amazing amazingness

it's been one of those weekends where i don't even know where to begin. sherry and i flew up to beijing to meet steph- who has been up there for the past 10-ish days for work - marc, her bf who flew up a day earlier to meet her, and our friend viv who is up in beijing to see her mom and catch some olympics.

it was somewhat of a small miracle i ended up going, what with the budget constraints and then a late-arriving and fairly debilitating flu that hit me friday morning. at any rate, come 4 pm, sherry came and picked me up in a cab, we made our way to beijing with only a 2 hour delay on our flight. directly from the airport we went to mao live, one of the live music venues in beijing, where steph's work was throwing this fucking amazing show/party featuring seven awesome local punk bands (more on that below) and z trip out of new york. he spun a fat show. i danced my flu away:










v for vachina








i finally left everyone at about 2:30 am outside of a bar in a hutong district nearby because my extra-strength tylenol wore off and my fever was back with a vengeance. so much fun. i must have scared the shit out of my flu, because the next day i woke up chipper and ready to roll to our FIRST olympic event - athletics qualifying rounds. thanks to sherry and her superior planning skills, we procured these tix the day before for about half what the other scalpers were charging:




women's 400 meter



the torch



herzog & de meuron's bird nest, sherry admiring in foreground







after at least an hour of post-olympic giddy times,




steph in purple, marc in red


we headed to the legation quarter, which is a project that my company did some work for to see maison boulud, daniel boulud's newest restaurant. not only did we get to hang out with chef boulud himself, who toured us around the restaurant,








the red room, ready for al roker!








that's chef daniel boulud to marc's left


thanks to marc's contacts - marc is an amazing chef also - we also got to see the kitchen, chat with the chef de cuisine, brian reimer, and managed to invite ourselves back for drinks that night. stoked! we are all intense foodies, so this was an incredible honor as well as being just an incredible experience. i mean, look at that kitchen! it's spotless. there are glass tiles on the walls for god's sake. the building restorations are really mind blowing, and i work for two exceedingly talented and famous architects, so that's saying something.

and on... we then went to boxing (light and midweights):



prelims

which were cool, but after a while, suffice to say the crowd got bored enough to start singing 'the star spangled banner' during a match when neither opponent was american. our favorite fight was india vs. thai, because we were able to stretch the curry vs. curry joke the entire night.


we went to pick steph up from mao live again, and caught the most fucking amazing beijing band, queen sea big shark. steph has been insisting on their greatness for months now, but only last night did i realize how stupid i was being in not immediately dropping everything i am doing and following them around everywhere. they are an incredible show. i now insist you visit their myspace page and listen to their stuff. 'man on the moon' was what got me, being a girl and it being a ballad and all. in fact, it's constantly looping as i write this.






after that, we made our very late way back to maison boulud, where we caught the chef at the bar drinking a beer, the restaurant completely empty. the extremely kind man that he is to us so very imposing group of people, he had his bartender make us delectable martinis from lychee / raspberry / rose-infused vodka, then disappeared behind closed doors to reappear with plates and plates of food that he had chef brian reimer prepare. i'm talking foie gras, country pate, three types of bread, and a impromptu terrine made from the leftover suckling pig from al roker's birthday celebration held there earlier that evening. i wish i was kidding (no, i don't), but it was that intense of a day. we were beside ourselves with joy. it was about 1:30 am at that point and i hadn't eaten dinner, so i was especially grateful and ecstatic.



my martini, with a formed ice cube encapsulating a rose petal. awwwww





what a weekend.

my mind is elsewhere

3 showers a day. cold.

i'm feeling slightly disgusted with the media hype about the 5-ring circus. there are hella foreigners here! who the hell was talking shit about all the denied visas? wait, that was me. well, i should know better than to listen to the hype. although i guess trevor had a nightmare of a time getting his visa extended to a pathetic july 15. they must've kicked out all the dj types scraping by on F visas in between visits to hong kong every 30 days and replaced them with a shitload of smiling faces and happy families, because that's all i'm seeing on the street. i barely see chinese people. in a city of 17 million, that's saying something.

i finally watched american psycho. i never really wanted to see the movie, mostly because i'm a culture snob and prefer to read the book over seeing the movie while sticking my nose in the air, but also because christian bale weirds me out. i'll have to get over that when i go home and see batman, but meanwhile... i don't know if it was the msg-laden (leaving in a month! gotta bone up on msg before i leave!) dumplings we had for dinner, but that movie was making me feel dizzy and ill. and it wasn't nearly as nasty as the book.

who knows.

it's thundering like a mother outside and i hope the weather clears up for tomorrow's brunch 'n pool session. we've grabbed about 8 friends, rented a van, and are heading to le meridien on the outskirts of shanghai for the all-you-can eat brunch and pool usage.

i should start a new section for the shit i'm about to dive into (pun intended).

here we go.

ahem.


pools in china (where the fuck is the underline function?)

are either dirty or have about 100000000000000000000000000000 people in them. i am not fucking kidding you. see pic below of madhouse fake beach pool thing called dino beach in shanghai (totally ripped the photo from the sh municipal government page, sorry), aka hell on earth. therefore it stands to reason that any decent pool in shanghai is closely guarded by strict-ass, borderline ridonkulous regulations for entry. normally sherry and i circumvent the workout aspect of pool access by going to jill's place, which has a clean 50 m pool, usually fairly empty. still, we had to promise our first born children to gain access. but for the summer, all of us americans want that vegas pool party, strawberry daiquiri, my-flag-is-up, hawaiian tropics kind of pool thing. and we are sadly deprived.





so we hatched a plan, resourceful vitamin d-hungry alcoholic girls that we are. tomorrow we are going to le meridien, boondocks version (vs. the one centrally located), and will plunk down rmb 318 for free flow beer and wine (including sparkling, you know that got my ass on board) and all you can eat, which in shanghai usually includes beijing duck, foie gras, dim sum, and sashimi. plus you get all day access to an actual outdoor pool. i am not sure how the mosquito thing will work out, but i'm bringing my 7% deet. i suspect it will be super crowded and less than clean, but shit, don't know till you try, right?

*end rant*

jesus, my place is being blown to pieces. and now its pouring rain. this shit better clear up before we leave tomorrow.

i'm normally happy about getting a little bit of color, but i'm kinda eh about getting darker in my old age. is it the whitening products endlessly marketed in asia finally getting to me? doubtful. i went and became one of those people that burns a lot after my teenage years. it's the weirdest thing. the minute you go and stop swimming outdoors year round, you turn into a differently-complected person. my dad was kind enough to point out that i was 'really pale!' when he came a-visiting. thanks, dad. i would have felt strangely insulted about that in my younger day, but now it's kinda like, meh. i work inside all day. it happens.

lucky day triple 8!

see ruby's:

http://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/shanghai/dining/dessert.htm

so today is the commencement of the summer games! the whole city (country, i dare to extend) is buzzing with excitement. most companies have given their employees half days off. true to the nature of my business, my company did not. hence i am writing this.

anyway, this is short one because i am sneaking out soon to run around the bund and sniff out the good parties for later tonight with sherry, but we had cake to celebrate the olympics (cheaper than letting your employees leave at 1 pm?) and it was the shit.

you have to be a fan of the chinese cake variety - super soft cake, cream, and either fruit or chestnut filling - ruby is your girl. i don't like cake, but chinese cakes remind me of birthdays when the only cake i would entertain would be chestnut-filled cakes topped with those ubiquitous but somehow tantalizing mandarin oranges. i love those.

anyways, i'm off to rage.

for lack of thai oil...

at saadiq's suggestion about thai oil for my purple, lumpy, swollen legs, i remembered these little bottles that came free with my economy-sized white flower oil that i love so much: hoe hin strain relief!

it doesn't smell 'horrid,' as i guess thai oil should, i hope that isn't indicative of its weaker healing powers. when chinese medicine is concerned, if it doesn't stink to high heaven, it's somewhat suspect in its effectiveness. it's making my leg tingle and feel warm, which i guess is better than nothing. it smells cinnamon-y.

i can also douse myself as i see fit since i'm not at the office and vulnerable to 'you smell like an old person' comments.

switzerland

trev sent around this short piece in response to western media outlets covering china for the olympics. he was crafting a mass email masterpiece to precede the head-nodding goodness of the piece itself, but decided that it spoke for itself and needed no introduction.




“Reporter Guidelines for Covering the Beijing Olympics. 1) On arrival, set the scene by saying a few nice things about the infrastructure—the high rises and the multilane highways, the interchanges. Developmenty sort of stuff. 2) Make an amusing, self-deprecating comment about your inability to speak or read the funny language they have in China. Play down the fact that you are dependent on a translator for quotes and newspaper reading. Never admit in print to getting story ideas or borrowing quotes from the China Daily. 3) Get story ideas and borrow quotes from the China Daily. Make sure you do this discreetly. For background only. 4) Now for reportage. After saying the nice things about the new buildings, get your translator to find a Beijing yam seller whose slum was knocked down to make way for the Olympic badminton hall. Do a few paras on him, and how all the money thrown at the Games is not helping the poor, and how terrible the huge income gap is. Make sure you write at least three times as much about the yam seller whose slum was pulled down as you do about all the new apartments, new metro lines, the growth in car ownership, the expanding health insurance and all the other good news about China that nobody in the west really wants to know about. 5) Say how horrible the air in Beijing is, even if it isn’t on the days you are there. Everybody says Beijing air is horrible, so play along. 6) The political bit. Interview a token party member, but reword him subtly to make it sound like he is just spouting the party line. Bend the translator’s words to fit—it’ll be rubbish English anyway. (Ditto in all quote treatment). Then find a good Chinese, one who is fluent in English, has lived in America or Britain, and is prodemocracy. Give them lots of space, let them sing. Martin Lee types, but preferably younger and female, for the mugshot. If you can get an interview with the Olympic artist, Ai-whatsisname, who is an anti-Commie quote machine, give him full throttle. Hopefully, he hasn’t been arrested yet.
Lastly, please remember: Chinese who love their country are called “nationalists.” Never use this word for Americans, French, Tibetans and other civilized peoples who love their country or territory. When demonstrators protest over Tibet they are acting in a heartfelt, spontaneous way, waving pretty flags you would be happy to see woven into your granny’s bedspread. When Chinese counter-demonstrate, they are always “bussed in,” the mood is “ugly”, and they are draped in intimidating red flags that can be made to look a bit Hitler Jugend-ish with the right kind of photo. (They probably did arrive in buses as this is the cheapest way of moving numbers of not-very-well-off people around, but you don’t need to prove the insinuation that the regime laid on the vehicles). Beijing is always a “regime,” by the way, and is not to be confused with western “governments.” (But: Hong Kong is an exception. Because it was under benign, enlightened British dictatorship for a long time, it cannot be a “regime.” “Regime” only applies to dictatorships in rubbish countries).That’s about it. Don’t be deceived by all that friendly smiling and optimism, that’s just a front. It’s your job, with your long days of experience of the Far East and your fluency in a language spoken by nearly 0.005% of the locals, to get under the radar and ferret out the truth. Did I mention how bad the air in Beijing is?”

http://time-blog.com/china_blog/2008/07/a_reporters_guide_to_covering.html?xid=rss-china


unfortunately, the author is unnamed, but it's pretty much A: what i'm seeing in the major papers i read online, and B: true from the perspective of us living here. i do realize that there is a back story behind my dvd store griping and other spoiled-expat behaviors. while there is undoubtedly a great deal of people who have been ousted from major cities or are being pressured from the government to take their small businesses elsewhere, it was a good reality check for me because we've also been seeing some good stuff go down. these include traffic guards at most intersections, lowering the likelihood that you will be mowed down either by a scooter, bicycle, or a car; government reinforcement of the haphazard air flight departure times on all airlines (it's common to sit on the tarmac for 3-4 hours); the awesome transportation changes that have gone down nearly overnight (beijing's T3 airport building, the high speed trains to neighboring cities, the underwhelming but convenient longest-bridge-in-the-world from shanghai to ningbo, and the upcoming bullet train between shanghai and beijing, the overall impressive list of buildings that have been erected in beijing like the CCTV tower and the egg / nest / water cube) and etc. some of these achievements cannot be attributed to the olympics alone, but almost certainly to the 1-2 punch of the olympics and the 2010 world expo in shanghai.


anyways, thanks trev for finding that.


p.s. pre-olympics we've also been able to view blogspot urls without any problems, too.

some amusing tidbits

from one of my favorite shanghai news blogs, the shanghaiist:


August 1, 2008
Whatever you do in Beijing, DO NOT wear white socks with black shoes

The Wall Street Journal reports that 4.3 million copies of "an etiquette book outlining rules on good manners and foreign customs, including rules about what not to wear" have been distributed to Beijing residents for use during the Olympics. A snippet: "No matter what, never wear too many colors...especially during formal occasions. When you wear [formal shoes], be sure to wear socks in good condition...socks should be a dark color -- never match black leather shoes with white socks. Older women should choose shoes with heels that aren't too high." Let that be a warning to you.




here's the link to the WSJ article. i found most amusing the guidelines of wearing 3 or less colors at one time. they need to add a sub-topic: only one detail per outfit. you can have ruching, tassels, paint splatter, acid wash, sequins, or drawstrings, but only ONE detail per outfit.

prickly like a cactus

this is the market street up the block from me. it's about a heartbeat away from my friend steph's place, too.

i was walking home from the bus one night when i stopped by to pick up some fruit from one of the stalls that actually stays open late, and noticed the joint was swarming with gray-uniformed officials. i mean, swarming. there were groups of 8-10 all over the place. then i noticed that not only were a disproportionate amount of stalls closed, quite a few had were boards nailed across them with some sort of official notices plastered across. a few of the stalls were being bricked over as i watched. it was some sort of freaky scene from a movie. poof! and things disappear here overnight.

so i wandered by last week and the market is a ghost town. there is one guy selling pork, another stall with seafood, and about 3 stalls with produce of some kind. this used to be the liveliest place in my hood (which is saying a lot - it's a congested area). and i'm not even the biggest wet market fan. i generally think they stink and are unhygienic, and people try to ride over your feet or your entire person with their scooters and bikes, making you want to beat them with the pig leg hanging in that unrefrigerated stall next to you, covered in flies. the occasional car is stupid enough to try and drive down the street, too. but i would be amiss if i didn't also point out that these marketplaces are the sole livelihood of a lot of people, not to mention where the neighborhood does its shopping. if it's not captivating, clean, and beautiful, it's at least functional and i'm sure more than a few people were dependent on its existence.

there's no doubt it's because of the 5-ring circus going down in the capital in august. facades are being erected over storefronts overnight, places are getting spiffed up or spit out or just plain closed the hell down. people are getting rolled on - with a quickness. at my friend jill's apartment complex (a nice one with lots of foreigners) the other morning as she was leaving for work, cops set up a checkpoint at her complex gates and were stopping all the visibly non-asian people from leaving and asking for their residence permits. this pink slip of tissue-like paper is the key to your existence here, apparently. mine is buried somewhere in my tv cabinet, i think (luckily i 'pass' and don't normally get harassed.) 48 hours after moving into a new residence, foreigners are required to register at their nearest police station, like child molesters. military state, this place. anyway, jill saw one foreign girl detained because she didn't have her paper on her since she'd crashed at her boyfriend's place. the police wouldn't let her go, saying that she has to register at the police station even for an overnight.

it's just silly is what it is.

lots of things are changing now. the dvd places aren't worth a damn (ok fine, i get it, but it's annoying), the regulations on mail are ludicrous, and the air in beijing is still filthy and making international headlines.

in other news... steph's company is throwing some big bash (or someone they know is throwing a big bash, or there's just a big bash in general) and will have her own apartment in beijing for a weekend during the olympics, so the girls are all planning on flying up there and joining the madness. i've been scared of being in beijing during the games, but i guess at this point i just do like the romans, grab my stupid pink paper, and join the throngs.

england amorous feeling

that's the name of a shop i just passed on my way home. clever, no? better than ordinary shop names like 'liv tyler' or 'only' or 'belville.' my favorite shop name is 'big toe,' which is a shoe store. logically, you would think, but such logic rarely applies here.

many things have happened since i last checked in. well, not really. trevor left for the states, that's been the biggest news. we're suffering from not being able to text every 7.89 minutes, so consequently we've worked out a semi-schedule that consists of both of us constantly being on the computer no matter what time it is so we can chat. skype has been a rare beast, because mostly he's at his mom's house, which features no less than 2 or 3 people swarming around him at all times. the one time we did skype, his baby sister was at home and later his mom came in and teased him about how 'a certain someone was having an internet conference with a special someone.' trevor, despite his actual age, eventually ended up being flustered about having a skype conversation with me that wasn't a secret to begin with. either way, i log into gmail about 50 times a day to see if he's online. he does the same, often very patiently waiting hours for me to log in. i tell ya, there's got to be another way.

in other news... there really isn't any. yesterday i went to linhai for a factory visit. it is a 3-4 hour drive each way. of course, i slept most of the way in the car. luckily my colleague is shanghainese, so he could at least chop it up with the driver there and back. i cannot stay awake in a vehicle for anything, i'm not sure why. i am the worst road trip companion known to man. except for cynthia. we're tied for last place. once i woke up, however, i was pretty happy, since linhai is situated at the base of the mountains in zhejiang province and is really beautiful and green. much more beautiful than the flat swampland that is shanghai proper.

we met for a total of one hour with the factory execs, did a quick factory tour (15 minutes), then jumped back in the car for another 4 hour drive. this time we had with us the young president of the factory, whose english was excellent. turns out she grew up in linhai but has lived in shanghai the past 16 years, so we gave her a lift back to shanghai for the weekend. i thought for sure i'd stay awake, since there was someone in the car i didn't know too well, plus we had just signed a contract to do work with them, plus she speaks great english, but we managed to chat politely for about 10 minutes before i completely passed out again for 3 hours. i'm shameless, i tell you.

i got home, made myself some dinner, then chatted with trevor (aka helped him with his resume) for a few hours. sherry organized a trip to xitang today and even booked a driver, but i pulled a lame one and decided to stay home. i slept for 10 solid hours last night (despite the 6-odd hours i got in the car) and could not be convinced that touring a water town in 100-degree weather with 65% humidity was a good idea. water to me means mosquitoes, and i get enough of them here. we are looking to try and take more weekend trips before i leave (and just in general), and i applaud sherry for always being the inspired one on excursions.

today i happily spent chatting with trevor, who sent me about 100 pics of chicago and of his dad and brother, then finally getting my shit together to run errands and get my daily exercise. daily exercise is a piece of shit in the summer. my knee is questionable, so i am taking a break from yoga and 'walking' at trevor's urging. one of the first things he learned about me (besides my general dope-ness) is that my mom is diabetic (2) and that i am likely on her heels to be the same. it scares him to death, much more so than it scares me, so he has commenced operation harass-the-shit-out-of-me about exercising every day. the upside about operation-pain-in-the-ass (covert name) is that walking around for 30-40 minutes actually qualifies as exercise, so i am able to do it most days.

i feel a couple of different ways about it. one, i find it ironic and a bit sad that trevor believes it necessary to actually ride my ass about exercise. it means that i've become this inactive person in his eyes, someone that sits on her ass and eat chips. (mmmmm...) ok, sometimes i do that. but generally i'm healthy and active (note that generally = when i don't live in china). here the pollution is terrible, my asthma is terrible, and i've paid about a billion yuan for a yoga membership that doesn't include a stairmaster. it means that as long as trevor has known me, i've been relatively sedentary, which is sad to me for some reason.

two (did i lose ya?), i am a bit concerned myself about my potential for developing this disease, and incredulous that this is actually happening to me. my mom tested my blood sugar when she was here and it was really high. i can't swear that it was after a full 8-hour fast, but regardless is was high enough to be considered pre-diabetic and i am not about to end up like my mom. so i decided that my reasoning (aka excuses, see above) for not exercising outside are paltry and lame and that i just need to do it. so far it's been going ok. i joined the boys at their muay thai class last sunday (note: not easy on my knee but fun as hell and i'm going again), and i've been walking or running. i haven't done it every day, but 3 out of 6 and it will be 4 out of 7 tomorrow. it's better than 0 out of 7.

so that's whats been up over here. not a lot.

fido and spot in the wok

http://tinyurl.com/5wdpx7

not for long! sorry, poor, disillusioned, naive PETA lady.




would like to point out that eating dog is deeply rooted in chinese (and filipino, and anywhere else where there are lots of peoples and they hungry) culture. that poor PETA woman needs a reality check. it ain't going away. it's just for show. people love to eat dog here. even the foreigners (above, trev and his best buddy) chow on dog ribs, paws, whatever. it's considered a special treat. trevor gets all FOB on me sometimes and will point out the best type of dog for eating if we happen upon one trotting down the street. only my mom does that, normally.

lots of people here don't eat tofu because it's good for them, more like it fits the budget or tastes good with pork, or stretches that nodule of ground pork for 5 people into a whole dish.

i ain't condoning shit. i eat meat - not dog, but i'm sure i've unwittingly eaten cat or some shit at some hole in the wall here that was billed as 'beef' or 'lamb' - but i draw the line at dog. i've eaten horse sashimi in japan. and ostrich, too, if i'm not mistaken. have also eaten raw chicken in japan. i ain't picky, but the thought of eating dog is pretty nasty and i can't get over the cultural taboo that kinda, you know, forbids the consumption of your pets. but i've also always had plenty of food in my lifetime, so i'm not judging. i'm a proponent of 'nose-to-tail' eating because it both reduces waste and, well, i grew up eating pig feet and fish cheeks, what can i say.

it's your own decision. i'm just saying it sure ain't disappearing from china's horizon any time soon.

being a big girl

...means learning how to pull myself out of a funk. i'm envious of sherry who is on jet air on her way back to civilization for 2 weeks, with all-you-can-drink bloody marys to help her along the way. i'm jealous of trev who is heading back next week. i can't put my finger on why i care so much since i'm heading back more or less permanently in a few weeks myself, but it may have to do with the massive mosquito buffet i've become, making me hate heat and humidity as my limbs swell with little knobby additions that will turn bright purple and make me look like i'm sprouting oddly-colored nipples all over my legs and feet.

i still have the scars from last summer and the summer before. i hate mosquitoes.

i don't venture out of the house or office without a generous dousing in DEET, insuring that my future offspring be born with three eyes or some shit. i can't survive without blasting the a/c. i am so dependent on chemicals and cooling machinery i can't understand how most of the world's population lives like this.

ok. that was little girl time. big girl time means i button it, pop a valium, and say nighty night.

we're obsessed with

http://youtube.com/watch?v=8AVebYQNV10&feature=related

this ridiculousness.

we keep sending each other different vids.

yes, we are 11 years old.

sleeplessness

there's a sense that things are drawing to a close, even though i'm going to be around for another couple of months. i don't really feel like i'm going to be here for another 60-odd days. trev is already getting his stuff together to ship off into the neverneverland of china post, and he's gone as of next week. i still have a bit of time, however i choose to think about it.

basically rounding up the rest of my task list before i leave work (and jesus is it LONG) and trying to do survivalist things like find a job in where i'm going to be relocating, and thinking about what household shit trevor and i are going to need (read: everything). oh yeah, and wresting my belongings from my family members, who have been both secretly and openly appropriating shit from my boxes in the garage. i guess that's what happens when you're too broke / cheap to rent a storage space.

weeks are booking solid in terms of extracurricular activities. have to work to squeeze in the odd yoga class or stay-at-home-and-watch-the-wire nights. at the rate that my apartment appears to retain heat these days, there's not much incentive to be home anyway. i am going to weigh about 300 pounds by the time i leave here. every evening is an opportunity to try this or that place either for the first time or one last time before i leave.

must. reign. in. appetite.

the more or less chronic GI tract issues that i have in the summers in asia seem to have little to no impact on my actual appetite. i like to think it actually makes my body MORE efficient at calorie absorption, therefore accounting for the beer belly i'm cultivating on my frame. and, for the first time in my life, i can actually attribute beer consumption (and dinners no earlier than 9 pm every day) for this unwelcome addition to my physique. if i wasn't so busy all of the time, it would rather suck.


waiting for the melatonin to work...

gu rei hai

chatting with t-money - who believes himself to be one of the more healthy-like-a-healthnut individuals in china, except for his LIVER, mr. smartypants - i realized that it had been weeks since i'd eaten a fruit that wasn't in a cocktail.

what?

i've had a busy past 4-6 weeks, ok? shit. i'm also only eating meals that come either from a delivery person or a package. ramen diet. at least i'm eating plenty of EGGS, the protein everyone here seems to subsist off of. besides pork, of course.

hee hee. show me a chinese person with a vitamin E deficiency and i'll show you a north korean escapee.

get out of town.

no way: http://www.fldsdress.com/

you may recall me going off about this in a previous post. gives the term, 'throwback,' a whole new meaning.

thanks sarah!

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.