the chinese nationals and their love-hate-disregard for their hair. (i will at some point rant about how an entire nation can be cool with running around in public all damn day long with some of the worst bedhead you've ever seen in your life. it's compounded by the fact that chinese folk really do not find hair-washing a priority. oily hair is somewhat 'glued' into place by sebaceous secretions, making for a fine sculpting medium for extreme bedhead. hair hygiene seems to be a curse or crime to be avoided, something that is detrimental to your life, health, and the health of your long and otherwise robust line of descendants. i don't know any other culture in this world that has traditions and folklore supporting hair-washing abstinence.)

i'm effin' geeked about finally having a camera on my phone. i haven't even turned off the loud, faux-shutter click because china is one of those places where you can both run around with a hairstyle like the above and not garner a single stare, and very obviously take multiple pictures of a complete stranger without anyone giving a phuck.

oh so cheez

as willie says, we're so disgusting barf barf barf -





what i like about this pic is that you can totally see the dude in the car behind us. i do not like so much that the sunlight highlights the pimple on my chin. gross.

saturday

http://www.badcatpros.com/main.php

that's where i'll be this afternoon. worldwide pillowfight, shanghai chapter. other participating cities include london, beijing, budapest, chicago, copenhagen, melbourne, nyc, paris, vancouver, DC, and more.

not exactly hayward and lijiang. not hating on either, tho. i need to find a pillow that i can get dirty.

sherry is the organizer for the shanghai event. i left her and steph at the diesel-adidas party at 1933 last night, sipping (ok, chugging) free-flow perrier-jouët and shrieking with laughter at the amy winehouse lookalike, and other china hipster-gone-wrong individuals. i couldn't deal. working gal who started with three cocktails after work and tops that off with the slider burgers on jean georges' bar menu only has the capacity of two glasses of bubbly before securing a cab and passing out in it. oops.

i was so tired i decided to put off sleeping by reading, and vaguely remember sitting up, shocked to find the lights still on and discombobulated, and then i suppose turning it off at some point. i just know i woke up this morning after crazy dreams about my mom's burgundy volvo station wagon from high school and trevor in a ranchero hat and a long ponytail, and the lights were off. the neighbor decided that 9:30 am was the perfect time to bump daft punk, so i'm retaliating with the hip hop, pop, and latin smörgåsbord that is my ipod. i think they particularly like nas. i know i do. jerks.

from friday night

from my flight to beijing on friday night. i was so perturbed and actually nauseated by the time i got into my cab, i had to record my thoughts on the blackberry.


my flight tonight was the worst one i've had in a while. not because anything was wrong with the flight itself - that was fine - but because i was surrounded by a full bouquet of the most vile odors a body can produce.

it started off innocently enough, i sat window and a guy sat aisle. we split the middle seat reasonably between his coat and my bag. then a third shuttle-load of people started boarding and a man sat between us. fine. and then he began to breathe.

every body odor offense that could be committed, he committed. i was O.O., olfactorily offended. he even dug vigorously in his nose when the hot towels came around - wiping the fruits of his labor on the provided towel. i hoped fervently, having just finished using mine to wipe my face, that they don't re-use them on the airlines. but you know that they do.

i could smell the oiliness of his hair (a bit of a feat since he didn't have much) and the rot in his gums. it smelled like a swamp thing shat in his mouth, then wiggled in and died in its murky depths. after our snack was served, i was treated to a string of roiling farts. at this point, i had the napkin from our meal box jammed up my nose. a sour foot scent came wafting about in waves. i looked down at his feet, but he was wearing shoes. someone else near us had decided to add the cherry on this rank sundae.


other than my fragrant flight and hellish time getting back (hello? no liquids of any kind allowed in hand carried bags on any flights... imagine what that does to the security line in this country), the weekend was wonderful and happy. we spent trev's bday night at med, where the environment is a puzzling hybrid of slick japanese eatery-slash-club and the warm homey environment of a mediterranean restaurant..? but the food was commendable. trev started with a cocktail and i started with bubbly, then we graduated to a pinot noir for the mains, and we had the most startling service. the main waiters for our table - there were two who seemingly worked in competition - would pop out from nowhere whenever a dish was placed on the table, or a new drink was introduced, and ask, 'how is your FOOD? [or wine, or whatever]' and when we answered positively, each waiter would beam at us and say, 'THANK you!' you'd of thought they made it themselves. after a bottle of wine, our opinion of the service went from slightly disturbed to downright hilarious, and we giggled our way through dessert.

too short, the weekend.

i came down with some bizarre flu-like thing yesterday (oh, and it was heaven fighting with security at beijing airport while sweating with a fever) but i got in bed pretty much as soon as i got home last night and slept the 9 hours till morning. i woke up around midnight to my neighbor shouting at his family, but i was groggy enough to observe the shouting and presume he was drunk, then gamely fall asleep again. the flu is going around - everyone in the office is dropping like flies. i think i got off rather lightly.

my chest is ragged from coughing - it feels like i swallowed a microplane like a sword-eater, then grated it up and down my windpipe (a fine microplane... like the one used for hard cheese and chocolate). i opted out of yoga tonight in favor of leaving the office before 7 pm, doing a jiu guang run, and then coming home to eat and get in bed before 11. i am allowed days off, right?

right.

hump day

my day today:

8 am - finally roll my ass out of bed and into the shower
9:54 am - bleep into work using the fingerprint machine
11 am - go to china mobile office with my assistant to pay the bills they never sent to me
12 pm - start reviewing all of the mock-up boxes the graphic team made for our packaging review meeting with the founders
1:30 pm - get hungry and go eat
3 pm - start packaging review meeting
5 pm - take christine up on her offer to go down to the cart guy on the corner for some pork-stuffed fried dough goodness (1.4 rmb each)
6:30 pm - leave office for yoga
9:30 pm - leave yoga studio and head for ramen joint with sherry, hip flexors in recovery mode.
11 pm - call trev to say goodnight

today was cush but busy. the rolling into work at 10 thing was an accident - having a head cold and a big meeting today basically meant that i had to be at work, but really just wanted to sleep all day. luckily i keep busy and work is pretty fun, so i can forget about the sore throat and sinus pressure and play with boxes and foam sheets for a few hours.

i was trying to download some pics from the blackberry that i took today but my head is stuffy and the stupid bluetooth thing is eluding me. the manual is in the other room, pretty much meaning that this post will be picture-less. maybe tomorrow?

canto luuuuuuv

this is what i was doing this weekend...






this little number came before the food, mind you. biann and i hadn't eaten in something like 8 hours by this point, so i was feeling close to suicidal when the lights dimmed and i realized what was going to happen. after a few notes i realized the amazingness and mustered enough energy to record it for what would no doubt be lots of enjoyment later...

cold as a motha

cyn and i are hashing over the latest hollywood gossip. and the whole hk edis*n chen thing. did you see the pics? scan-do-licious.

my ass is typing with some froze-ass fingers because stupid shanghai went and dropped back down into the 30s this week. about this i am quite salty. there's nothing meaner than weather that goes from icicle to semi-balmy and then back to icicle. in our world, we call that 'so not right.'

i came from my new level 3 putonghua class. it was alright. at least its only twice a week and only 2 hours a day this time around. i had the foresight to run to paul's (as i always have the wisdom to do before class) and purchase copious amounts of overpriced bread. the effin' regular baguette just increased from rmb 14 to 18. jerks. i gnawed on an olive-embedded baguette for a snack whilst walking from the west tower to the east. it's only a matter of a 45-second commute, but i managed to consume about half the baguette. the closer i got to my classroom, the bigger the hunks were that i tore off, and the less i chewed them. i wonder sometimes if my intestines aren't poked full of holes.

alright. i'm cold and have to get up early tomorrow. i hope the goddamn rats or whatever it is that lives in my walls and kept me up with squeaking and scratching last night has the common sense to make noise downstairs for the neighbors and not me. this will be the 5th night in a row without decent r.e.m. and mankind may plummet because of it.

over and out.

dreams

i dreamt last night that one of my eyes fell out and so i carried it around in a tea cup, looking for a doctor.

the night before i dreamt i saw an ex and his hair was overgrown and shaggy and his eyelids had fallen and were droopy.

what's with the presence of eyes in dreams?

dan shui lu

happy v day

for my general amusement -


whatd u guys have for dinner
sister: er
pigsfeet and hair
chicken
cabbage
me: did dad buy mom the requisite see's candy in the old heart box?
pigs feet and hair?!
sounds delish
sister: you know the faat choy or whatever that is usually in jai?
it was actually pretty good
me: yeah i know
i like that stuff
sister: dad didn't get shit for
mom, not even the sees
me: dang
cold, man, cold
sister: i know
mom got desserts at la farine
me: you can tell him i said that
sister: dad says he's become an orthodox hindu that disapproves of valentines day
me: lmao
wtf
he's hella random
why do hindu disapprove of valentine's day
sister: too risque
me: it can be conservative love day
sister: hehe
btw, your cat is hells of fat

latest cat update

sister: kvgbkvbkvb (from scarlett who's on my lap)
me: hi scarly
whats she up to
sister: oh sleeping under the library chair in the
living room again. and sharpening her claws on the under side of the chair!
I caught her the other day on her back with all 4 claws in the chair!
me: lol
the usual
sister: yup
me: i am thinking about taking her to denver
sister: please do!
me: i hope she doesn't freak out again
sister: shes rubbing her face on the monitor
me: yeah
she'll bat the cursor, too, if she sees it
sister: mom will be pleased
she says, get away from me, you! to her all the time
me: lol
yeah, poor scarly
no one plays with her
she's a brat
sister: dad says it sounds like a fantastic idea, she will love the snow
me: lol
i'm going to teach her to board

wednesday surfing

there are people as ridiculous as me -

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/la/inspiration/streamlining-the-medicine-cabinet-042601

two wheels

for christmas, trevor proved what a good listener he is and presented men with a bicycle. i had been going on one day about how much i wanted one, especially since steph has one and we can go riding around the city. it has, since then, been sitting on the first floor of my building, gathering dust. it's lovely, actually, if i'm allowed to say that about a bicycle. i loved it upon sight - pearl white with green detailing, a happy reincarnation of my snowboard in bicycle form. like most bicycles here, it's a one-gear beach cruiser. just my speed - i can drive any manual transmission, but give me gears on a bike and i freeze up.

i had been stalling about riding it - something was always wrong. too cold, snow on the ground, i don't know the roads well enough, something. i was super excited to try, but also scared. i have a thing with bikes, some weird nervous chickenshit craziness. i remember as a kid riding around all the time, tearing up and down the joint like my ass was on fire. more recently i'm a nervous wreck and i guess two disastrous vacations expeditions involving mountain biking haven't really helped to alleviate that.

long intro aside, i finally got into the saddle this afternoon. and, drumroll... it was lots of fun, actually. a bit annoying because there are several big streets around me that bikes aren't allowed on, so i had to figure out some roundabout way to get to jiu guang for some grocery shopping. i tried riding on the sidewalks for a bit, but if you've ever tried walking - let alone riding a bike - on a sidewalk in urban china, well, it's not the best way to alleviate fears. the next concern was theft - my bike is shiny new and white. it literally gleams next to the other stacks of bikes standing by. trevor bought a couple of locks, but they're really more of a deterrent and anyway i'm just a big worrywart.

the impetus behind the bike riding arrived in the form of a fitness plan. i was cruising around on yahoo and somehow landed in the yahoo health section, and started idly reading the various articles and blogs about fitness and nutrition. (all of this as a method of procrastination for studying chinese.) lots of this at this time of year because of those resolutions, i expect, but also the reality is that most people that live in china carry a bit more weight than they do at home so i'm always aware of how crappy my fitness level is these days. it's hard to buy the nonfat yadda yadda or the flax seed this and that here, and most chinese food is oil city. i don't run outside because we are all concerned here about the repercussions of running outdoors in a highly polluted area. when i first arrived, i lost a ton of weight pretty quickly, but that was due to the non-sitting-all day, no-car change of status that my life underwent. i'm now back to the sitting-all-day business, and my gut reflects it. ew. i also took this free diet/fitness assessment where your diet is analyzed not only for calories + fat, but also for your nutrition. i'm think about my diet here a lot because i know how i am - the easiest thing for me to get is new york deli sandwiches (MONSTER MEAT sized, no less, because it would just be too much for me to consider eating in moderation) for lunch, and something fast at night since i get home so late. recently it's been these dried japanese noodles that i can't stop eating. my diet is abhorrent. i bought a big costco bag of raw almonds for snacks, but i also space out meals with crackers and those rice seaweed triangles from family mart. i'm a fast food junkie these days. if it's not ready in under 10 minutes, fuck it!

anyway, i do the yoga classes during the week, but every little bit helps, right?

p.s. the point of this entry was supposed to revolve around a conquering-my-fears theme but it really is turning into c's diet gripes. sorry.

snow 2008

so those of you outside of china were probably hearing about all of the severe weather that was hitting china the week before and of cny. i've heard that it may snow on occasion here, but it's pretty rare and never sticks.

here are some photos of the snow (from the week before cny) coming down outside of my office, which is located on the bund. the bund area is a stretch of buildings on the huangpu river where a lot of the ritzy boutiques, restaurants, and clubs are located. it's kind of annoying - especially if you work there - but the buildings are heritage architecture and are quite pretty.




out the front window looking at #3 bund



out the back window where some of the smaller buildings (residences) hide behind the grander bund structures

asymptomatic

t left today for his chinese new year trip to guiyang. he spent a year or so down there during his block of years here, and it proved a defining time for him. he has a good friend down there and spends the time with the friend and the friend's family. when asked to describe guiyang, he usually says something like, 'its the capital of the poorest province in china' to which i usually interject some smartass comment about how he beelined for the poorest area whereas i would run far far away from anything that sounded that grim. but he loves it down there, has a great time, and that's that.

recovery from over 2 weeks of having couple-time is in-process. because its still the cny holiday and my friends have literally all fled the country, i'm in no mood to venture out. it would just be more of the same. my holiday consisted of watching 'rome,' cooking, eating, and taking walks with t. the longest time we spent apart for these 5 days was yesterday afternoon when i took a yoga class and he met his buddy for meat sticks and beers. i think we would make most people vomit, including myself.

last night must have been some specific day in the new year where it is auspicious to blow up all of the explosives you can get your hands on. the warfare started at dusk and heavy artillery fire did not cease until about 10 this morning. those of you who live here know what i'm talking about - you can't really describe it because verbal accounts don't even come close. i would say it sounded like a battle, but i don't think any military on this planet would have the luxury of using ammunition like firecrackers are used here.

a few days before the actual new years day, our friends all gathered to watch a member of the social circler, anthony, in his annual tradition of blowing shit up. he spent 1200 rmb on fireworks this year. i thought they were bringing in cases of beer, but they were 12-packs or 18-packs of rockets, and giant wheels of firecrackers laced together. these are not the measly little bottle rockets we get at home, these mothers were loud, powerful, and housed together so you need only light one wick on a case to set off about 12 rockets. it was pretty awesome, actually. a bit concerning knowing how many knuckleheads there are out there and how completely unregulated it is, but fun nevertheless.

i dropped a short video in here for your enjoyment. this was last night from my bedroom window. unfortunately i didn't think to film during midnight, when it honestly sounded like we were in the middle of an air raid, but this does pretty well to demonstrate what was going on all around. mind you, i live in one of the most densely populated areas in the city, so these are blowing up in between apartment buildings in narrow lanes that cars can't even squeeze through.

and me, incredulous

i have been accused, more than one or two times, that i speak condescendingly, that i am patronizing and arrogant. my usual response (mentally) is that i can't help it if everyone around me is stupid. sometimes i'm not kidding, sometimes i am. i don't necessarily think that everyone is dumb, but i do think that most people suffer from not-paying-attention-itis, which gets complicated when i am and i expect that you were, as well, so when i go on to start a lively discussion about what just happened, or what happened three hours ago, or what happened six months ago, i am frustrated when met with blank stares.

this is quite frustrating.

i also usually remember, verbatim, what so-and-so said during an argument or conversation. it really doesn't matter to me if the conversation was three years ago or three minutes ago; usually if i remember a conversation, i remember it and that's that. so it puzzles me when people aren't the same way, or worse, they start arguing in contradiction to what they were arguing about previously. i don't understand how you can have an opinion about something to the point where you are representing one side of a debate, and next time 'round you suddenly do the 'ol switcheroo and are on the other. that doesn't work in my world. does not compute.

i have also never really understood mainstream feminism (this is going somewhere, i promise. bear with me). i studied feminism in college, and found it baffling and alienating because of the rage and divisiveness in the rhetoric. it seemed unreasonable and self-limiting. this may be why i make a damn poor activist. i remember one girl in a social movements class, taunting some guy who didn't understand some point or another about cesar chavez, but making it a gender-based taunt. something about him being a man and life being so easy because of it. it seemed unnecessary, forced, and honestly a bit beside the point. to be filled with that much rage about him being a guy and being somewhat lame didn't fulfill a purpose. moreover, cesar chavez was a man. so what the fuck?

that said (wait for it...), i am finding that the older i am, and the more experience i have with interacting with the opposite sex, that i am starting to draw broad conclusions about the simplicity and somewhat low-IQ behavior of most dudes. sorry, guys, it blows my mind as well. i actually found myself on the verge of shouting, 'what you don't know could fill a book!' i am turning into that girl in my lecture.

seriously, tho. i am met with behaviors that make me want to beat my face against the wall and make those 'donk donk donk' noises. the gender divide just gets wider and wider the older i get. is it me? i know i had a hard time accepting that i was a girl for maybe the first 25 years of my life, but that was mostly because i had and have a thing about emotions, and expressing them, unless it included rage or ego. emotions were for girls, so count me out. but the older i get, the more i learn about guile, and the more i associate it with females, and the more i understand that guys don't have a goddamned clue. you could club them over the head with the reason that their ex-girlfriends thought for 11 months that they would be getting back together and still get the blank stare. some even have the nerve to argue.

pshh. please. i am surrounded by fools.

friday nights

isn't there some football sitcom that's entitled something something friday nights?

it snowed a little again today. i'm so glad this week was over. i was bitching and moaning to trev like on tuesday night or something that i wanted life to end, that i was too tired to live through this week. honestly i don't know how he puts up with my ass. i'm such a drama queen sometimes. in my own defense (to my own criticism), i always mean it at the time, i'm not trying to be disingenuous. but damn, he must be rolling his eyes when he listens to me. seriously. he deserves a gold star for not strangling me this week.

but i guess its hard to strangle someone remotely.

hello, firecrackers! apparently chinizzle new year is off the hinges with the firecrackers. i wouldn't know. last year this time cyn and i were busy getting ripped off in vietnam. we didn't even have pho that was exemplary. wherever all the good shit is in the country, we fucking missed it. usually i don't want to leave whatever country i'm in. this time i couldn't wait to bail and find someplace better. wrong, huh.

so my latest thing is to come home, switch on the radiator and mattress heat, wash up, and immediately get into bed. its too cold to heat up the other parts of the house without it being a complete waste of energy, and i get home late enough where going to sleep immediately is feasible. of course i just sit and fuck around until way too late and end up pissed at myself in the morning, but the farting around part is fun.

am i hungry or not. hmm. i ate dinner at like 5:30, being overexcited that it was the weekend and i could order burritos from ny deli. i ate half and stuffed the other half in my bag with my manolos. then i looked down at my beautiful sage green suede bag with the huge sheng jian bao grease splat on it (from last week, oops) and wondered if that was such a good idea. made it home (and through a 70 minute shiatsu treatment) just fine, tho.

no reward in sight. must procrastinate.

so i really must do two of two things. one is check my work email, review the revised presentation, and update my notes to reflect the changes so i don't suck ass at the client pitch tomorrow. the second is to do my rather extensive mandarin homework assignment for tomorrow's class. can't do it during lunch because i'll be pitching to the client at that point in time.

so what am i doing then? of course. feasting on ayi's jiaozi and roasting my toesies in front of the heater. watching scrubs season 6 and writing in the blog. so so def.

mandarin class was brutal today, only because i can really be a dunce sometimes. i have a theory: once the synapse has occurred and the track has been laid in my brain about what something is, if i learn it incorrectly, i can't fix it. i can't fix what 'yi dianr' means vs. 'yi xiar' because i wrote it wrong in my notebook, and when conjuring up how to use those two phrases, i recall how it looks in my notes and always pick the wrong one.

wtf is wrong with me? my cognition is too heavily visual.

some french dude participated in our class tonight as a makeup class, and tho his english was fair, his french accent was entertaining. imagine hearing 'mapodoufu' with a french accent. i had to use my eyedrops in an effort to not giggle.

this week is going to suck. i keep telling myself - something that always works when i'm feeling panicky and stressed - that it's just an hour. or a week. and how many gajillions of those have i lived? it's nothing, a drop in the bucket. it'll be over before you know it.

i'm surprised that there are walls in my apartment. i am so cold and getting accosted by so many drafts that i feel like i'm typing on the roof. how can one make an apartment with so many invisible holes? as sherry says, so not right.

as i curse to (and at) myself every day, i can't believe i'm paying this much for such a stupid apartment. in china.

ok. i'm off for a flossing and brushing session that will be followed nicely with a snoring session.

the mechanics of missing

i listen to my girlfriends' stories, mine through them for motivation, for reason, for patterns. bad behavior can usually be filtered down to one or two simple reasons - attention and insecurity. related to each other, sometimes, often. behaviors that seem irrational frequently have a very ordinary, very logical explanation, if you look carefully enough. humans are so much more human than we give us credit for.

a few days short of my 30th birthday. as always, i'm relatively underwhelmed about the whole thing. i catch a few moments of excitement from my friends' enthusiasm, but in the end no one's here to celebrate it and the birthday fairy isn't descending from the heavens to plan it for me, so i'll end up doing what i was going to do originally. not much. i think trev will be down here and we'll likely go to dinner or something, but the candlelit romantic crapity bullshit dinner is not what i have in mind. i'd rather have the world's best jiaozi or pulled noodles or something. nice dinners are... nice, but they remind me of going on dates and feeling awkward.

looking back on my 20s, especially in the current phase i'm experiencing, is a calibration of the times when i banged my head on walls hard enough to learn something from it. oh, that time. oh, right, that one. that's how a guy looks when he's scrambling for lies to tell you. that's what a company does when it's in trouble. that's how things fall apart when you don't keep your mouth shut about your friend's new boyfriend.

all of these chronicles of hardship. good things, too, but i'm in no mood to conjure them up. in the marathon that is a long distance relationship, i'm about halfway through and feeling like i could just sideline to the mall over there, rip the number off of my chest, and look for a place that sells lemonade. try to blend in. it's the dailiness of the absence that's started its wily erosion. it's spending yet another week with only yoga and the company of the only two people i can stand to be around these days to look forward to.

i try to look back on my 20s and learn from them to get me through this. what have i learned, what do i know about myself that will help me understand why i'm suddenly inconsolable about a single word, the way something is phrased, the hint of impatience in his voice. why two hours on skype isn't enough. why i suddenly need something so badly i want to walk out of my office at 2 in the afternoon and fall into an abyss. when was the last time i felt like this? before the epic meltdown of 2006. what drove that? work pressure and the perfectionist devil sitting on my shoulder. how did i deal with it? i brought down the house. i am, if nothing, impactful.

some people who know me well blame it on work. stop taking work home with you, don't be so hard on yourself. quit your job. you're sounding like you need to see a shrink. don't obsess. my answer to that was that you're telling a person who has obsessive patterns and rules by which she lives to not obsess. my my, that is a blunt tool we are using. try a laser, those are more sophisticated.

i can't dissect right now. i don't have the clarity i need to pinpoint the culprit for the moods, the sadness. the fatigue. the quicksilver of pain in the back of the throat. feeling like the world is too heavy. if i had a handful of percoset i'd make a damn fine addict. i am feeling that sharon stone had it pretty good in casino. lolling around in satin nightgowns, downing painkillers. wearing bad 80s hair.

going to sleep.

damn

7.5 hours of mandarin a week makes for one tired birdie.

bird jerky

i cooked myself a tough-ass chicken. i'm mad. i wasted about 40 minutes and two heads of garlic and went out and bought chicken broth and everything. not to mention buying the goddamned chicken itself. stupid freshmart, tricking me into buying a stewing chicken and not a roasting chicken. this is the first time i've bitten into a piece of chicken and actually could not come away with any meat. it was solidly strung onto bone. it was like chewing on a plastic fake chicken that tasted meat-like.

my veggies were super good tho. roasting veggies always results in goodness. i bought some tiny potatoes and threw those in, too.

steph and i were supposed to go get foot massages, but we both bought a ton of groceries today and i bet she did the same thing i did - cooked up a storm, ate royally, and is now collapsed on the couch like me with a blankie and the heat blasting. for some reason the drafts are letting up tonight so i'm actually feeling some semblance of warmth. odd. i'm sure this nice warm cosiness will dissipate soon enough and i'll be back to the freezing popsicle i was before.

i love that i am sleepy by 10:30. what an old lady! its awesome. and i love that my friends are either out of town or leaving me the fuck alone so i don't feel pressured to go out. i can be a real homebody.

i want to sleep. hence my winter gut. chub chub. i had noodles for breakfast, pizza and beer at steph's for lunch, and a massive, garlic-infused dinner.

i should be in an igloo

my ass is cold.

why is it that in beijing, which is anywhere from 20 - 40 degrees colder than here, i feel warm and snuggly and honestly frequently sweaty. why, people. i swore after moving out of that victorian in SF that i would never live in another old building... and yet here i am. i wake up and i can see my breath everywhere in the house. these goddamned high ceilings are lovely and all but right now i would take 8 footers over these visually appealing rafters any day.

some people live and learn. i am beginning to suspect that i just live.

i went to the hospital today to get the 'ol eyes looked at. eye, anyway. some weird pressure and feeling like the muscles connecting my eyeball to my head was pulled, if that makes any sense. what i thought was eye strain in my left eye turned out to be a corneal infection in both eyes. nice. i read all this shit about it online afterwards - now i'm getting all paranoid - but the doctor said it was caused by either wearing my contacts too much or too much computer work.

proof that work is toxic!

it was my first hospital experience in the city. i went to the huashan 'worldwide medical center' or some craziness, rumored to be the best hospital in the city. the foreigner clinic looked like a hotel lobby - heavy brocade-inspired carpeting, a rose in a cut-glass vase on small polished-wood side tables next to arm chairs. that hushed lobby feeling. at any rate, it went well - a thousand times better than the hospital in foshan that scared me - the nurse and doctor seemed fine, everything was super clean. the doctor actually had the worst english out of everyone there; the young nurse and various receptionist / pharmacist / cashier people were impressive. i kept following the wrong person, tho, because once the ubiquitous nurse be-hatted, greenish uniform-wearing girl currently handling me would turn around, three more would swarm into my visual field and they all looked the damn same. i kept having to get scooped up by the right person after following the wrong girl.

i've got my shins positioned in front of this heater like it's a fireplace, with the relatively ineffective wall unit blowing behind me. with the drafts blowing here and there and everywhere, i can't tell if it being on is helping at all. i've got burning hot shins and the rest of me is cold.