First off, feet, frustrations.
Welcome to the first post! As usual, I’m torn between wanting total anonymity and to communicate with people! But I’m doing this anyway.
I’m just sitting here in Shanghai with a broken foot. Those of you who know me have heard all about this — my lament about my cracked bone, and my indignation about the circumstances. I’ve complained about it in other places too, for instance, on an ESL site:
Some of you are familiar with the saga of my broken foot. I was walking along on my campus, carrying a big box, when I tripped over a curb and went sprawling over onto the sidewalk. Now, the first thing I see when I look up from the pavement is this white guy standing there like ten yards away, ignoring me. Or maybe he didn’t hear the loud thud and see the person laying on the sidewalk. I was caught between yelling at him for not helping me, and sneaking away in embarrassment about my clumsiness. As it was, I got home and limped home, on what turned out to be a foot with a fractured bone.
So my foot’s in a cast, and I’m alternating with using a wheelchair and crutches. I was invited to this dinner for national day, and b/c the trip back from the hospital, where I was getting checked, took so long, the taxi driver just drops me off at the hotel where the dinner is. I have to go partway on crutches, and THEN it turns out the dinner is on the third floor, and there’s no elevator. The thing is, that as I hobbled there, and stood helplessly at the foot of the stairs, these big beefy American guys (with big butts, I may add), just walked on past me, without looking at me, or offering any help whatsoever. What’s up with that? I’d think they’d assume I was another foreign student, if not a teacher, and at least make
some sort of comment, like, “Bummer about the foot. Want any help?” At Shenzhen U., the foreign students used to talk to me (granted, they were Korean and Russian, not American), and we used to exchange pleasantries even though we couldn’t understand each other very well. What’s with these American guys? Are they just d-ckheads? I wanted to really yell at them, like, “Hello? Could you f-ing help me?” I’m pretty mamby-pamby, and it’s rare for me to get so pissed off. In the end, a Korean student I never saw before carried me up the stairs on
his back, and then a Russian guy carried me down, and to my dorm! What’s wrong with these people? Are they just a$$es? It might be weird to help a random person in a public place, but I’m right inside the school. Are the foreign students in Shanghai generally jerks, or does ECNU have an unusual number? (And this whole thing is ironic, in that I remember a teacher here complained that ECNU foreign students were showing up on his campus to prosletyze to the students!) Or do foreign students think teachers are afflicted with scabies or some other transmittable malady, so they steer clear of us? Don’t they have any manners?One thing is for sure, though, that dude who ignored me when I fell down better look out. If I ever see him again I’ll really tell him something, and maybe swat him with my crutch.
So, I’ve had my foot in a cast for almost four weeks, and I haven’t been able to go out. My friend Curtis was supposed to come visit, but then he got some stomach thing and couldn’t come. That was a big disappointment. I’ve just been sitting here, going on line, working a little on my socialist screenplay, and stuff like that.
The only other thing worth mentioning is that last night I had an interesting dream. It turned out to be about some sort of cataclysm. In the end, after I woke up, it seemed that the events fell into some sort of Biblical pattern for doomsday. The first sign: I forgot, because it didn’t seem significant at the time. It wasn’t part of a pattern yet. The second sign: The air was full of birds, swallows, flying frantically from something. The third sign: The earth shifted and the walls of buildings buckled. The fourth sign: Lightning strikes. The fifth sign: Ice. The sixth sign: Illness. After that, we were all waiting, in a school lounge, some other teachers and I, to see what would happen. The woman next to me was writing something that involved the phrase, “John Alton, of the BBC.” Then the phone rang and woke me up before I could find out what happened next! It was like a phone call from the Man of Porlock! The dream was really scary, and I still feel creeped out after writing it down, like it’s unlucky or something. Then I remembered that I’d watched part of Angels in America before going to bed and maybe that’s were some of the themes came from. I hate it when my dreams are derivative!