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.

catty catty catty

the cat was good today. even with multiple sources of overstimulation in the form of visiting relatives waving her cat dancer and green ribbons in front of her, and petting her the wrong way, and placing tempting feet with wiggling toes in her path, she didn't take a swipe at anyone. she hid under the sheet of red cellophane that housed my aunt's bright-orange gap jacket, she gamely lunged out after the dancer or prudently ignored it, she adored my aunt's gift box by rubbing against it but refrained from chewing, she even let me cut her nails after everyone was gone and only nibbled me once on the thumb. i think she's maturing. this is a good sign.

finally got skype to work - this time on my laptop - and trev and i have been talking. it's nice to talk without one eye on the timer, stressing about how much its costing him or my sister's international calling account. skype is a good, good thing. looking forward to going back if only to see my favorite face for a few days before it heads back to bj.

three and a half more days of clean air...

blogging

the funny thing about me blogging is that i actually kinda hate reading blogs.

passing the days

relax time for me is a mix of actual relaxation, plus an undercurrent of high-strung guiltiness about work. not working makes it hard for me to relax, but working is working. and aren't holidays all about not working? whatever. i never did deal well with stress and i think i'm just getting worse at it as i get older. terrible at drawing boundaries.

yesterday was the outlets and today was 4th street in berkeley. neither are major shopping destinations for the holidays, but tell that to the crowds we beat off. all i do is walk around and mentally compare the US with china. i marvel every five minutes as how lucky americans are. still, i think more and more that i'll be glad to leave china. i know living in the states is insular and we're ungrateful and wasteful and wealthy and use too many plastic water bottles, but being in china is wearing thin. it's been less than 18 months, too. sure didn't last very long, eh? here at home i've gone running in the woods and walking around the neighborhood with my sister, there's clear sunlight and industry, it's all building up to the consensus that china is dirty and i don't want to go back. there's opportunity there, and i'm grateful for the experience, but right now i think about china and the only thing i do is feel irritated.

being an expat is a weird place to occupy. you have your criticisms about the society in which you were raised, and the one that you have temporarily adopted. you watch the american SUVs zoom by, see the kids drinking starbucks and carrying cell phones, buying piles of crap at target and claire's and using words like 'need' when discussing a seventh gray sweatshirt or new nikes. you sit in heated leather car seats and drive your dad's german-engineered car, revel in your boxes and boxes of 800-gram weight towels and frette bedding and the stacks of sweaters and belts and handbags and candles you blew your paychecks on. you think about these things and wonder where you fit in now with these luxury items and a newly minted conscience. where would you be if you hadn't spent so much money on things that just take up space now, that didn't enrich your life or those around you but sure made you happy when you wore new outfits to work for 4 days in a row. you spend 45 minutes in calvin klein, trying everything you can but walking out with nothing thanks to your new china size and your new china frugality. am i really going to be one of those women that drive around in a minivan with an armchair-sized ass encased in terrycloth sweatpants? and when i am, will i look at myself and care? will i just write all this shit down on some free blog service and forget about it once i'm back in a place where i can drink tap water and buy designer bath products for my dog?

i really don't know. all of these thoughts - i'm not exactly fraught with them but i am aware - dance around and i wonder where it'll all settle out. what will be the end-product of it all. i'm ok with it going absolutely nowhere, i understand that stepping outside of consumerism - even just mentally - makes me a weirdo here. mostly i think i'll just have flashes of conscience like i do now, will likely write them down, then turn back to my peets cup with my organically-shampooed dog snoring beside me, wonder what to eat for dinner, and move on.

i read in the chronicle today that front-page article about yusef bey and his followers. i think about chauncey bailey and the obvious implication that the death of the journalist and the bey party are linked. i think about what it would be like to be walking around downtown oakland in broad daylight, maybe thinking about lunch or that stupid email you got from a colleague or your kid's shoes for god's sake, and getting killed with that unimportant thought still in your head. maybe food still in your teeth or that stain on your tie. it makes me feel so aware of how important life is, but unable to act out how to demonstrate that. appreciate every moment? hug your mom? recycle and reuse? spend holidays in soup kitchens or donate more money? go to museums? become vegan? demonstrate at rallies? lose that weight?

homey loo

finally getting a handle on this jetlag. arrived home last week, and have conducted a rather extensive food tour of my favorite spots since the plane touched down. tartine, immediately after the airport. (a big shopping break at jeremy's - armani jacket and gucci sweater, 3 pairs of shoes.) pho for lunch at ao sen on e12th. dins with the village, korean bbq. since then, we've conquered more vietnamese, da bi no at my pah pah's house, tonight is burritos. me and grandma. it's on. right now she's getting her grub on with the almond chocolate pocky we bought her yesterday.

besides my tummy, the doggie has been benefiting rather nicely from my return. walks twice a day, nighttime runs. she seems to appreciate it. the cat, another story. her fat ass is so plumpy for the generous hand my mom has with her food. she's only getting one scoop a day from me, and she's not happy about it. she's wearing so much fat under her fur, she looks like a plushy snow leopard. without the fast and agile part.

saturday was lively. met up for dinner with former work peeps and their extended friends. drinks at casanova - $19 for a guinness, a pbr, a shot of jim beam, a sapphire tonic, and a belvedere cran? we're going back! - went for a couple hours, bumped into another few coworkers, then off to some lame joint in the marina. i promptly got rejected for my lack of ID (damn it. driver's license no longer lives in the wallet! no need for it in china) so jenn and erik and i sought out irish coffees at perry's. heavy on the irish, my friends. very very heavy. we almost couldn't finish them. jenn swears the guy used one shot of espresso for the three of us.

after perry's we headed late-night to the aquarium. running around at 4 am in the aquarium? petting the sea turtle. having giant sea bass swim up to us. the touchpool with starfish and abalone and anemone! sticky tentacles.

btw - i love berkeley bowl. about $100-worth of love.

hot orange soda

just saw a relatively narsty 'comment.' may have to start screening my peeps. none of this porno shit.

so last night was long, an office night, but always tempered by the presence of others. the whole of the graphics team, no less. at around 8:30 one of the kids developed a hankering for macdonald's and called for delivery. (for those stateside, macdonald's delivers all over the damn place in asia.) they refused, however, to deliver to my office, so christine, out of desperation, took a cab to nanjing and picked the order up herself.

spicy chicken sandwiches never tasted so good. the funny and notable 'i-live-in-asia' moment arrived with the drinks. kenny had placed the phone order ahead of time, and i asked for a coke, but what arrived were what looked like coffee cups, each in their own plastic bag. hot drinks. i sniffed several and they all smelled citrusy. i'm thinking, hot orange soda. great. but it actually turned out to be pretty good. not soda, more like tea with pomelo juice. there were actual pieces of pomelo pulp on the bottom (not to be confused with grapefruit, because, in the words of frank but altering the meaning, pomelos are IMMENSE).

so anyway, i'm going home tomorrow. HOME HOME HOME. land of the good food and somewhat clean air and all dat shit. i can't wait. i'm bringing home 4 coats - courtesy of my sister and cousin - and hella work shit and a smidge of clothes for myself. i spent the evening packing and now i'm considering meeting the girls out at some event on moganshan. some artsy fartsy business.

why am i craving macdonald's? that's just wrong.

silver bells

man it took me a long time to gain access to blogger tonight. good thing i have work to distract me from the long load times :)

i got some 'comment' from what looks like a german website. may i ask why fools spam your ass in a different language than that which you speak (or in this case, write?). not only are they ignored because they're rude enough to send spam, but they're double ignored because they send german spam. probably latched onto the one german word or phrase i have on here and decided it was worth the risk.

what's new... not too much. decided that i need to learn to stay my ass at home. sherry and i are way too used to calling each other up at the end of the day, or sending 'what time you off???' messages to each other, our secret code language for, 'let's get our eat on!' which ensures both of us spending money we don't need to spend, plus me staying out hella late when i should be jumping my ass on the bus around 8:45 (i rolled in at 10:45 this morning. for the love of god what is wrong with me) in the morning, meaning that i should be asleep right about now. and also it tends to drive this habit of eating really late at night, which is no good for the digestion or the waistline. and though i struggled so much with this last year around xmas, i really AM looking forward to going home next week and hiking with the doggy or running by the ocean. the likelihood is higher this time, esp since my cousin and sister are all gung-ho walkers now. around the lake, in the hills, whatever. i'm going to make them make me do it. i can still fall asleep on the floor in front of the fireplace with my dad and the dog, but this time it needs to be after a long stroll or run. capice?


i am super babbling.

went to a trial mandarin class today. i will start early jan, but i wanted to make sure i liked the institution and the system before committing. survey says... i'm relatively impressed. the lessons ain't cheap, but it is quite professional, and the class i sat in on (only one student) was quite good. the teacher included me in the convo as much as the student, and made me talk a lot. that's good. i need an ass-kicker type to motivate me, or i run all over your ass. additional bonus - it's always a relief to hear a non-shanghainese person speak mandarin. shanghainese-tinged mandarin is a mushmouth, oddly-accented, very confusing sound for the beginning mandarin speaker. i do not lie.


time for bed.

sunday nights

heroes, season 2 marathon.

one soma for my muscle twinge. floating around for a while, but now i think i'm back down to earth.
what else is going on... work work work. today i had a wonderful day off and we spent it eating rou si mian and tang bao next door, and running around looking for handmade shoes places (mr. billy still looks the best), and buying tangerines, and walking in the cold air. thank god for weekends. yesterday i took the afternoon off and we watched the pie-eating contest at kommune then decompressed with some serious shopping. uniqlo is the bomb, but you have to go to the 'dong where the big one is. happily sporting new pseudo fair isle sweater and there's a bagful of other stuff waiting to be worn this week.

aaahhh. retail therapy is the BEST.

cleanin up the mess you made

taco night again. overstimulation.

sometimes, despite how much you love someone, there can be too much of that one person. i don't know why i work the way i do, but i function so much better when i have space to breathe. i am a better person for it, avoiding people and noise and social interaction when i'm just too tired to function under the weight of it. it's not an issue of physical fatigue - it's the emotional burden of shouldering simple social dynamics, even with people i am friends with and enjoy being around. when i feel like i've reached the end of my rope - however that happens, in whatever capacity - i really just don't have a good time when i'm around people, no matter how beloved. there's just too much going on, too much noise, too many undercurrents, too many careless comments that sting just a little or are just a tad inappropriate. i feel tired from catching and reacting to all of these little things, feeling uncomfortable for that person or trying to rescue that conversation from heading down that path. it's just exacerbated when people are drunk and i'm not. it's not my responsibility to save anything, but i think when you're the type that's wired to notice everything, you can't help but feel like you should.

in moods like that i just need to be at home, alone or with someone who knows how to be silent, writing or reading perez or doing anything but having to think about my behavior within the confines of society and how to act and what's right and what's wrong. at the end of some weeks, it's just too much. it's too hard. i am listening to john mayer and pretending that i'm on an island with my laptop and a mysterious outlet that's popped out of the sand. because we all know vaios have shit for battery life.

25 hours of shooting later...

chris taking a break from styling



that photographer was the most bend-y little dude


wearing the requisite feet shower caps to keep from footprinting the white set



this was the most interesting thing of all - the building we were in was being renovated, and all of the migrant construction workers just live on-site. this is their living area - you can see their makeshift beds against the wall - in the parking-garage area of the building, ground floor. the not-so-great thing about it was that there was no running water in the studio, and we had to share the Nastiest Bathroom in the World with the workers, which made us all self-dehydrate in hopes of avoiding usage of it.

my couch is my friend

back from an all-day stint at the photo studio. i have another one tomorrow and an in-store the day after. glug. i never knew that a person could be so anal retentive about photography, but our guy was. i was at the studio for 10 hours and i swear to god we only got through 40% of our product list. probably less, i may just be saying that to make myself feel better.

anyhoo, enough shop talk. i don't want to think about it anymore.

the right side of my body (facing the heater) is nice and warm. my left side keeps getting hit with gusts (my very non-airtight windows facilitate this) of cold-ass air. trev was kind enough to warn me last night on his way to the train station that SH would be getting cold tonight. good thing i paid attention, because all day in the studio it was pretty chilly. studios aren't known for their good heating systems.

well my thanksgiving dinners went off without a hitch! or maybe there were so many hitches no single one stood out. the office loved the turkey and stuffing and sucked down gravy like there was no tomorrow. i was a bit alarmed. saturday i was up at 7 making the stock and chopping veggies, making more cornbread. turkey went in at 11 am and was ready at 2:30, stuffing went in after, then i made a quick pie crust - with trev's right-hand forefinger crimping the crust, it was classic - and we threw together a little quiche that came out nicely. in between all of this was the repairman for the washing machine (needs to be taken in), the repairman for the dryer (fixed in less than 5 minutes), and the stovetop repairman (replaced my gas hose which had been leaking and was dangerous. he also removed the oven from its little cubbyhole space while the turkey was still cooking!). i can't believe a decent thanksgiving turned out as a result of the chaos.

kate's gift to our dinner was caesars - the canadian take on the bloody mary, made with clamato and rimmed in salt and black pepper. delicious discovery! a little too delicious. pretty much everyone at the dinner - and there were a ton of us, at least 15? - ended up hammered. sherry, trev, and i took a couple of tokes out on the balcony, and, in jason's words, sherry and i 'staggered in, downed a huge plate of cake, and then crawled into the guest room and passed out.' i woke up probably 30 minutes later, feeling a lot better. naps are the bomb! went back out into the living room and the party was still going. gotta love nights like that.

kate wins the award for the most adventurous night. she's madly embarrassed about her evening - which she doesn't recall, i think thanks partly to those caesars - but let's just say when you're down on your luck, and your shoes and pants have gone missing, head to your nearest guard shack. they pepper shanghai - every housing community has a couple - and the guards are quite kind. they'll put you up in their shack, and even cover you with a blanket for the night. tee hee!

alright, i'm starving after a day spent fixating on the reflections given from the lighting boxes against lacquer finishes. time to eat and then it's bedtime for me.

xoxo.

g & ts

argh. i don't even think i drank that many last night, maybe 2 or 3 when all was said and done. but i guess when you drop those drinks down to a tummy that only holds a bowl of jook... it's twice as effective!

kate came by last night with a backpack full of booze + mixers and we settled in a for a long dish session while i made a quick cornbread batch for tomorrow and packed up the staled bread - unchewed by any little rat teeth, thank you. stupid asshole shitface dumbass rat.

this very fine hungover morning i'm trading going into the office for washing out the large styrofoam cooler (ayi delightedly showed me yesterday that she'd found the perfect place to store my boots!) and bleaching the shit out of it. i'm going to make this brine in a minute, after my coffee soaks in. i had 2 pieces of semi-ok toast from city super. china = bland ass bread, in case you're wondering. at least it wasn't made of complete air. i went through and molested all the bread in the bakery, hefting them all to see which loaf had some weight to it. sherry and i were sadly disappointed by the multigrain raisin 'bread' we bought the other week. it seemed as if the raisins were suspended in mid air.

cyn arrives around 4 pm today, but sadly i have to head into the office for some dog and pony show at 3 pm that apparently my boss signed me up for (note: i am the show). even from europe she's managing to facilitate guanxi. anyway.

our xmas plans are well under way. next week should be insane! looking forward to it. i'm going to take pics of our store holiday concept. it's going to be crazy. i can't wait.

vermin

sitting on the sofa, typing. half talking to trev and half playing freecell. over the top of my laptop screen, i see movement in the kitchen. a medium-sized rat strolls his ass - not scurries, not runs, STROLLS - through my kitchen.

he sniffs thoughtfully. stops. raises himself on his hind legs to take a deeper sniff. spies me moving - sitting up in shock and incredulity at the cojones on this motherfucker - in the corner of his eye and u-turns, then jogs away, deep in thought.

it's tough, being a rat. you have to live from the trappings of others, are viewed worldwide (except for that crazyass temple in india) as vermin, are in constant fear for your life. people see you and try to stomp on you. trap you with peanut butter and cheese (or banana bread, in steph's case) and hope that your spine snaps when you're ensnared.

i heard that fucking bitch tap-dancing on the smashed cardboard box i left in the living room last night. it was so loud i actually woke up, which, as trevor pointed out, is impressive. i think he also knocked my fucking mosquito lamp down, which means this bitch thinks this is his home, all crawling all over my shit. i thought it was the trucks rumbling by, which make my floor shake, but that's never knocked it down before.

i bet my crazyass neighbors hand-fed him under the generous crack in my door. it's probably their nastyasses that drew him here in the first place. bitches.

vermin! i live in a house filled with vermin.

business plans

i think that i have essentially been signed up to construct a business plan for my company for the next 5 years, which sounds to me like a big deal, but doesn't seem to be a big deal to anyone else. it's like, very offhand. "oh, you know that business proposal you wrote a while back? about our goals for the next decade? go ahead and flesh that out, build out all the personnel and budgeting we're going to need for that, all of the actionable items and who should do them, you know. that sort of stuff."

oh. ok. well why didn't you just say so?

so i made a discovery last night - sherry had some free massage coupons so we headed late-night to the dragonfly on donghu. normally i'm not a big fan of the element fresh-esque mass market massage joints, but a free massage is a free massage. i was going to opt for the regular chinese massage (which, i'm slowly developing a theory regarding, is an oxymoron because chinese people don't have an additional mental dimension for customer service and the pleasing of another person, in my opinion, doesn't exist here. but i digress), but sherry was going for shiatsu and so i decided to give it a whirl.

2 conclusions:

#1: i will, from now on, request a male masseuse. my theory is that they tend to have larger hands and therefore broader fingerpads and the 'pokey' phenomenon that small chinese female fingers seem to have is therefore dispelled. and,

#2: shiatsu, when done correctly, actually functions a lot more effectively for people who want to get knots out of their muscles then the general, crowd-pleasing 'swedish' style or the afore-mentioned, not very enjoyable, 'chinese massage.'

i'm very happy for taking the shiatsu plunge, and more than a little surprised that i got a good massage at dragonfly.

sherry didn't have as great of a time and halfway through the massage stopped her girl and sent her in for a new one. then we were both happy.

i'm running off in a little bit to this new kitchen and baking supply store near me called, 'pantry magic.' according to chris st. cavish, pantry magic (sounds like a product you would hawk on an infomercial) buys from factories that make all-clad, calphalon, and the like to provide people like me a place to burn hard-earned cash. i really need measuring cups of the 'cup' and '1/2 cup' variety - enough with this stupid 100 ML bullshit - and a pastry blender and some pie pans for thanksgiving. i reluctantly bought a rolling pin last night at ikea. i will need one to roll out pie crust but i'm very stingy with my kitchen space. namely, because i have none, and rolling pins are not easy to store.

anyhoos. after a 4 am bathroom flooding involving my washing machine and it's tendency to 'walk' when spinning dry my very heavy bath rug, and a nice long skype session with trev after getting up this morning (we can 'hang out' on saturday mornings even when we're in different cities! thank you video cam), i will meander down to pantry magic, then probably nap and go get a manicure with sherry, and then we have a dessert extravaganza waiting for us courtesy of steph at jade. not bad for a saturday.

for the record, i do try and blog more often (like this past wednesday) but am often unable to log on to blogger, tor or no tor. i think the internet activity is just so high on weekdays at 11 pm that its next to impossible sometimes. so sorry for not being very regular these days.

i'm going to be back in the bay dec 14. fasten those chin straps, you're going to need a helmet!

chippy chap

when my cousin emails me, instead of using 'chit chat,' she says 'chippy chap.' i think it's the cutest thing. it reminds me of little birds twittering or something.

left work and met sherry at the xintiandi tian jia, but i just wasn't feelin it. we ended up ordering and eating nearly rmb 600 worth of food and booze, but jason sms'd me midway through the meal about burgers and beer and honestly i could've knocked out a cheeseburger no problem. oh wells. toro is better for my arteries. and sake is better for... something. we then went to city super to do some pre-shopping for the dual-thanksgiving extravaganza i'm about to embark on and i dropped another chunk of change there. damn. damn. damn. all my hard work taking the bus and eating crappy lunches gone to the wayside! although i have to admit that i love taking the bus and would choose to do so over a taxi any day anyways.

so now i need to get my ass in bed so i can get up and actually roll into work before 10 am. i need to review 1000 things with JJ and get our new gift assortment in ASAP! i need to pull together the photo shoot. i need to pull together the last-minute ad i want to place in a certain publication. i need to pack all my yoga stuff for my class. i need to do so many goddamned things... and least of all (but still important to me), my work wardrobe is killing me. not wearing jeans is a huge problem for yours truly when the weather gets cold. i don't want to go and start shopping but i can only rotate one pair of wool pants and one pair of cords so many times. sneaking jeans in when i know my boss won't be around. it's a dirty shame, i tell you.

oh, trev and i saw the new ang lee movie last weekend. halfway through i was thinking, 'i don't like this movie,' but then afterwards i couldn't stop thinking about it, so i changed my mind. plus tony leung is kinda hot in this odd, intense way. the gratuitous ess-ee-ex scenes were dutifully deleted (already my coworkers are hinting that they want me to bring back the full version from the states) but i hear they're pretty full-on. as my dad would say, hotcha, hotcha!

oh, and i totally forgot my mom's birthday. it was saturday. i'm terrible! in my defense, however, we were never really sure when her birthday was because she was born in china where calendars weren't used (something like, the fourth day of the second week of the eleventh lunar cycle) so she kept changing her birthday around. for most of my childhood it was nov 8, then she abruptly decided it was the 10th. who knows.

i'm uninspired

back from beijing tonight. flew into pvg which i think i'll do again when coming in on sunday nights, because there was absolutely no taxi line and the flight was cheaper. noice. even considering the difference in cab fare between flying into hongqiao vs. flying into pudong.

so we all suspected that my old house apartment would be pretty freezing in the winter - old houses in SH tend to have poor plumbing, be cold, and have bad windows - but so far i'd doing ok. i come home and turn on the radiator in my room, and let it warm up the room while i putz around. it works pretty well so far; my room's always warm despite the 20-foot ceilings, plus there's the nice radiator smell, which always makes me feel warmer even if i'm not. i bet most people hate the smell of a heater warming up, but i've always liked it. i also like the smell of gasoline, for whatever that's worth. as a kid i used to stick my head out of the window when we pulled into a gas station and deeply inhale, and it drove my mom nuts. she'd be like, stop smelling that stuff! it's going to give you brain damage! she may have a point.

well, off to bed, i guess. i'm actually on bed right now. i can't wait to get a new bed. this one is nice to look at but is so broken i'm afraid to move too much. it shakes if i take a deep breath. lame.

back to the grind! yuck.

post-yoga glow

if someone tries to steal my towel again when i'm showering at the yoga studio, leaving me to dry off with paper towels and the fucking blowdryer, i'm going to grab her by the fucking hair and knock her goddamned teeth in.

namaste.

damn i'm tired

so yawning and exhausted, post-burrito, waiting to hear back from kate. i'm so tired i'm hoping she's having too much fun to notice that i'm not there, but i suspect this is denial, not just a river in egypt, having received a desperate sms about 40 minutes ago to get my ass to volar for a rescue mission. sherry just left (back from tokyo!) and i'm suffering the effects of our carnitas super burritos plus beer plus the nutty bar chocolates cyn left behind, following the first hot class i've taken in months. omg.

cyn left this morning, piling an impressive amount of our old household into her dad's minivan (just like college! only over a decade later and with locals buzzing by us on electric bicycles) and hit the road for zhuhai, complete with michael the driver, amy the random, and kodi. a new chapter begins, one that begins with me signing up for mandarin classes. i have to defeat being mired in silence and monolinguality, even if it results in fewer games of charades with ayi (the ironing board is broken! leave it here and i'll tell the landlord so they don't charge you! the phone doesn't work and the roof leaks! they're coming to fix it next week!). i know cynthia gets a kick out of watching us attempt to communicate, but its not so fun being on the receiving end of it. either of them.

last night we went to xindalu with jason and dan and mormon, cyn's dad always in pursuit of a nice meal. true to rumors, the 'beijing duck operation' that they brought down from the capital is really outstanding. the meal overall was excellent, and we staggered home (ok, rolled home comfortably in the minivan) after fried goose liver with green onion pancakes, beggar's chicken wrapped in leaves and baked in clay, garlic ribs with a thick layer of fat, and of course, the duck and many smaller dishes. potstickers. green beans with pork. beef tendon. and a nice red from new zealand.

is it poor form to flake on a friend twice in a week? i know it is, i know. and what can i blame? nothing, no one. fatigue from the week, overly large dinners that are gastric piledrivers, myself. not being one of those naturally high-energy people that can work and then go out just as hard. i've never been able to do both.

here's a pic that i stole from my sister off facebook. she is supposed to be emailing me the bali pics, since i took most of the pics from the trip on her camera, but slowly these things happen. we're on the dive boat the first day of diving, at nusa penida. if i look grim its because i'm struggling to stay awake, anti-emetics having that drowsy effect on me. we were popping dramamine every few hours to keep the seasickness at bay.







this one's also from the dive boat, obviously. the dive master in the buddy holly glasses is named igor.