Yuan Yuan called from her tour yesterday, and gave me an earful of righteousness about her uncultured clients who throw their garbage on the ground whenever they happened to be disposed to dispose of it, regardless of whether there's a trash can within 2 light years or 2 feet of them. All right, you got me, the 2 light years case wasn't actually tested using the scientific method.
Whenever this kind of thing happens, I feel as giddy as gossip girl who just got back to New York and first thing she sees when she opens the newspaper is the rumor she started while vacationing on Alpha Centauri B. Yuan Yuan is a human sponge for things I say, behaviors I exhibit, opinions I bray. She's like a gravitational vortex addicted to the nonsense that's accumulated in my star system. And of course, to her, they're all historical documents.
When I first met Yuan Yuan, I spent a good 3 months scolding her for throwing her trash on the ground of the street. The change didn't come naturally to her, though it wasn't for lack of trying: we would be riding home on our bike, her sitting behind me on the little platform behind the seat, and she would lean out, forcing me to turn the bike in that direction, and then she would attempt to slam dunk whatever trash she magically produced during the last 5 minutes, into the nearest trash can. More often than not, I would hear "damn, that was so close! Oh well, we tried our best." I would then give her mixed signals by not stopping to force her to clean it up.
It's been years now, and I still can't say she's broken the habit completely. But the righteousness about other people doing is now completely Pavlovian for her. I can't decide if this is an upgrade or a downgrade.
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Friday, August 9, 2013
End of an era
Two 30-day trials are ending today: being vegetarian and blogging every day. That means tomorrow I can have a healthy KFC lunch and not tell a soul about it. The exercise and sugar-nazi trial are still in full swing, and the stretching trial died an inglorious death the same day I said we were going to start it up again. Coincidence? Morpheus said it's providence. Fasting on 3 apples a day once a week might as well become a trial since I've already done 1/4 of it. Maybe I'll change the fruit to chocolate bars.
I started a new book yesterday, the Black Prism. I got roughly five sentences in before I fell asleep so I'll be seeing them again tonight. The Mote in God's Eye has gotten flushed down the toilet. The Dresden Files got translated to Afrikaans and then the 6 million original English copies died in a tragic gasoline fight accident. I'm not about to learn Afrikaans just so I can finish that book. Another book got dumped, I forget its name but the relief I'm feeling didn't just come out of nowhere. Of the last 4-5 books I started, only Trash, Sex, Magic is still hanging in there. Angry fans litter the streets, don't stay out past curfew.
I started a new book yesterday, the Black Prism. I got roughly five sentences in before I fell asleep so I'll be seeing them again tonight. The Mote in God's Eye has gotten flushed down the toilet. The Dresden Files got translated to Afrikaans and then the 6 million original English copies died in a tragic gasoline fight accident. I'm not about to learn Afrikaans just so I can finish that book. Another book got dumped, I forget its name but the relief I'm feeling didn't just come out of nowhere. Of the last 4-5 books I started, only Trash, Sex, Magic is still hanging in there. Angry fans litter the streets, don't stay out past curfew.
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Tomato and Egg and Urbien
Yuan Yuan is off to Hangzhou for the next 10 days, on two back-to-back tours. Daddy's all alone at home putting the bread on the table, where it's currently growing mold. Tradition. Can't live with it, can't get moldy bread without it.
My roommate, a guy who works in finance, was asking me today what kind of stuff I work on. After completely confusing him with specifics he couldn't possibly understand without a basic background in Web technologies, I resorted to my best friend, the analogy. The analogy is a great device for when you've lost that caring feeling, when more important than "do they understand you" is "do they think you're working on some complicated shit." I'm a seasoned veteran of terrible analogies, and so I hit him right in the face with a tomato an egg parable. Try to imagine the following in Mandarin Chinese, the language it was first heard in.
Once there was a farmer, who loved to eat tomato and egg. How he came to love it is one of those mysteries of science. Perhaps his wife told him he better love it or else. Perhaps he had once been kidnapped by a tomato and egg chef and it's a permanent side-effect of the severe case of Stockholm syndrome he took away from that experience. Perhaps it was some kind of genetic predisposition that trickled down into his genes from the future. The past isn't the only force in genetics, as science fiction tells us.
In any case, this farmer loved tomato and egg more than anything in the world. But he had no freaking clue where tomatoes came from. He opened his prehistoric refrigerator over and over but they didn't appear to grow there. He looked out into the forest and didn't see any tomatoes swinging from trees. Even more baffling was the egg. How the hell did it get into that shell? And if it could do something like that, what else could it do? The people who hunted those must be very brave, he thought.
But then along came JQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch, and suddenly people could build web apps that actually had a chance against native apps. Really? No, not really. Ninjas could build those kind of apps, armed with Backbones and Zapiers and other magical gadgets whose names only six fingered people could spell correctly. Ninjas knew what to do when the JQuery Mobile page they swung to knock the banana off the tree worked liked a charm when swung to the left, but denatured the instant you swung it to the left. Ninjas could build steaks out of salads. The rest of us were still chopping down cells in the Excel forest, because everyone knows tomatoes have a non-zero chance of being found inside the trunk of a tomato tree cell. And the tomato tree, sneaky tree that it is, looks like any other tree!
All was lost. But all was not lost! Along came Urbien and they brought a tomato gun and an egg cannon with them, not to mention Jesus, who would multiply the ammunition whenever they were in danger of running out. All that was left for the non-ninjas to do was to design the models for their apps, to use their "domain expertise" (oops, 4 billion non-ninjas just fainted dead away) and write the recipe for tomato and egg. Suddenly entire armies of klutzes were leveling up and becoming ninjas just by waking up in the morning. Fine, the afternoon. For the sake of realism.
The moral of the story is that everything is relative. You may be an idiot, but tomorrow, when being an idiot is all you need to be to be able to paint the Sistine Chapel, you're no longer an idiot. You're eating a delicious plate of tomato and egg.
Of course the story I told my roommate was a little more embellished. I couldn't risk him understanding it all in one session. What would I have to say to him next time?
My roommate, a guy who works in finance, was asking me today what kind of stuff I work on. After completely confusing him with specifics he couldn't possibly understand without a basic background in Web technologies, I resorted to my best friend, the analogy. The analogy is a great device for when you've lost that caring feeling, when more important than "do they understand you" is "do they think you're working on some complicated shit." I'm a seasoned veteran of terrible analogies, and so I hit him right in the face with a tomato an egg parable. Try to imagine the following in Mandarin Chinese, the language it was first heard in.
Once there was a farmer, who loved to eat tomato and egg. How he came to love it is one of those mysteries of science. Perhaps his wife told him he better love it or else. Perhaps he had once been kidnapped by a tomato and egg chef and it's a permanent side-effect of the severe case of Stockholm syndrome he took away from that experience. Perhaps it was some kind of genetic predisposition that trickled down into his genes from the future. The past isn't the only force in genetics, as science fiction tells us.
In any case, this farmer loved tomato and egg more than anything in the world. But he had no freaking clue where tomatoes came from. He opened his prehistoric refrigerator over and over but they didn't appear to grow there. He looked out into the forest and didn't see any tomatoes swinging from trees. Even more baffling was the egg. How the hell did it get into that shell? And if it could do something like that, what else could it do? The people who hunted those must be very brave, he thought.
But then along came JQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch, and suddenly people could build web apps that actually had a chance against native apps. Really? No, not really. Ninjas could build those kind of apps, armed with Backbones and Zapiers and other magical gadgets whose names only six fingered people could spell correctly. Ninjas knew what to do when the JQuery Mobile page they swung to knock the banana off the tree worked liked a charm when swung to the left, but denatured the instant you swung it to the left. Ninjas could build steaks out of salads. The rest of us were still chopping down cells in the Excel forest, because everyone knows tomatoes have a non-zero chance of being found inside the trunk of a tomato tree cell. And the tomato tree, sneaky tree that it is, looks like any other tree!
All was lost. But all was not lost! Along came Urbien and they brought a tomato gun and an egg cannon with them, not to mention Jesus, who would multiply the ammunition whenever they were in danger of running out. All that was left for the non-ninjas to do was to design the models for their apps, to use their "domain expertise" (oops, 4 billion non-ninjas just fainted dead away) and write the recipe for tomato and egg. Suddenly entire armies of klutzes were leveling up and becoming ninjas just by waking up in the morning. Fine, the afternoon. For the sake of realism.
The moral of the story is that everything is relative. You may be an idiot, but tomorrow, when being an idiot is all you need to be to be able to paint the Sistine Chapel, you're no longer an idiot. You're eating a delicious plate of tomato and egg.
Of course the story I told my roommate was a little more embellished. I couldn't risk him understanding it all in one session. What would I have to say to him next time?
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Yum
I had lunch with Yuan Yuan, her mom and her step-dad today. Just one lunch, not three. We went to pick up our butcher knife from her mom's place, she has a smithy or a special rock or something that sharpens knives. We got the knife. It's sharp. There will be no more playing the grapefruit game with the knife.
The lunch was an unexpected bonus. I wasn't really in the mood to see anyone other than Yuan Yuan and myself in the mirror, so when we went for a walk and Yuan Yuan suggested we pick up the knife, I said that that was fine as long as we didn't have to stay there and be social. Yuan Yuan swore a terrible oath that we would sneak in, grab the knife and run back faster than it is polite to run from family. But when we arrived, complications arose. Yuan Yuan's step-dad was in the vicinity, we didn't know in which direction to run and then Yuan Yuan's mom rushed out with a bag full of food, stuffed us both in her armpit and carried us to the nearest restaurant, where we ordered two dishes and a soup for appearance's sake and then unraveled the smorgasbord she'd prepared in the 3 seconds it took for Yuan Yuan to get her hands on the knife.
Lunch was fine, but it reminded me, very quickly and with tremendous special effects, why I don't like eating out. When I'm at home, in relative safety, there's no danger that I'll be kicked out or an impatient waiter will swoop in and clear the dishes before I can dislodge the half of a potato from my throat and shriek in protest. But whenever I go to a restaurant, my body, which is after all just a product of the long and painful evolution of a lonely starving monkey trapped on a glacier to this beautiful specimen of man meat, decides that it needs to stock up on food and turns into a Roomba, devouring everything on the table that's smaller than it and that doesn't skitter out of the way. This binge continues until the oxygen flow to the brain is all but cut off and the brain starts panicking and issuing gag reflexes and knee jerks. But by then 6-7 pounds of fuel has made itself a warm little nest in my belly. Blech. And I mean that literally.
The lunch was an unexpected bonus. I wasn't really in the mood to see anyone other than Yuan Yuan and myself in the mirror, so when we went for a walk and Yuan Yuan suggested we pick up the knife, I said that that was fine as long as we didn't have to stay there and be social. Yuan Yuan swore a terrible oath that we would sneak in, grab the knife and run back faster than it is polite to run from family. But when we arrived, complications arose. Yuan Yuan's step-dad was in the vicinity, we didn't know in which direction to run and then Yuan Yuan's mom rushed out with a bag full of food, stuffed us both in her armpit and carried us to the nearest restaurant, where we ordered two dishes and a soup for appearance's sake and then unraveled the smorgasbord she'd prepared in the 3 seconds it took for Yuan Yuan to get her hands on the knife.
Lunch was fine, but it reminded me, very quickly and with tremendous special effects, why I don't like eating out. When I'm at home, in relative safety, there's no danger that I'll be kicked out or an impatient waiter will swoop in and clear the dishes before I can dislodge the half of a potato from my throat and shriek in protest. But whenever I go to a restaurant, my body, which is after all just a product of the long and painful evolution of a lonely starving monkey trapped on a glacier to this beautiful specimen of man meat, decides that it needs to stock up on food and turns into a Roomba, devouring everything on the table that's smaller than it and that doesn't skitter out of the way. This binge continues until the oxygen flow to the brain is all but cut off and the brain starts panicking and issuing gag reflexes and knee jerks. But by then 6-7 pounds of fuel has made itself a warm little nest in my belly. Blech. And I mean that literally.
Monday, August 5, 2013
Chuck is good. Enough already
Started a new show today with Yuan Yuan - Studio 60 on Sunset Strip. We've been married to Chuck for the last...seems like 20 years but it's only been 3 and a half seasons. We usually watch while we eat lunch or dinner together but Yuan Yuan's been off to Korea and busy with other tours, so Chuck has been visiting us only once a week or so. Soon our viewings of the show will align with Yuan Yuan's period and then hopefully she'll decide she's ready for another. Pavlovian conditioning, my only hope.
Before a shitstorm erupts in the comments from the Chuck-loving crowd and turns this blog into a lonely and irrelevant sideline on an intergalactic flame war, let me set the record straight. I have nothing against Chuck. I like Chuck. It's often entertaining and sometimes hilarious. But it's getting very repetitive and way too emotional. In season 4, it doesn't go an episode without a heartwarming moment. We need more Buy More and less Chuck-Sara relationship issues. We get it, Chuck's a little girl and Sara's a big man with a gun, so Chuck has all these feelings and Sara has little phantom Tyrannosaurus arms where her feelings once were before they were amputated for good, but the steady onslaught from Chuck's pharmaceutical-grade pheromones finally overwhelm her (in every episode) and she starts getting sympathy pains and everything is "well" between them again.
Then there's Chuck's sister, who is completely intolerable. Mario couldn't stand her from the beginning. If there's anything Mario hates in this world, it's being babied and told "if there's anything you ever need, you come to me, you're my brother/son/nephew/mistress and I'm here for you always." Somewhere out there, Mario just felt the inexplicable but urgent need to run away as fast as possible. The only person Mario needs to be there for him is a bowl of mildewy soup. But I tolerated Ellie for the sake of contrast, which she struck spectacularly with Casey. Which brings me to Casey. Casey is slowly but surely turning into Chuck's sister. Ever since he reunited with his daughter, he's been discovering all these feelings and emotions and frankly it's disgusting. Casey was the goto guy for your dose of macho. Without him, this whole show is getting unbearably sappy.
I take it back, we didn't start Studio 60 on Sunset Strip. I was hoping for a self-fulfilling prophecy but the gods would have none of it. Just as we sat down to watch it, after I had downloaded the subtitles and made sure they matched, I unplugged my external laptop fan and set up my laptop on a chair near the bed so we could watch from there. When I hit play, VLC started spouting some nonsense about bad movie files and inauspicious weather conditions. I opened the show folder to try to start up the video from there again, and noticed the folder had disappeared. Turns out the folder was on the fan. And the fan wasn't a fan, it was an external harddrive. When I plugged it back into my laptop and reopened the folder, the first 5 episodes were gone. Somewhere on the other end of the galaxy, a black hole is slurping down one episode after another. The most epic slurping in the world, that we'll never see or hear or maybe even imagine, as black holes are so strong that they slurp up their own slurping sounds and webcam footage as soon as it begins to exist. But otherwise it would be all over the news in a billion years or so.
Before a shitstorm erupts in the comments from the Chuck-loving crowd and turns this blog into a lonely and irrelevant sideline on an intergalactic flame war, let me set the record straight. I have nothing against Chuck. I like Chuck. It's often entertaining and sometimes hilarious. But it's getting very repetitive and way too emotional. In season 4, it doesn't go an episode without a heartwarming moment. We need more Buy More and less Chuck-Sara relationship issues. We get it, Chuck's a little girl and Sara's a big man with a gun, so Chuck has all these feelings and Sara has little phantom Tyrannosaurus arms where her feelings once were before they were amputated for good, but the steady onslaught from Chuck's pharmaceutical-grade pheromones finally overwhelm her (in every episode) and she starts getting sympathy pains and everything is "well" between them again.
Then there's Chuck's sister, who is completely intolerable. Mario couldn't stand her from the beginning. If there's anything Mario hates in this world, it's being babied and told "if there's anything you ever need, you come to me, you're my brother/son/nephew/mistress and I'm here for you always." Somewhere out there, Mario just felt the inexplicable but urgent need to run away as fast as possible. The only person Mario needs to be there for him is a bowl of mildewy soup. But I tolerated Ellie for the sake of contrast, which she struck spectacularly with Casey. Which brings me to Casey. Casey is slowly but surely turning into Chuck's sister. Ever since he reunited with his daughter, he's been discovering all these feelings and emotions and frankly it's disgusting. Casey was the goto guy for your dose of macho. Without him, this whole show is getting unbearably sappy.
I take it back, we didn't start Studio 60 on Sunset Strip. I was hoping for a self-fulfilling prophecy but the gods would have none of it. Just as we sat down to watch it, after I had downloaded the subtitles and made sure they matched, I unplugged my external laptop fan and set up my laptop on a chair near the bed so we could watch from there. When I hit play, VLC started spouting some nonsense about bad movie files and inauspicious weather conditions. I opened the show folder to try to start up the video from there again, and noticed the folder had disappeared. Turns out the folder was on the fan. And the fan wasn't a fan, it was an external harddrive. When I plugged it back into my laptop and reopened the folder, the first 5 episodes were gone. Somewhere on the other end of the galaxy, a black hole is slurping down one episode after another. The most epic slurping in the world, that we'll never see or hear or maybe even imagine, as black holes are so strong that they slurp up their own slurping sounds and webcam footage as soon as it begins to exist. But otherwise it would be all over the news in a billion years or so.
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Language is musical
I watched a TED talk a few weeks ago where the guy claimed he was going to make me fall in love with classical music, or if not fall in love with it, at least learn to appreciate it, or if not learn to appreciate it, at least learn to love classic rock. Except for that last part. He failed completely in his objective. I already have a good relationship with classical music: I listen to it very rarely but I can appreciate it. Classic rock on the other hand...
Despite his failure, the lecturer made a very interesting point that I carefully catalogued and put to use today when showing someone why normal English sentences sounded stilted in their rendition. The point that Mr. Classical Music made was that when you start out with music, you don't know what to stress, other than the mistakes. So the beginner will stress every note or at least every beat in a measure. When the beginner gets a little better (given the odds, chances were that this story would be about the 99.9% who quit, but did I mention I have incredibly good luck? The fictional beginners in my stories stick with it!), he/she starts putting accents every other beat, and then just at the first beat of the measure, and then eventually, according to Mr. Classical Music, the former beginner and now accomplished musician puts only a single accent in every phrase, or perhaps even in the entire piece, and the music magically stops sounding like an exercise and starts to sound like the classical music that everyone knows and loves and listens to at rave parties.
Jia Yan (female), one of our mutual friends, asked me today to listen to her read a few English sentences and tell her what was wrong with her pronunciation because she found it inexplicably abhorrent. I listened. To my own thoughts of course, not to a word she was saying. And after she was done, I pronounced a diagnosis based on no data whatsoever. I felt like an accomplished psychiatrist. I told her that the English language is like music, and like music it...and then I gave her the spiel on accents. She thought it was brilliant. Just kidding, she didn't understand what the hell I was talking about. But I felt quite intellectual. If I knew anything about wine, I'm sure I would have poured us both a glass and then lectured her on the proper way to drink it. I'm more of a Coca-Cola guy, so instead I taught her how to clean a toilet with it.
Despite his failure, the lecturer made a very interesting point that I carefully catalogued and put to use today when showing someone why normal English sentences sounded stilted in their rendition. The point that Mr. Classical Music made was that when you start out with music, you don't know what to stress, other than the mistakes. So the beginner will stress every note or at least every beat in a measure. When the beginner gets a little better (given the odds, chances were that this story would be about the 99.9% who quit, but did I mention I have incredibly good luck? The fictional beginners in my stories stick with it!), he/she starts putting accents every other beat, and then just at the first beat of the measure, and then eventually, according to Mr. Classical Music, the former beginner and now accomplished musician puts only a single accent in every phrase, or perhaps even in the entire piece, and the music magically stops sounding like an exercise and starts to sound like the classical music that everyone knows and loves and listens to at rave parties.
Jia Yan (female), one of our mutual friends, asked me today to listen to her read a few English sentences and tell her what was wrong with her pronunciation because she found it inexplicably abhorrent. I listened. To my own thoughts of course, not to a word she was saying. And after she was done, I pronounced a diagnosis based on no data whatsoever. I felt like an accomplished psychiatrist. I told her that the English language is like music, and like music it...and then I gave her the spiel on accents. She thought it was brilliant. Just kidding, she didn't understand what the hell I was talking about. But I felt quite intellectual. If I knew anything about wine, I'm sure I would have poured us both a glass and then lectured her on the proper way to drink it. I'm more of a Coca-Cola guy, so instead I taught her how to clean a toilet with it.
Saturday, August 3, 2013
Gimme Books
I like being in the middle of several books at once, it feels like there's a lot more going on in life. I don't read or watch the news, and when my grandma tries to tell me about all the horrible stuff that goes on in the world because "you can live under a rock," I usually la-la-la her out or try to divert her attention onto a more worthwhile subject, like how soon we'll have a real space program and stop letting Einstein bully our spaceships around, which usually works and gets her yelling at me to stop filling her head with nonsense. In Lamb, which it feels like we've been reading in realtime as related to the events in the book, Biff and Jesus are still in India, on a little side-quest rescuing the daughter of an Untouchable from being sacrificed to some psycho-goddess. In The Mote in God's Eye, contact has been made with an alien race and a specimen has been brought on board and is being studied intensively. Or is she studying them? I may never find out, the book is a bit too old-school sci-fi, there's an 80% chance that I will abandon it unfinished.
Then there's Trash, Sex, Magic, which I only just started, so I don't really know what's going yet, except that some tree is being hacked down and some women living in the area keep referring to the tree in anthropomorphic terms. I guess the Trash has been introduced, but there's yet to be any Sex and there are only the vaguest premonitions of Magic. Will keep reading, eventually. Then there's the first book of The Dresden Files, about some magician living in the modern world, who it looks like will get involved in a cross-world jurisdiction murder case. I may drop this one too. Then there's the first book of a fantasy series called Riyria, which is goofy, but not funny enough I think to warrant further reading.
I changed my mind, I don't like being in the middle of several books at once. It's a symptom that none of them are good enough to monopolize my attention. Lamb is obviously amazing, but I've already read it several times, and Yuan Yuan has been busy lately so much of the enjoyment has evaporated as we've lost almost all continuity. But the others are on the whole disappointing. Somebody recommend me some awesome books please.
Then there's Trash, Sex, Magic, which I only just started, so I don't really know what's going yet, except that some tree is being hacked down and some women living in the area keep referring to the tree in anthropomorphic terms. I guess the Trash has been introduced, but there's yet to be any Sex and there are only the vaguest premonitions of Magic. Will keep reading, eventually. Then there's the first book of The Dresden Files, about some magician living in the modern world, who it looks like will get involved in a cross-world jurisdiction murder case. I may drop this one too. Then there's the first book of a fantasy series called Riyria, which is goofy, but not funny enough I think to warrant further reading.
I changed my mind, I don't like being in the middle of several books at once. It's a symptom that none of them are good enough to monopolize my attention. Lamb is obviously amazing, but I've already read it several times, and Yuan Yuan has been busy lately so much of the enjoyment has evaporated as we've lost almost all continuity. But the others are on the whole disappointing. Somebody recommend me some awesome books please.
Friday, August 2, 2013
The Hao Women
I just noticed Yuan Yuan put a recent photo of her family on my desk right next to my computer. It must have been there for the last month but it only just struck me as odd. It's all the women in Yuan Yuan's family, of which there are so many that the photo could pass for a Wellesley graduation ceremony keepsake. I don't know what it's doing next to my computer, maybe so I'm frequently reminded that I definitely got the best bear from the flock. One of the women in the photo is a baby, terrible dating material, can't hold a candle to the one I got. Can't hold a candle at all, that would be irresponsible parenting. Plus, that would be parenting, so there goes the romance. Then there's Yuan Yuan's mom, who's a bit traditional for my taste, though I always poke fun at her that she's not traditional enough. She knows I'm joking but she can never decide if she wants to get the joke.
Me: dinner's ready!
(we all sit down to eat)
Me: wait! We can't eat until the food's cold! It's to remind us that these days of plenty are not to be taken for granted, and that even cold food is better than no food at all. It's a great tradition, trust me. You're going to love it.
Yuan Yuan's mom: ...(looks at Yuan Yuan for help)
Yuan Yuan: don't listen to him, mom
Me: hey, no respect for your elders! ...Another fine tradition from the wild wild West. You'll fit in great, honey!
Yuan Yuan's mom: can we eat?
Me: yes, let's eat, but as long as we make it a new tradition to break a glorious tradition every time we break bread.
Yuan Yuan's mom: well, we can keep the good ones
Yuan Yuan's oldest sister is a dear, or so I thought for the first 10 minutes of meeting her. I even had time to plant a sloppy kiss onto her ass, saying she seemed like the gentlest one of the pack. Of course, 5 minutes later I was flat against the wall from the shockwave when her eldest son did an no-no and got a strong dose of traditional child-rearing. I'm still a little deaf in those ears. I'm surprised neither of us did a no-no in our pants. It must be all the conditioning Chinese people get from their cellphones. A little tip for you, if you're getting bad volume from your cellphone, hand it to a Chinese person and step 50 feet away. You'll hear the other side just fine. Some kind of technological racism, Mario and I are still investigating the science behind it.
Yuan Yuan's older sister is a cutie pie, the kind you want to feed candy until they're fat enough that they lose their appeal. She's the skinniest of the four and her face is vaguely chipmunk-like. She always looks like she's about to nibble something. Alas, looks can be deceiving, and when she recently stayed with us for 10 days, I saw into the heart of the beast. She came here with her 1-year old baby girl (7 years old in China), and proved to us that babies are quite resilient creatures. They can take a beating at every meal and be just fine. To be honest, it's the baby's own damn fault. If she'd closed her ears when she got screamed at and hadn't gone deaf, she could have gotten safely screamed at for the rest of her childhood and her mother wouldn't have to hit her so hard.
Mario was shocked by all the verbal and physical violence. Shocked enough to have an opinion if you can believe it.
Mario: she just smacked the baby right in front of us!
Yuan Yuan: you don't beat children in the US?
Mario: of course we do. We just have the decency to do it secretly and then lie about it.
Mark: she didn't even look embarrassed at losing her temper. I'm kind of jealous.
Yuan Yuan: so what do you do if you don't beat them?
Mario: we just give the kid a dirty look, as in "when we get home...you're dead"
Yuan Yuan: does it work?
Mario: ...
I tried to stay out of it though I felt sorry for the baby, but I was involved against my will. Somehow they noticed that the baby would eat better in my presence, so they started bringing me in as a consultant whenever the baby needed feeding. Her sister would say something about Uncle Foreigner to the baby in their dialect and the baby would eat like a charm. Later I found out that the sister was telling the baby that I was going to yell at it if she didn't eat the food right away. I was used, and not in a good way, no handcuffs or oils or anything. I was used to scary some appetite into a baby. Anyway, my relationship with her sister didn't suffer. We're friendly as always and she probably doesn't even notice how I skip to the table like a unicorn whenever she says it's time to eat.
Yuan Yuan's younger sister, the last of the brood, is currently experiencing the dubious benefits of higher education. She's cute and friendly like the rest of them, but she also packs a temper like the rest of them (well, I got the mellow one), which I've luckily never seen firsthand. It's not her fault, she'd be a darling if she weren't so spoiled. And this is typical China - the youngest children get spoiled beyond all reason, in the name of love. If you see an obese child on the street, you can bet his spare butt cheek he's the youngest. One time I overheard during dinner that Yuan Yuan's mom loved her youngest daughter the most. I couldn't understand why she didn't love me more than all of them put together, but I stifled my righteous indignation and asked politely "why the f??" To which Yuan Yuan's mom replied, like I'd asked her why the sky is blue:
"Because she's the youngest."
Tradition. It even tells us who to love more. It's amazing how straightforward life can be.
Me: dinner's ready!
(we all sit down to eat)
Me: wait! We can't eat until the food's cold! It's to remind us that these days of plenty are not to be taken for granted, and that even cold food is better than no food at all. It's a great tradition, trust me. You're going to love it.
Yuan Yuan's mom: ...(looks at Yuan Yuan for help)
Yuan Yuan: don't listen to him, mom
Me: hey, no respect for your elders! ...Another fine tradition from the wild wild West. You'll fit in great, honey!
Yuan Yuan's mom: can we eat?
Me: yes, let's eat, but as long as we make it a new tradition to break a glorious tradition every time we break bread.
Yuan Yuan's mom: well, we can keep the good ones
Yuan Yuan's oldest sister is a dear, or so I thought for the first 10 minutes of meeting her. I even had time to plant a sloppy kiss onto her ass, saying she seemed like the gentlest one of the pack. Of course, 5 minutes later I was flat against the wall from the shockwave when her eldest son did an no-no and got a strong dose of traditional child-rearing. I'm still a little deaf in those ears. I'm surprised neither of us did a no-no in our pants. It must be all the conditioning Chinese people get from their cellphones. A little tip for you, if you're getting bad volume from your cellphone, hand it to a Chinese person and step 50 feet away. You'll hear the other side just fine. Some kind of technological racism, Mario and I are still investigating the science behind it.
Yuan Yuan's older sister is a cutie pie, the kind you want to feed candy until they're fat enough that they lose their appeal. She's the skinniest of the four and her face is vaguely chipmunk-like. She always looks like she's about to nibble something. Alas, looks can be deceiving, and when she recently stayed with us for 10 days, I saw into the heart of the beast. She came here with her 1-year old baby girl (7 years old in China), and proved to us that babies are quite resilient creatures. They can take a beating at every meal and be just fine. To be honest, it's the baby's own damn fault. If she'd closed her ears when she got screamed at and hadn't gone deaf, she could have gotten safely screamed at for the rest of her childhood and her mother wouldn't have to hit her so hard.
Mario was shocked by all the verbal and physical violence. Shocked enough to have an opinion if you can believe it.
Mario: she just smacked the baby right in front of us!
Yuan Yuan: you don't beat children in the US?
Mario: of course we do. We just have the decency to do it secretly and then lie about it.
Mark: she didn't even look embarrassed at losing her temper. I'm kind of jealous.
Yuan Yuan: so what do you do if you don't beat them?
Mario: we just give the kid a dirty look, as in "when we get home...you're dead"
Yuan Yuan: does it work?
Mario: ...
I tried to stay out of it though I felt sorry for the baby, but I was involved against my will. Somehow they noticed that the baby would eat better in my presence, so they started bringing me in as a consultant whenever the baby needed feeding. Her sister would say something about Uncle Foreigner to the baby in their dialect and the baby would eat like a charm. Later I found out that the sister was telling the baby that I was going to yell at it if she didn't eat the food right away. I was used, and not in a good way, no handcuffs or oils or anything. I was used to scary some appetite into a baby. Anyway, my relationship with her sister didn't suffer. We're friendly as always and she probably doesn't even notice how I skip to the table like a unicorn whenever she says it's time to eat.
Yuan Yuan's younger sister, the last of the brood, is currently experiencing the dubious benefits of higher education. She's cute and friendly like the rest of them, but she also packs a temper like the rest of them (well, I got the mellow one), which I've luckily never seen firsthand. It's not her fault, she'd be a darling if she weren't so spoiled. And this is typical China - the youngest children get spoiled beyond all reason, in the name of love. If you see an obese child on the street, you can bet his spare butt cheek he's the youngest. One time I overheard during dinner that Yuan Yuan's mom loved her youngest daughter the most. I couldn't understand why she didn't love me more than all of them put together, but I stifled my righteous indignation and asked politely "why the f??" To which Yuan Yuan's mom replied, like I'd asked her why the sky is blue:
"Because she's the youngest."
Tradition. It even tells us who to love more. It's amazing how straightforward life can be.
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Nonsense
Time-consuming things completely brainwash you. You work every day for a month and then you stop for a week and on the 2nd or 3rd day you'll be consumed by this horrible listlessness, like there never was anything to do but work in the first place. You could learn to be an ice-dancer, but it's summer, and you could practice your skateboarding tricks but the streets are covered with ice, and the other things that you could do and maybe even should do, you'll eh...do them...some other time. I've seen this happen to so many people - they start watching copious amounts of TV and then they can't imagine life without it, they quit their job and they have no idea who they are anymore, they get a divorce and suddenly they're not so interested in their mistress and don't really feel like buying that house for her anymore, they get a maid and they die of starvation when he/she forgets to take them out of the high chair. Getting you in that thing was hard enough. And who buys a house in this economy anyway? Or is it the other economy that you're not supposed to buy houses in? And why did I assume the maid was female? Maybe he/she is one of those androgynous people that you can't get a grip on, literally and figuratively, and when you finally get a grip, they sue you for them turning out to be the opposite of what you thought.
Yuan Yuan is in Korea again, so good luck finding anything in our apartment. I found the flame on under the fried rice today, half an hour after I made it, and the leftover rice had fused into a pancake, charred on one side and completely edible or at least lickable on the outside. I resisted the urge to lick it, in case my tongue decided it'd rather live on the pancake side of life, but I salvaged the top layer and now I've had it for dinner. It smelled like cancer but it looked pretty tasty so now it's in my stomach.
I had to do all my exercises alone today. There was no camaraderie, no team spirit, no high-spirited but pain-rich wailing as the timer counted down the last seconds, but there was that dream of chocolate at the end of the tunnel, and it turned out to be good enough. I haven't eaten it yet, I plan on smearing it on my face like a mud mask and then chasing my face around the room and trying to get it all into my mouth.
Yuan Yuan is in Korea again, so good luck finding anything in our apartment. I found the flame on under the fried rice today, half an hour after I made it, and the leftover rice had fused into a pancake, charred on one side and completely edible or at least lickable on the outside. I resisted the urge to lick it, in case my tongue decided it'd rather live on the pancake side of life, but I salvaged the top layer and now I've had it for dinner. It smelled like cancer but it looked pretty tasty so now it's in my stomach.
I had to do all my exercises alone today. There was no camaraderie, no team spirit, no high-spirited but pain-rich wailing as the timer counted down the last seconds, but there was that dream of chocolate at the end of the tunnel, and it turned out to be good enough. I haven't eaten it yet, I plan on smearing it on my face like a mud mask and then chasing my face around the room and trying to get it all into my mouth.
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