Meet The Parents. Check!

I'm sleeping over at one of my students' houses today. I'm approximately 95% sure he's not going to murder me in my sleep, way higher than with some of my other students. He went skiing in the morning so we moved our class from 11AM to 8PM and since the subway goes home at 11PM and we have a 3+ hour class, he offered me to either stay the night or he'd pay for a taxi to take me home. My Sunday morning class got cancelled on account of lazy-studentitis so I decided to stay.

I met Yuan Yuan's mom yesterday and I'm pretty sure she likes me. I don't think she's going to try to steal me away from Yuan Yuan, especially since she's already married, but I think the overall impression I made was favorable. Yuan Yuan told me this morning that her mom was saying yesterday how she found me "quite polite for a foreigner," whatever that means, and pretty handsome, not too tall but not too short. Yuan Yuan assured me that she rushed to the defense of the foreigners of the world against such vicious calumny but I don't see why she bothered as it could only hurt my standing. Silly Yuan Yuan, so straightforward.

[WARNING: spoilers ahead]

We got to know each other over dinner, the three of us, though Yuan Yuan and I already knew each other pretty well. Coincidence? We had some roast duck, the Beijing special, and I made sure to order six times the amount we would consume if we were only worried about filling our and the people's at the neighboring tables stomachs. So I definitely passed round 1. Then we talked a bit about what I do, which is a topic ever popular with women and women's mothers. I somehow managed to restrain myself from dropping a Mark's-life-philosophy bomb on her and ruining any chances of seeing Yuan Yuan again in this lifetime without full body reconstructive surgery. When she asked me how long I'm planning to stay in Beijing, I remembered Lucy's advice and said that I had no plans of leaving in the near future except for the purpose of visiting my family. And when her mom asked me which I liked better, China or America, I neatly avoided the question by asking her which of her daughters she liked better. At that point it turned out she had a sense of humor.

There was only one slightly awkward moment. We stopped by a little convenience store on the way back because mommy needed to buy some needles and thread. I wondered allowed if Yuan Yuan knew how to sew and she answered me in the typical Jewish answer/question manner "Have you ever seen me sew?" to which my sarcasm reflex responded without my consent: "I've never seen what you do in the bathroom but I'm guessing you might know how to use the toilet." I don't know what her mother made of that. I think she could tell I was lying. That xkcd comic came to mind.


http://xkcd.com/275

Oh yea, I forgot to mention that there were three languages at play during the whole adventure. Yuan Yuan's mom doesn't really speak Mandarin. She speaks her hometown's dialect of Mandarin, which has a lot of words in common with the original, though often with different tones. Kind of like jive. So the dinner went something like this:

Yuan Yuan's mom: Hey Holm, I dig this duck yo.
Yuan Yuan: Col' got to be yo! I pray to J I get the same ol' same ol'.
Mark: I totally agree. Or I would if I understood what you're talking about. Unless it was something I wouldn't agree with of course.

After every few minutes of hometown dialect, Yuan Yuan would ask me if I understood what they were talking about. Against all expectations, I actually managed to do pretty well; I almost always got the gist of the conversation though I'd miss most of the words.

So overall I think I did way better than when I met Chun's parents in college, sometime before graduation. That time I think I forgot to turn on my brain and told them all about how I had no idea what I was doing next but that after I skipped the graduation ceremony because that was totally lame and only lame traditional parents came to see that, I was probably going to Texas to start a band and that maybe we'd sleep with other people for a while as long as there was a steady stream of groupies and if there wasn't then I'd definitely maybe possibly come back and be a good boyfriend for at least a while but who knows if that would ever happen because who knows what's going to happen in the future anyway and that I loved their daughter. By the time I got to that last part I think her father was already halfway to Massachusetts General Hospital with a severe case of reality-overdose. Compared to that, yesterday I passed with flying colors.

Epileptic Verbiage

I don't know if anyone noticed but Michael Jackson's been spinning in his grave like a driedel on X for the last fifteen minutes. No...that would imply he's buried standing, maybe more like the spoke of the wheel on The Price Is Right...or a piece of pecan pie in the microwave/centrifuge. He was spinning so fast that the angular momentum of the Earth fled straight into the complex numbers. Yes, I started the "learn the moonwalk" 30-day trial. 10 minutes a day is the commitment, unless my kneecaps pop off, in which case I'll take my day of rest like God did when his did.

Sometimes I get really sick of Chinese thinking. I'm supposed to meet Yuan Yuan's mom one of these days and as I made some delicious Salad Olivier a few hours ago, I offered Yuan Yuan to swing it by tomorrow, give mommy dearest a taste of Russian medicine. To my surprise, Yuan Yuan, who can shotgun a keg of salad faster than you can say "damn it! I wanted some too!", told me to forget it and just invite her mom out to get some hot pot. Confused, I got to asking stupid questions and eventually got to the blunt answer that it's more meaningful to ask someone out and throw down some shekels than to cook a delicious foreign meal for them that'll probably give them the runs.

I guess in one respect this is good: it evens the playing field. If you can't boil an egg--and I have to say I've failed many a time in this department...there's just so many steps, I always forget to turn on the fire or turn it off or wait long enough or peel the egg after instead of before, or spin the egg counterclockwise, which as you know doesn't work as eggs have intricate networks of gyroscopes lying in ambush in case you should attempt this--you can still make your girlfriend's parents feel like you're earnestly sucking up to them. But it also obviously takes no effort. It's like getting money on your birthday; it's simultaneously great because no one really knows what you want to buy except Google, and meaningless because they obviously didn't make any effort to divine your secret wishes.

But whatever, I guess. When in Rome, buy your Chinese girlfriend's Chinese mother a typical Chinese meal. Or maybe this is all a ploy to keep her from noticing that I have white skin and a nose with extra nose on it.

The knot of the day is The Rapala Knot! Oops, scratch the exclamation point.


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Unfortunately I haven't been able to locate explicit directions on how to tie the Pocket Knot - the one where you put your earphones in your pocket and take them out the next day and then go to the Apple store and get a free iPhone cause they can't prove there isn't one trapped in the middle of your Pocket Knot. If I were a sailor, I'd get on that right now.

Mario's soliloquy of the day:
i was looking at some of the stock games of real masters or something, there is one where a guy sacrifices rook and queen to get a checkmate
unfreakin believable
did u ever have any victories like that ?
i have many losses like that
without the checkmate part

I think my writing style is getting more epileptic.

Uh Oh

Things are moving fast around here. Yuan Yuan's parents are no longer arriving sometime soon. They're arriving now. Tomorrow. Yuan Yuan has gone totally berserk, which is way more tiring to endure than push-ups. Hopefully this is just pre-game jitters and not an indication of what the next month'll be like. Otherwise I might have to kill both her and her family and I really don't want to get back into that stuff. I'm so glad I wasn't born into a traditional Chinese family. I'd be so happily married right now that I wouldn't even realize how unhappy I was. Hmm...something about the grammar in that last sentence feels fishy.

I've given up drawing stuff in my room and downloaded a book on cartooning. Did the first lesson today. So far my cartoons all turn out looking like deflated beach balls with limbs and organs sticking out of them. Hope there's a demand for that in the world.

The knot of the day...and they're getting scarce on animatedknots.com...is the Prusik Knot:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Easy, simple and trivial (to be read with a strong Russian accent).