mf.rox

Because something was wrong with the airplane, my mom’s flight was delayed by one day. So, she’d not arriving until tomorrow night.

Today, just outside of the front gate of my university, I saw a fresh-faced young man selling vibrators. He had his hands full of them, with all the different little accessories on them. They were the shortish type that look innocent, unless you put the phallic accessory on. There were also a bunch that looked like bugs, with vibrating feet.

I wanted to know if he knew what they were, so I went up and asked him. He said he didn’t, just that he had bought them from some guy and was selling them. I said they were “adult toys,” but he protested that they were for muscle massage, and demonstrated on my shoulder. I told him you could use them to massage other places as well, and asked him what the one with the penile-looking attachment looked like. Suddenly, his face fell, and he was totally crestfallen. He really looked like he was going to cry. He said, “Well, I can’t sell them now,” but them back into his bag, and walked away.

I felt really guilty! I made the guy miserable and screwed up his business. I was just trying to tease him! Later on I went back to look for him, thinking I could make it better by buying some of the obvious-looking ones (which I guess would make good Christmas presents), but I couldn’t find him anywhere.

Later, when I told my neighbor about this, he agreed that I should have minded my own business. Ah well.

Aaaaagh! I feel very nervous about it!

I learned about this bizarre, obscure piece of history on a documentary I saw the other night. I stumbled across the program on TV, and initially thought it was a joke because the whole story sounded so strange. On a January day in 1919, a huge, poorly-designed storage tank full of molasses suddenly burst, sending a 20-foot high wave of the thick brown goop crashing through a mixed residential and industrial area. It came with so much force that whole houses were swept off their foundations. Buildings collapsed, crushing people, and other people were swept away. Victims tried to swim in it, but it was too thick, and they drowned. People died, coated in molasses, some of them because the wave had forced it down their throats, suffocating them. In all, 21 people died, with many more injured.

Very creepy.

I just got an e-mail inviting me to come to a UN AIDS conference. It was signed Kofi Annan, and while I was reflecting on how bizarre this piece of spam was, and why I would get spam from the UN, I noticed other things, like how my airplane ticket would be free, my visa would be free, and I’d be given free anti-retrovirus vaccines (?!?). Reading down, I found that the e-mail was written by a “Mr. Smith Roger.” I assume this spam is a bizarre way to phish people.

I saw a guy today wearing a shirt that said FUCKHEAD.

I recently heard about this Japanese film called HELL BOY. It’s about this woman whose son dies, and she asks someone to bring him back to life. Unfortunately, she waits a bit too long, and he comes back all decomposed and zombielike. It’s a horror film, but I think it has more possibilities than that. I can see it being a weirdly poignant animae from the point of view of the boy, wistful, big-eyed and decomposing. He’s falling to pieces, but is that so wrong?!? He needs love too! Or, to exploit the comedy angle, it could be an exuberant musical comedy called THAT ROTTEN KID.

I got really mad about something today. Here’s a letter I sent to someone about it, with a few strategic words removed:

Subject: Behavior of _________ ________ (foreign cultural organization I work for part-time) workers, ECNU, Saturday.

Dear ______,

I wish you would have a talk with the people who came to ECNU to administer/invigilate the _____ test this Saturday, and remind them that their behavior reflects on both the _______ _______ and on other foreigners in general. As you know, it was VERY hot today, and I was standing in front of ECNU, waiting for a taxi when two people I recognized from the _______ _______ approached. They seemed to think because they were foreign they didn’t have to wait and could grab a cab ahead of people who had already been there waiting for some time. There wasn’t a line, but it’s easy to take a look around, notice who came ahead of you, and let that person take a cab first. I had been waiting for about twenty-five minutes, and there was a young girl who had been there before me. The young man tried to take that girl’s cab. I told him he had no right to do it, and then he tried to take the next taxi, which should have been mine. Needless to say I stopped him from that too. He was angry, but I feel I was in the right. I don’t have any patience with this “foreigners go first” mentality, and I’m sure it’s something the _______ _______ doesn’t condone either. I might also add that if the people had just come from administering the test, some of the people they were jumping in front of may have been students fresh from the exam, who could recognize them as _______ _______ representatives.
I just wanted to let you know about this.

MF

I should have mentioned that the person who gave Dominic a new lease on life was Jenny B. (now Jenny H.), who adopted him through the Bloomington animal shelter. I was initially horrified at the idea of having him in the house, and originally decided to try to walk/train him a little to get over my fear.

I heard yesterday that Dominic the dog came down with adrenal cancer, and is no longer living. Ah! It’s sad. He was a great dog, much admired by people who knew him. He was a humble guy who got a bad start in life (perpetually chained to a tree, apparently, and used by someone for BB-gun target practice). Nonetheless, he was a very gentle dog who loved people. I trained him to walk nicely, sit, lay down, and not enter roads without permission the summer between my first and second years of graduate school. I also trained him not to jump on people, since he was so large he would have knocked almost anybody over. He always remembered me, and was really happy and excited whenever he saw me. When I went to visit Jenny B. in Cincinatti, Dominic smelled me while I was still outside, got excited, and started barking and howling.

Poor guy! I’m going to post a picture of him on Flickr to memorialize him and let everyone admire him.

I got a package of One Piece trading cards today, and I noticed that they were produced by a company called CardAssMaster. Only in Japan! It’s a great name!

In other news:

I finally had to knuckle under and eat duck tongue. I was at a party hosted by a Chinese professor, and another person said I ought to eat some because it is so expensive. It was pretty gross, though. Not as soft as the equally disgusting cow tongue — duck ones are gristly and have these bony things in them.

I saw my third weasel in as many weeks tonight. This one was also in my qiao qu, but looked smaller than the one I saw a while ago.

Here’s a kind of person who is on my poop list: The kind of person who thinks it’s funny to suddenly shout out to a dog as you walk by with it. Today I was walking ALiSi, and some woman called her, then tried to slap her away when she came nearer. That resulted in the dog making this weird zig-zag, with me tripping over the top of her, and narrowly missing falling down hard. Once back in Bloomington when I was walking Dominic, some doof driving by in the far lane of the road called him. He took off at a run, dragging both of us partway into the road, where we were lucky to miss being hit by an oncoming car. Why do people think that kind of thing is funny?

In other news, my mood seems better. I was really upset about the hurricane and the inept response to it. Stephanie Haines sent me a nice note, which cheered me up.

I did notice that the list for the best countries in the world to live in has come out. I saw places 1 - 9, and noticed the US wasn’t anywhere on the list. Norway was number one, and then there was Iceland, Australia, Luxembourg, and Canada.

I feel that nothing I do creatively is worthwhile. For example, I was working on my screenplay, but then I was thinking that nobody will ever see it, because even if I finish it, I’ll be scared to show it to anybody. Then, I decided to abandon the mountie story because it is to embarrassing to me and I’ll never be able to finish it. Then I was worrying that I really shouldn’t be so scared and confused about what to do with my stories, that really maybe they aren’t so strange after all, and they could find an audience — I’m just assuming they can’t or I think they can’t because I don’t know about the publishing options there are.

and yet they really bother me.

There are all these things lately, like the fact that while I’ve sent a lot of people presents, barely anyone has sent me anything. Nobody calls me, either. Most people don’t know my number here, but nobody asks for it.

I’ve just been feeling down lately. In particular, my temper was really bad today. It seems like lots of stuff was happening more slowly than normal. Another teacher and I ordered lunch at a restaurant, and it didn’t come for 45 minutes. We left. I went to get a hair cut, which took forever, and looks awful. I have a foreign teachers’ dinner tomorrow, and I don’t know what I’ll do for that.

Well, it’s not that I feel isolated in general, but I am really upset about this whole hurricane thing, and would like to have a like-minded English-speaking person to rant and rave about it with. I want to talk about how inept the government is. I want to speculate how this will affect American culture or politics, or if it will affect it at all.

Is my upset just masturbatory, since I can’t affect the situation, and have no real connection to NO other than Bart and Christy being there, and hearing about NO through them? Of course, that makes everything more concete, because I can think of their neighbors whose photos I’ve seen on Bart’s blog, and because of what Christy wrote about her students.

Ah, I’m getting a bit lightheaded and can’t make sense here. I’d better go eat dinner.

Last night at like one a.m. I was struck by all this anxiety. I started worrying about money, and what to do with it. Now that I’ve saved some money, should I send it to my bank account in the US, or will the US economy go downhill because of the hurricane, forcing the dollar to fall in value? Should I invest in a foreign currency? I was thinking of the Euro before, but now it sounds like a risky bet. It’s had some setback too. Jessica suggested the British Pound. Is is really still strong, after the advent of the Euro? She said it’s pretty stable. Then again, Curtis suggested that in the future, the RMB may be the currency to have. But what will happen with the deregulating of the banking industry, the Three Gorges project (and its success or failure), and the fact that there’s nothing like the FDIC insuring deposits in China? I’m thinking I should talk to some British Council people on Monday on their thoughts about the pound vs. the Euro.

I’ve also been upset and freaked out about the New Orleans situation, especially the looting and things like attacking hospitals. Why are people so bad? I’d like to have people around I can talk this out with.

It’s all astonishing, the incompetence of the government and everything. Surely this event was foreseeable. In Taiwan and the Mainland, 250,000 people were evacuated by the government before hurricane Talim stuck. Was there any sort of public evacuation effort in Louisiana?

The weather is freaking me out too. We just had a typhoon here (Matsa) about two weeks ago, and we’re already having another one (Talim). It seems that the weather is going crazy. I remember B and XY went through another hurricane or big storm right before this one too. Here in China, our region’s “peach rains” went missing, which will have a big affect on agriculture, it snowed in Nanjing like a month ago, when it is usually like 40 Celsius, this winter Shanghai had its first snows in nearly ten years, and the last fall I was in Shenzhen, the whole three-week rainy season went missing.

It seems like things are deteriorating.

I keep thinking, as I have for a few years now, that America is in a downward trend. I think is about 15 years, the country will realize, with a state of shock, how bad things have gotten. It seems like there is no “national aim” or “national ambition” that everyone is working toward. At least China, with all the problems it has, is aiming to build up, modernize the country, and improve people’s living standard. The US doesn’t have any sort of “mission statement” right now. It’s like corporate profits and heterosexuality are the highest values to pursue in America. Even European countries, or Canada, could state their country has a mission, with regard to the welfare and living standards of people living within their borders, but I don’t think the US could say that at all. The US doesn’t take good care of kids, people don’t value education, a lot of people seem to be oppressing themselves through the use of drugs and alcohol (even if all discrimination would disappear, that wouldn’t help someone who is addicted to drugs). The US seems wrapped up in this weird, punitive, religious-fundamentalist mindset I don’t understand … I think the US is going down, and in the future, will cease to be a desirable place to live.

I just read that uniformed policemen and firemen are taking part in looting in New Orleans. Some firemen even used a firetruck to cart stuff away.

It’s too bizarre. How could someone live with themselves after doing that kind of thing?