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I guess the crackdown on pirated CDs is over because all the 4AD records I was wanting (the ones I mentioned in the post No Death Metal for Me) suddenly reappeared. I got another Cocteau Twins album. I’ve noticed that even though I haven’t heard their songs since like 1988, as soon as one plays I feel like I’ve been hearing it all the time. The CD I just got has the song “Sugar Hiccups,” which keeps going through my head, but with the words rubber nipples instead. I keep hearing, “Rubber nipples in stereo, rubber nipples.”

There have been a couple of huge rainstorms in the last few days. Yesterday I looked out the window at around 4:00 pm, and it looked like it was about 7:30! When the rain started I took a few pictures that I’ll put up on Flickr soon.

US to Make Plutonium for “Secret Missions.”
This is a story that just came out from Reuters. Is the US one of the dumbest countries in the world today? Is everyone in the government going crazy?

I’ve been rethinking my summer plans. I may want to go home for the summer, or at least for a few weeks of it. I haven’t found a summer job yet, partly because of my lack of enthusiasm for getting one. I feel burnt out, despite doing almost nothing all the time. Maybe I’m just sick of China, or at least of Shanghai. This year has been a rough ride for me, what with breaking my foot, not saving enough money, and having to try to make new friends. It turns out the school won’t just give me the plane ticket money, like someone else said, I have tp apply for it. If I do go home, they’ll pay for my plane ticket there and back, and my friend Evelyn’s dad said he’d come and pick me up, to take me on a trip to Indiana. That’d be nice. It’d also be great to see Adam, and even to see Bart and Christy — although I may not have the money to do that. *Sigh!* I’m feeling sort of discouraged right now!

Today I had a conversation with an old lady who had six teeth. There were four on top, and two on the bottom. Because the two on the bottom were evenly spaced and very long, the whole time I was talking to her I kept thinking about how they looked like tusks.

I went back to the computer I’d used to send “Naked Came the Mountie,” an attempt at mountie porn, to a friend of mine, and I found it was on the list of recent document! I think that means anyone who had used the computer after me could have accessed it! Crap! I should have thought of that! I really need to get my computer fixed so I can send that kind of stuff from home!

I was just sitting back, thinking of how I’m done with work for the night, when it dawned on my I actually haven’t planned anything to do in class tomorrow. That’s an odd thing to overlook!

If you read this, please send me your e-mail, so I can send you a link to my Flickr account!

Lately I’ve felt migrainey, and thought if I went to get a massage it would help. (It usually does.) I brought my woodlock oil for the masseuse to use. Last time I got an oil massage from No. 5, the masseuse, I had to pull up my shirt and undo my bra so he could get at my back better. This time, not only did he do that, but pulled my pants down partway and started massaging my butt. Now, since my sciatic nerve hurts, I really did need that, but it felt strange to have a man pulling down my pants and underclothes and kneading my buttocks. Even my butt crack was exposed. On one hand, I trust No. 5, on the other hand, I felt a like I should keep alert. At one, he got up on the massage table and used his knee on the small of my back. I peeped around occasionally to see if everything was kosher, and pondered what to say if things started feeling creepy. In the end, everything was OK, though. He didn’t do anything out of bounds.

(Today I’m having my period.)

The people I was hanging around with during the conference were coughing a lot, and I was hoping I wouldn’t catch whatever they had. I did catch it, though. Now I have a little fever, a sore throat, a stuffed-up nose, and a cough. Oh well.

I went to the conference, and it was pretty fun. In fact, I’m convinced I could make decent conference presentations. I’m thinking that if I had gone to a conference or two when I was in grad school, I would have gotten a confidence in what I was doing, and not felt so confused. If only I had had a decent advisor who had let me know that!

I made friends with some of the participants, Jessica Langer, Susan Jacobson, and Lara Vanderstaay among them. We hung out around Shanghai post-conference, which was really great, because usually I have nobody to do stuff with. We went to Duo Lun Cultural Street, the silk market, the pearl market, and the Old Jazz Bar at the Peace Hotel.

As for the presentations themselves, Ackbar Abbas didn’t show up for some reason. There was a really interesting lecture on film tie-ins and their profitability by Robert Allen. One presenter, who will go unnamed, consistently went way over time limit (15 minutes the first time, at least five the second time). I also reconnected with Neepa Majumdar, who was my Introduction to Film teacher back in the day (as they say), and saw Yingjin Zhang (and finally found out what his name means), who was not as chirpy as he used to be.

I’ll go back and take a look at the schedule, and mention a few presentations I particularly liked, a bit later. I do remember Gary Bettinson’s paper on Wang Kar-Wai, and ________ Conroy’s presentation about a New Zealand film about a Chinese settler.

I’m going to attend a conference on Chinese film tomorrow. It’s the first time I ever went to one of these. I’m going just as a listener, to hear what’s going on. I’m a bit nervous, because I don’t know what do say or how to act. Plus I’m not an expert or anything. There are a lot of films I haven’t seen. I’ve watched a few in preparation for the conference, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish Devils on the Doorstep or The Little Chinese Seamstress, because both of the discs I got have problems.

I’m surrounded by deaf people “yelling” in sign language! It’s interesting. I feel kind of rude writing this when they’re around me, actually, as if I’m talking about them “behind their backs.”

I was invited to some sort of get-together tonight but I decided to stay home, largely because the annoying Israeli guy was there. Really, he’s more maddening than annoying. If you say anything he disagrees with he turns all red in the face and says things like, “Only a bad person would say that.” He never has any factual information to argue against you with — he just says you’re a bad person or something. I don’t need to listen to that crap.

Actually, I’m a bit tired of the guy giving the party too. He’s another teacher at my school, and damn, he really likes the sound of his own voice. He really won’t shut up.

It seems the more I’m around other people lately, the more critical I feel of them.

because it could get on line with the new modem my student gave me. It actually worked when he was there. As soon as he left, though, I couldn’t link to any pages. Maybe the internet is just really slow?

Today in my little “xiao qu” (sort of like a little, walled-in apartment complex), I ran into this really old guy who wanted me to sit down and talk with him. I did, and then noticed his fly was open. I felt kind of weird about that at first. Then we were joined by another old guy, whose fly was open too. The first guy kind of chatted with me about nothing while the other looked on. From time to time he slapped me on the arm jovially. It was strange, but maybe in Shanghai opening up your fly is some sort of normal way to beat the heat.

Oh — a nicer thing happened earlier today. Before my ten o’clock class, I heard a bird chirping loudly and suspected it was caught somewhere in the building. I was right. There was a little bird that had flown down and somehow had gotten trapped behind this pane of glass of a window that extended down below floor level. It couldn’t figure out how to get out and kept chirping and banging against the window. My students and I tried to get it out, and couldn’t. The cleaning lady told us she’d ask her husband to do something about it, but when we came out of class we found out she’d forgotten. Anyway, we looked for him again, and he hunted down a thin bamboo poll, which he used to kind of squish the bird against the wall and drag it up (not to comfortable for the bird, of course, but it did the trick). He couldn’t get the bird all the way up, though, and it turned out I was the only person with fingers long and thin enough to reach in, grab the bird, and pull it the rest of the way up. Then we took it outside and let it go. It was a young bird, and everyone was excited to see it fly away. One of the students who helped in this whole exercise was the crossword girl. Hopefully we will get along better after this.

Recently I found this DVD store near where I get my massages has an upstairs section where they had all sorts of weird music I wouldn’t expect to find in China. There was a ton of death metal, for instance Sopor Aeternus, Dying Fetus and Lachrymosa. They also had a huge assortment of 4AD bands — Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, etc. Really, I was excited by the latter. The last couple of times I’d gone there, I’d bought a few, hoping to catch up on all the records I wanted as a teenager but could neither find nor afford. I went there today, and everything was gone! I was bitterly disappointed! I’d brought extra money with me and everything. I asked a saleslady about it, and she was vague about why the stuff was gone. In fact, the whole store had gone through an overhaul. There was almost nothing there, when the store had been fully stocked like four days ago. I had even chatted with a guy who worked there, expressing my enthusiasm for the music stocked in the upstrairs room. Strange!