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I’m thinking I should write in here more, if just as a way to deal with all the chatter in my head. That just sounded weird, but what I mean is that I don’t have many people to talk to much anymore, so I end up just talking to myself, ruminating on things for hours, etc. It’s not healthy.

I feel lost lately and discouraged with myself. (Writing this now, I’m getting deja vu. I’m sure I’ve written this a ton of times.) I just don’t have strong connection here, like people I talk to every day. I feel like this bobbing cork … I can’t explain it. But I spend hours each day in a funk, feeling bad, waiting and hoping for someone to contact me.

I just uploaded this to Facebook. I’m afraid it’s kind of mean, but this is something I really can’t take anymore:

I wish before posting things like “So and so had a baby because God loves them” or “So and so’s baby was okay because Jesus loves them,” people would think of what a slap in the face that is to all the people who are very religious but have had miscarriage after miscarriage, or have given birth to a dead baby, or have had no pregnancies at all. If prayer was what keeps people from having miscarriages, I don’t think my friend’s wife would have had five.

I know people want to testify about their religious faith, but knowing about my friends’ struggles with infertility, which have sometimes gone on for decades and have caused huge amounts of physical and emotional pain, I can’t take hearing this stuff anymore. If I ever get pregnant and am lucky enough to give birth to a healthy baby, please think of my friends who have been trying to have children for years. If you want to congratulate me, don’t tell me that my healthy baby was caused by God’s loving me, because that implies that he doesn’t love my other friends enough, despite their religious faith, to give them a live baby.

Here’s a picture of the director of the German movie OH BOY, which I saw tonight at the Shanghai International Film Festival.

True to form, the events weren’t well-publicized, so for the millionth time, I missed the red carpet event at the opening. However, I did manage to get tickets to some films. I watched TENCHI: THE SAMURAI ASTRONOMER, which was great; WOLF CHILDREN, which was okay, and today I saw OH BOY.

Actually, a strange thing happened at the screening. Beforehand, there was a Q & A. There were two girls doing the questioning, one in Chinese, and one in English. The one doing the English to Chinese translation actually didn’t speak English too well. Initially, they had apparently thought all the people on stage together had worked on the film, but actually the guy next to the director (the second man from the left; the first one is the director) was the director of a completely different German film that had already been screened. The people next to him were the writer and director of another film, and the two women on the end were representatives of the German Film Promotion Board or something similar. The director of the film explained this, but the English translator girl didn’t understand and translated it as “They were all friends in university and have worked together many times.” Therefore, the Chinese-language Q & A girl kept asking questions about what it was like to work together. All of a sudden, this middle-aged man started yelling that they should start the film because the questioners didn’t know anything about the movie. Then about fifteen older people started shouting about how they should turn the air conditioning on. There was a big hubbub, and I think the German people on the stage were kind of confused and astonished.

Finally everything settled down and they showed the film. It was black & white and sort of low key, about a confused young man. It was really pretty interesting — sort of a slice-of-life thing rather than a Hollywood-type story. I’d be interested in knowing what went on in the character’s life next.

Oh man oh man! Flickr has been redesigned, and boy is it ever ugly! The front page is an overwhelming visual assault! Photos take forever to load and it’s a pain to screw around looking for things like sets. Some of the information that used to be on photos is gone too, like what sort of camera the person used.

I haven’t been using it too much because of these changes. Honestly, it’s really upsetting to me that something that has been a big part of my life since 2005 is now so unattractive and hard to use.

Tonight I decided to look at my favorites and see what kind of camera the person used to get the shot. I think it’s a good way to know what kind of camera to buy. However, for a lot of the pictures, I couldn’t find that information anymore (although for some I could). I started searching around for it, clicking everywhere, and got so pissed off that I got a migraine. So I’m still up, feeling headachey and queasy and irritated.

Here is a sort of Socialist Realist gazing-off-into-the-future picture I took in Langde. I chatted with the elderly woman on the far right. I took a video while I did it, and this one is terrible too, even though I wasn’t drunk. I was surprised at how clunky my Chinese sounded, and I think I was a little to abrupt in asking questions, which isn’t that polite, especially when talking to older people.

Chatting in Langde

I really should have said more about my Guizhou trip. I went there during the Spring Festival, and so we (meaning a Spanish girl named Carolina I met and traveled with) kept running into celebrations. Miao people are super, super hospitable, so we kept being invited in to eat and drink. People there can REALLY drink, and make their own rice wine. When you come into their house, they make you drink three cupfulls by pouring it into your mouth, so you can’t really refuse it. I shot the video I’m linking to after drinking all that wine on an empty stomach. You can really tell, because I even screwed up the color somehow.

Drinking in Jidao

but I think most direct questions become much cooler if you put “kingslayer” at the end. Example: “Do you want another piece of pie, kingslayer?”

I’m a bit late in writing about it here, but I had a wonderful time on my trip to Guizhou. I got to see several villages, including Shidong, Jidao, Taijiang, Xijiang and Langde. I got to take three days of sewing lessons total, one with an older lady in Taijiang who did not speak Mandarin so her nephew had to translate everything, and two days with a very nice young woman in Xijiang who had four kids. I wish I had taken her picture!

I got to see a lot of women in beautiful traditional costumes. A lot of women and girls still wear traditional clothes, especially traditional head-coverings and hair accessories, on an everyday basis. We even saw people dressed up for a wedding. I wish I had gotten better pictures of that! I was so excited!

Up at the top of this post is a picture of a very nice woman from Langde.

If it was a good enough excuse for well-to-do 19th century women, it’s good enough for me.

On the night of Chinese New Year’s Eve I went to the Shed, where I joined a birthday party for Curtis’s friend Abby. It being New Year’s, everyone had bought fireworks to set off. We went outdoors to a corner and started lighting ours. There were also people in front of the Anus Hospital (now disappointingly called the Colorectal Hospital) setting off a bunch. All of a sudden, one of their fireworks toppled over and shot into us. It hit my coat, bounced up, hit a guy named Ryan in the leg and the hand, and hit K. in the face. He was holding his eye, which made everyone really scared. Luckily, it had missed his eye, but only by about one inch. It took off some skin right next to his eyebrow, so he was bleeding a little. This was actually the first fireworks mishap I’ve ever seen.

This guy, K., seems to have terrible luck with injuries, so it’s interesting he was the one that was hurt. When riding a motorcycle in Shanghai he wiped out in a crosswalk and broke his arm, and when riding near the border of Mongolia he wrecked and broke his leg (or maybe it was vice versa).

I’ve called this guy K. because he goes by a very unusual nickname, and I haven’t asked his permission to write about him here. I’m not sure why he goes by that particular name, but anything would be better than his real one. His grandma was a fascist and wanted him to be named after Adolf Hitler. His parents were like, “No way!” However, when his mom was doped up on painkillers after giving birth to him, his grandmother raced to the nurses’ station to fill out the paperwork, put Adolfo on his birth certificate, and he’s been stuck with it ever since. Apparently it’s very awkward whenever he crosses a European border.

I’m going to Guizhou, Goddamn it!

It’s the one place I’ve always wanted to go in China. I think pictures I saw of Miao people in China Pictorial in high school were one of the things that got me interested in coming here. I’ve been in the country for ten years, though, and have never gone. It’s always been because conditions weren’t quite right — like I couldn’t find a good person to go with, the weather was bad — or I was scared to go by myself. Now that my Chinese is better, I’m just going to do it. I don’t care if the trip isn’t perfect and I do some bumbling around. It’s better than not going and wishing I had, right?

I’ve got my tickets, and now I’ve got to get decent hiking boots, figure out where to stay, what to pack, etc. Meanwhile, I’ve got to start getting stuff ready for next semester because I’ll be coming back right before it starts. I’ve got to read Old Man and the Sea (which we’re having the students read), prepare some different sort of exercises, etc. But anyway, planning everything will feel a lot better because I have something to look forward to.

It’s the second time I’ll be taking the US Foreign Service exam tomorrow, and also the second time going to take it in a mask. It’s a strange coincidence I just thought of today. The first time it was because of SARS and now it’s because of pollution.

Do I really want to be a diplomat? Where will they send me if I pass both exams? These are things I don’t know. I’m hoping if I pass I’ll get sent maybe to the Baltic States, maybe Finland, or a Stan. I’m leery of making any suggestions when they ask me for input, though, because they seem to give you the exact opposite of what you want. One person I know asked for French-speaking African countries, Brazil, or Haiti, and was sent to China instead.

Ms. Li from Anhui took care of me while I was in the hospital.

This nice man bundled me up and wheeled me to the operating room.

I found out back in November that I needed to have an operation. I’d started to have periods twice a month once in a while, and then I had random bleeding at different times of the month. At first I’d thought it was a symptom of perimenopause, but as it went on I became more worried, remembering that unexplained bleeding is a sign of cancer. Because my aunt died of (maybe) uterine cancer (it spread throughout that area before it was discovered, so the precise point of origin is unknown) when she was about 35, I decided to play it safe and go to the doctor. She did an ultrasound, and when I got the results back, I was scared to find the word “ji liu,” tumor, on it. The doctor didn’t say anything about it, but said she’d have to do another ultrasound after my period, gave me a bunch of progesterone to bring it on, and told me to come back after it was over. I was freaked out and the progesterone made me depressed. Eventually I chatted with Peggy, who translated the report, and explained that the tumor they were talking about was just a fibroid, BUT that there was an another unexplained thing inside. I returned to the doctor, they did another ultrasound, and they found the thing was still there. Since they couldn’t explain what it was and they believed it was the source of the bleeding, she thought they should take it out and biopsy it.

I kept mum about this throughout the rest of the semester. Everyone was still freaked out about my colleagues’s suicide, and even worse, another teacher who worked with my department had cancer. I didn’t want to tell my parents because they would just freak out, which would be useless and stress me out more. I arranged to have the operation after the end of the semester and after I visited my parents for Christmas.

I went into the hospital on like the 7th of January, and unexpectedly, I had a great time! I stayed in the VIP ward of Huadong Hospital, with a private room that had cable TV with CNN, BBC and some sort of weird sex and swearing-less HBO that I think is meant for Malaysia. The food was excellent, so much so that the day after the operation I hoped to stay until the afternoon so I could have lunch.

I had to go in on a Friday to secure my spot and have a lot of tests, left Saturday afternoon, came back Sunday night, had the operation Monday morning, and left around noon on Tuesday. The operation itself was called an operative hysteroscopy, in which they put an instrument through my cervix (which may be too much information for some people!), found the weird thing growing in my uterus, removed it, and pulled it out. It took like one hour, apparently. When I was rolled into the operating room, I told the anesthetist that I was afraid of gas anesthesia, so they gave it to me in an IV. I managed to count to 22 before I conked out. I woke up later feeling totally normal, not groggy at all.

I spent the rest of the day resting. To my surprise, there was no pain at all. Since I had no relatives to stay with me, I paid to have an ayi come in to take care of me. She fed me with chopsticks (putting the food right into my mouth), helped me go to the bathroom, and in the evening insisted on giving me a sponge bath (I wasn’t sure if this was standard procedure, or something she just really wanted to do, but I went along with it). She slept on a cot next to my bed. She tossed and turned and coughed sometimes, which occasionally woke me up, but nonetheless it was great to have her there. Anna came and visited me too, bringing me a bouquet of flowers.

They told me the biopsy report would be ready in about a week, so then I went back. They were surprised to see me and said they would have contacted me if anything had been wrong. I wouldn’t be trusting enough to assume that, though! Happily, the biopsy result came back negative, so I’m okay!

Priest’s “Horrible” Job of Telling Newton Parents of Children’s Deaths.

It seems wrong to quibble about a headline related to something so tragic, but this is the most poorly-titled news story I’ve seen in a long time. It reads like the priest did a horrible job of informing the parents, but in reality it was about how telling him was a horrible thing for him to have to do.

Although I like participating in charity events, I was thinking I hadn’t done it that much lately. So, in the past month or so I’ve been involved in an activity where I got a bag full of gifts for a needy child, and this weekend I did something as well. The point of the event was to thank street sweepers for their hard work, and give them some fruit to express our gratitude.

It sounded like a nice idea, so I decided to do it. However, when I got to the event, I found that the majority of people were like 17, and not only that, it was being held by some church group. They were praying a lot, which made me uncomfortable, and I was a bit worried that they were really using the event as a way to promote Christianity, but I decided to keep an open mind. I did find them to be very nice people, but it was still kind of awkward. The people kept asking me to join their church, to come to their prayer group, etc., which would have been great if I had been interested, but I had to find ways to decline again and again, hopefully politely. They have my phone number because I RSVP’d to the event, and I’m wondering if they will call me again. If they do, I will just have to be up front with them, in a nice way, about my lack of desire to be involved in their church.

I was talking to my friend Joe about wanting to find someone to go out with, and he mentioned a website that he’s been going on. I looked at it, and wrote a profile.

One of the first people who was recommended to me looked great — other than being fond of exercising, a vegetarian, and tidy — almost ideal. His answers to most questions were what I would have put, and where he explained what he meant I found the way he explained himself to be funny, clever and sort of self-deprecating, which I liked a lot. I decided to send him a message, which I did. He didn’t reply. Then I realized from messages that people sent to me that very short messages (like, “Hey, what’s up?”) are very offputting, and that it’s better to write the person something with a question in it. I decided to wait like two weeks and write again, but as usual, I was worried about doing a good job, so I looked at his profile several times, thinking about what to say. I had read that a person can see you looked at his profile only the first time, but I guess that must be in the paid version of the site (or I didn’t read carefully, despite always telling my students to do so).

I only realized something was wrong when the guy changed his profile to a point-by-point enumeration of why he didn’t have any of the qualities I was looking for. The tone of the whole thing was kind of angry, yet hysterical. It started like, “I’m not going to sugar coat it for you! I’m not an easy-going guy! I don’t want to travel with anyone! I don’t like people who are sloppy!” and so on.

I was filled with humiliation. A few days later, I felt the whole thing was hilarious, and wished I had screen-capped it. Then I felt sorry for the guy, who I thought might be losing his mind, and then I started thinking he was kind of scary.

The most interesting thing, though, was that this whole incident ended up making me feel really refreshed. For the past semester, I’d been thinking about my colleague’s death (which I haven’t discussed here) a lot. Really, I’d been brooding on it almost every day. I realized that during this time I was filled with surprise and chagrin because of this dating site thing, my mind had been completely occupied with something else, which felt great. It was sort of a mental palate cleanser.

During this National Day holiday I took a short trip to Nanchang. Why? Just because I’d never been there before. I’ve always been aware of it because my friend Swallow comes from there, so it’d always been in the back of my mind.

At first I didn’t like it very much — it seemed dirty and noisy. That was partly because of my hotel, though — the room looked out onto a busy street, and there was constant honking. For the next night I moved somewhere else where I had some more quiet, and even though the city was still noisy, and still dirty (maybe one of the dirtiest ones I’ve seen in China), I enjoyed myself a lot more and had a better impression of the city. I found things here were more affordable, mostly aimed at the middle-class and lower-middle-class buyer, rather than being so chi-chi, like they are in Shanghai. I also noticed the huge number of young people. It’s like Shenzhen in that regard, but maybe it was more pronounced. Maybe the average age there was 25? It was definitely under thirty. Tons and tons of little kids too.

I had one disappointment there in that I meant to go out to see an ancient village named Luotiancun. I started out too late, unfortunately. I had thought I’d get there in an hour and a half, but three hours later, I still hadn’t arrived. The woman from the mini-bus company told me that if by the time I arrived there would be no way to come back, and since there was no hotel, I’d have to ask a farmer if I could sleep in his house. Since I was alone, I didn’t think that was a good idea, so I went back. I didn’t want to repeat the nearly six-hour trip the next day, so I didn’t end up seeing the village at all.

I did have a nice time, however. I relaxed, walked around and shopped. I had some cotton candy and bought a skirt and a shirt. In the end, despite the air pollution and tons of car horns, I liked the city and was glad I visited.

This was at the back gate of the Jinan mosque. The people there were very friendly, although I couldn’t go so far in to look around because I was wearing a tee-shirt and no hat. A little down the street I came upon the ladies’ mosque. I’d actually never seen one before. A nice woman chatted with me for a long time, and let me go into the worship hall to look around (although that is usually not allowed). She kept encouraging me to covert. She told me that the woman’s mosque was presided over by a female imam, and later I realized it might have been her, because she knew so much about the religion and said she had been to Saudi Arabia twice. For some reason, I didn’t take a picture of the building, which is a shame. It was newer and more “Middle Eastern” looking than the men’s.