I just turned in my grades for my last semester at ECNU. It feels strange. I even feel a little sentimental. I was telling Curtis that I think I will really miss my old multimedia classroom, where I’ve taught my film class for the past two years. Maybe I realy will take a picture of it, like he suggested.
Oh, I’m sleepy now … more later.
I went to Huadong Hospital early this morning to get my heart monitor. Actually, I was pretty excited about it. I wondered if being all wired up would give my a legitimate claim to calling myself a cyborg. I was also wondered if I could get some cool pictures of the little machine.
Well, to be honest, to be a cyborg isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, it’s been itchy. First the doctor abraded my chest skin with this little emory-board like thing, put the sticky sensors on, and taped this array of cables to my stomach. Then all of that was attached to a little thing the size of a Walkman that’s strapped around my waist. The sensors and the tape are both totally itchy and drove me crazy for several hours. I’m not looking forward to getting them pulled off tomorrow, either.
Also, I have been having trouble getting good pictures of my apparatus. The problem is that it is too close to my breasts, and I don’t want to take some accidental porn pictures of myself. Oh, alas!
Lastly, I’ve been taking a man-man-lai, meaning a bit by bit approach to moving. I’ve been spending an hour or two a day each month for the past few months, rather than panic a lot at the end. In one way, that’s good. However, the down side is that it stretches out to process into something really long, so I get totally sick of what I’m doing. I did this with my grad school applications too.
An article Sherry passed on to me …
Sworn to Virginity and Living as Men in Albania
Actually, I’ve heard of this before, but I think it was in Georgia (Former Soviet Georgia, not yee haw! Georgia).
Tensions rise between Tibetans, Chinese Muslims
It’s interesting that the old “____________s are cannibals” story shows up in this conflict too.
My digital camera has gotten older and not so sharp anymore, so I’ve been thinking about buying a new one. I’ve been worrying for some time now about what kind to buy. Finally I thought, ‘I’ve liked my Konica-Minolta Dimage so much I’ll just get a newer version with more megapixels.’ Well, to my astonishment and distress, J just told me yesterday that Konica-Minolta has totally stopped making cameras. What to do now?
A lot of the pictures I like on Flickr are taken either with a big Pentax or a big Cannon. I don’t want a big, unwieldy camera, though. I want a little, very sharp one I can carry in my bag all the time. Also, I never have any luck with Canons — I’ve never had a Canon product that worked correctly for more than two months.
So, it’s back to the drawing board. Maybe I’ll look at Sony — they’ve taken over K-M’s photo division, or Ricoh, or Pentax. But this is a big bummer for me.
It’s funny that I talked about a strange conflict I got in several years ago when I was having lunch with J, Hoiyan and Boby today, and then B wrote something on his blog that reminded me of the same thing.
It was a time that I nearly got into a fight with this girl, partly because the guy she was with did something rude, and partly because of my bad Chinese. It was in a small department store in Shenzhen. There were two people, a guy and a girl, selling shoe polish. They asked me if I wanted to try it, and I said no. Then the guy squeezed some out of the tube and flicked it onto my shoe, trying to FORCE me to try it, I guess. I was pissed off, took off my shoe, and wiped it on his pants. They both got really mad, and the girl said, “He didn’t want that on his pants!” and I said, “I didn’t want it on my shoes!” She started arguing with me, and I said to her, “You have no culture!” Actually, I’d meant to say she was rude, but I trying to work out how to say it in my mind, I said she had no culture instead, which is MUCH more insulting. She freaked out and wanted to fight me! I slipped out when someone restrained her.
I’ve got just over one month until I move. I’m on the way to being ready, although I still feel I have an overwhelming amount of stuff to deal with. I’m trying to prepare bit by bit — I’d say I spend at least an hour every day going through or packing stuff. I’d rather do that than panic at the last minute.
I’ve gotten rid of a lot of stuff - over 20 kilos of papers, I believe, plus at least fifty clothing items. I also plan to give away a lot of stuff, like bedsheets and towels. I’ve also weeded quite a few things out of my DVD and book collections. Still, I feel like I have a massive amount of stuff. I’ve mailed a little over two hundred pounds of stuff home already.
I just look a look out my back window and saw a little kid taking a crap on the communal patio!
In another belated piece of news, I want to mention that Bartender J, Day and Little J came to visit a couple weeks ago. They came accompanying the Rocky Mountain Ballet Theater, who were touring China, so that J could write articles about it for his local newspaper. Actually, it was really exciting because I have barely had any old friends come here because of the cost and distance. It was great to meet up with them, or I should say to meet two of them for the first time. I totally forgot I had never met Day before because I had seen her on ROX, so I felt like I knew her. I think I launched into talking about various stuff with her forgetting that she had never met me before. Little J was cute, but a bit cranky because he had an eye infection. Chinese people were going crazy over him through the whole trip, as well as telling J and Day to make sure he wore more clothes. Bartender J was doing very well, considering that he had gotten a call from his mother earlier in the day saying his father had passed away. His dad had suffered from stomach cancer for some time, and had taken a serious turn for the worse after J had come to China. We used the trip to Jade Buddha Temple as an opportunity to burn $1,000 in ghost money for J’s dad, who he said would be glad to get poker money in heaven.
An overview of the story, from Danwei:
Well, why not, I guess?
Japan’s Blooming Sex Niche: Elder Porn
(Originally seen on both Japundit and Japan Probe.)
Since coming to China, I’ve been building up this cache of baby clothes. It’s not big or anything, I’ve just picked up a few things here and there that I really, really liked and I’d want my baby to wear if I had one.
Every once in a while, like when a friend is going to have a baby, and now that I am going to move, I wonder if I should get rid of this stuff. They would make great baby gifts, or I could donate them someplace.
I mean, should I be realistic? There is no way I will have a baby in the near future, and if I don’t have one soon, I never will, no matter how much I would like to. Maybe I should either get rid of this stuff or try harder to meet somebody.
Or, on a superstitious note, maybe I should get rid of this stuff, and it would give me luck in finding someone. You know, there’s that old “if you have it, you don’t need it, and once you get rid of it you’ll wish you still had it” thing.
What do you think I should do?
Student teacher: Guys! Seriously! Was the Underground Railroad an actual train?
7th graders: No.
Student teacher: Then why did you all circle “true” for number 8: “The Underground Railroad ran on coal”?
–University Neighborhood Middle School
(From www.overheardinnewyork.com)
This man was taking a nap near my house the other day. He was renovating one of the upstairs apartments, and decided to take a snooze during a free moment.
I haven’t posted many details of my daily life here recently. I’ve been too preoccupied with the earthquake, moving, and other stuff that I’ve been doing. So finally I’m going to write about some of the stuff I’ve been doing lately.
LIFE AT THE POLICE STATION
I got a phone call from the local policeman a couple weeks ago saying I had to come in and show him my alien registration certificate. (Foreigners have to register with the police here whenever they move to a new location.) I thought, hey, no problem, and gathered together what I thought were the right documents and headed on over. Well, it turned out I had brought the wrong stuff. Not only that, but the policeman said there was no record of my ever having registered. I knew this was wrong, since I had visited the station with the woman from the rental agency. Thinking hard, I remembered that I had been given a blue and a pink paper, which I had then given to my school’s foreign office for safekeeping. Calling the foreign office, it turns out they had no idea what I was talking about. Unfortunately, the previous office head had left abruptly, not explaining to the present people where she had put some of her files. I insisted they looked more carefully, but they said they could find nothing. I told this to the policeman, and he told me my fine could be really big, because I had been unregistered for like 3 1/2 years. Luckily the woman from the rental agency backed me up and said she had come with me, but of course she did not have the paper I needed. This all went on and on. I talked to the policeman for like an hour, then the woman from the foreign office came and talked to the policeman with me for like two hours, they prepared a statement I had to come in and sign later, etc. etc. At every step of the process things kept going wrong, though. When I came in to sign the statement, I got panicky because I could not read it very well, and would not sign until I got a translator. I had to call a girl I know named Karen to come over and help me. I had to pay a five hundred renminbi fine, but I could only pay it at one bank, which turned out to be closed the day I went there, even though most other banks are open on Saturday. I had to go back the next day, but I think I brought something wrong again, so I had to go home, get different stuff and try again. I think in total I spent five or six hours in the police station, over about a week.
Oh! One thing that it typical is that there is actually a new regulation that whenever you leave the country and come back again, even to the same address, you need to register again at the station. But, it turns out nobody knew about this. Even the foreign office lady had no idea. So, this gives the police leeway to fine a lot of people, but it was good for me, because I had left China the year before. So, instead of being fined for 3 1/2 years, I was only fined for like nine months.
I did see some interesting things at the police station while I was there. It seems the cops do a lot of negotiations to calm people down, rather than laying down the law like American policemen do. Even the officer I was talking to said that Chinese law is flexible, and a lot of things depend on the discretion of the officer. On the night when I came to sign the paper, there was this middle-aged Shanghainese lady yelling and screaming at this young girl. I assumed it was some sort of family problem, like the mom was angry at her wayward daughter. I couldn’t imagine getting that worked up over a stranger. The only other thing I could guess was that maybe the young girl was an ayi, and the older woman was an employer who thought she’d stolen something. Well, eventually they moved the girl back into a sitting area where I was waiting, because they older woman was so enraged. Eventually, the policeman came back and said to girl, “That woman is kind of psychotic.” Then the girl started giving her side of the story. She said the older woman was a neighbor. She was super neurotic, didn’t have a job, and was always making some sort of trouble. She often argued with her husband and even beat him up sometimes. It turns out she had become obsessed with this girl. She would cook all sorts of food, then knock on the door and barge in when it was open, insisting the girl eat the food she had prepared. It was almost impossible to get the woman to leave. She had also accosted the girl on the landing in front of her apartment, embracing her and saying sexual things to her, and would not let her go. The girl said she ruined a sweater trying to pull out of the woman’s grasp. The reason they were in the police station that night was because of a strange incident. It was hard for me to understand fully, but what it sounded like was that the girl went out on her balcony. The woman came out onto hers and said she wanted to do the girl’s laundry. She may have even tried to take some articles of the girl’s clothes that were hanging up to wash them. However, the girl refused, saying she could wash her things herself. The older woman became enraged, and called the police! The girl told the policeman that she and her roommates were all going to move in about three days because they just could not stand this woman anymore. They were even scared to answer the door because of her. The policeman told the girl he knew it wasn’t her fault and just do her best to keep out of he woman’s way until she was able to move.
Sometimes I wonder if in China women retire too early (I forgot if it is 50 or 55), and if that is a big mistake because they get bored and neurotic. I think that it MY neighbor’s problem – I mean the neighbor who is always yelling at her son.
From a set of 5.12 Earthquake-related comics by Coco Wang. Her strips also tell the story of a dog who saved several policemen’s lives, a teacher who died protecting his students, tragic Chen Jian, and “Coke boy.”
SPACE AMOEBA is my new favorite movie, and I still haven’t see it yet! I found the trailer on the DVD of another film.
Well! I attended a fundraiser Saturday to help victims of the Sichuan earthquake, and it turns out they raised 4,360 yuan! I brought several items, and while I can’t say how much they all went for, one tea set I brought along went for 200 RMB. All that money will go to buy school supplies for kids whose schools and houses were destroyed.
In other news, for some reason I’m having trouble commenting on other people’s blogs. So far, I’ve tried to send stuff to Editor B’s and J’s, but they comments havent’ shown up.
Also, I was excited to have visitors last week. J and Day and Little J came to Shanghai with the Rocky Mountain Ballet troupe. We were able to hang out together several times. I’ll (probably) write more about it later.
