In 10 City

I've been daydreaming quite a lot recently.  I guess that this is actually an issue (?) that I've had for a pretty good while, but it definitely feels like a different quality/intensity now than it has before.

It seems to happen the most strongly when I'm just transcribing with 3Play.  Especially if it's an easy file that I'm working on, my fingers and some subset of my brain seem to just go on autopilot and I realize that I'm hardly even thinking about the work in front of me anymore.  I'm staring right at the screen and still correcting the spelling and grammar, but in my mind, I'm seeing extremely vivid scenes from the past few years.  One of the most common ones is sitting on the deck at the back of the MV Explorer on a warm day; I remember playing guitar there or looking down to the lower deck and seeing people reading, sleeping, sunbathing, whatever, especially my friend Caitlyn.  I used to just sit there between classes for five minutes listening to Seaweed Sheets.  But sometimes the scenes are less detailed, although still feel very animated, like just the feeling of being in a classroom on the side of the ship, or walking through the main hallway, or looking out the window of my room, or playing piano in the auditorium, but they all kind of happen together in the same feeling.

My daydreams don't take me to Cambodia very often, and I'm not really sure why that is.  I guess that's just how it goes.

When I think about China, for some reason, by far the biggest hit with the nostalgia part of my brain is Nan Shi Da (Nanjing Normal University).  I always just get this feeling that I'm walking over there after school on a Wednesday, and the weather is either just barely warm or just barely chilly, and there's a student next to me that I'm talking to, though the student and the conversation are both indiscernable.  We're always walking up the path to the huge set of stairs at the southwestern part of the campus.  Sometimes it's like a mash-up of all the different little shops and restaurants that I had been to while I was there, though sometimes it's a specific feeling of the ones that I had gone to most often, and sometimes it's even the clubbing district, 1912, or a specific night there.  Sometimes I'm on the roof playing guitar and Angela comes up to see me, or I'm walking with Kara and Eric, or I'm at brunch or with Courtney and Dani, or sitting in the corner of AJ Cafe with Tracy.

I love all of those memories.  I'm glad I have something to miss so strongly.  But sometimes thinking about them makes me feel very dissatisfied with my life right now.  I wish I didn't feel like that, although sometimes I wonder if it's a sign that I need to go.

Peace out.

The Interview

I had an interview with [Redacted] Games a little bit before Christmas that I think was just about the worst interview that I've ever had.  Well, maybe the interview for the Fulbright Scholarship was worse, but in that case I was totally unprepared for what was going to happen, so it's not really even comparable.

Anyway, the guy who was interviewing me apparently used to be a pretty big developer -- and apparently wrote a chapter in one of the most famous Ruby on Rails books? -- but I guess is now more of a manager(?).  He got a business certificate from U Penn, whatever that means.  Anyway, when I sent my resume and short bio to them, apparently they wrote back a few minutes later, "This guy looks fucking legit."  So we're starting off with the assumption that I am probably pretty close to what they're looking for given that reaction.

For some background, [Redacted] Games is a company that makes exactly one game, [Name of game], and therefore should probably be called [Redacted] Game.  They were interviewing me to work on the developer operations team, which basically means that they have so many computer programmers working for them that they're now hiring a meta-layer of computer programmers to make life easier for that original line of computer programmers.  But the point is that it's a programming gig.

Anyway, the first question was like, "Do you know what [Redacted] Games does?"  Yes, you make [Name of game].  I think that's your only game.  It should be called [Redacted] Game.  "Do you play [Name of game]?"  And this is where things started to go downhill.  No, of course I don't play [Name of game] because I know how to operate in the real world, so playing is a totally non-optimal use of my time.  But of course, I just said, nah, I don't play it.  "Do you play video games at all?"  Again, the truth here is the same -- no, I don’t, because it's a tremendous waste of time.  Also, did I mention that I work full-time and go to school full-time while playing on three hockey teams?  Because I work full-time and go to school full-time while playing on three hockey teams.  If you think I'm going to choose to spend my spare time staring at a screen any more than necessary, you're crazy.  But anyway, "Not really.  Well, sometimes I'll play something super casually, but I'm not really a gamer in a meaningful sense."  (That's the wrong answer, by the way.)

From there it moved on to a bunch of bullshit.  "Tell us about a time that you were criticized and responded well."  Someone criticized my work and I read the docs.  But my real reaction was, "Are you kidding me?  Do I look like I'm 16 to you?  You should ask me real questions."  Then, "Tell us about a time that you criticized someone else and they didn't respond well."  I told him about kids cheating in Cambodia, heh.  "Tell us about a time when you criticized yourself."  This question is so stupid.  Nearly every human on Earth criticizes themselves all the time.  I criticize myself when I forget to turn the heat off, or bump my leg on the table, or forget to text Yuge back.  But you can't say that during an interview, so I mentioned having an imposter complex and getting a Master's degree to help alleviate the feeling.

Then more bullshit.  He described the projects.  "So if you had to figure out what the developers wanted to see on a dashboard like this, how would you do that?"  Well, I'd ask someone whose job it is to figure that out, because I write code for a living and that's what I'm good at, not figuring out what developers want on a dashboard.  "What do you think is interesting about this?"  Well, it wasn't very interesting to be honest, which made it hard to answer, so I really had to fish.  "Finding a way to measure the effectiveness and use of each service in a unified and maintainable way seems challenging."  Well, it might be challenging, I think, but certainly not interesting.  I don't think there was really anything elegant going on in this project.

Then yet more developer-specific bullshit.  Do you go to hackathons?  Do you contribute to the open source community?  Again, keep in mind that I have been going to school full-time and working full-time since I became a professional developer so I really don't have a lot of free time, and the little I do have, I don't really want to spend doing slave labor so that my resume looks better.  For those who don't know, hackathons are competitions where companies ask people to solve their problems in 24 hours (or 48) and then pay them a negligible fraction of what that solution saved them.  Open source typically refers to bug fixes on open source projects so that you can tell an interviewer that you have open source contributions.  I didn't mention CATNIP because I just forgot it, which was unfortunate, but I'm not sure it would have really made a difference anyway.

I really hate those questions.  The question shouldn't be, "So do you do your job outside of your job?  Like, you work 24/7, right?  Like you're a developer and nothing else?"  It should just be if you're good at your job when you do your job.  I have better things to do outside of work other than work some more.

Anyway, then they asked me if I had questions.  I asked some questions, though I could tell that it hadn't gone particularly well and was pretty frustrated about that.  I think the frustration came from knowing that they first thought I was "fucking legit" and then proceeding to ask me a bunch of meaningless questions which I haven't geared my life towards answering well (i.e., playing video games, being a non-developer at work, doing work after I'm done work) without giving me a meaningful opportunity to explain why I might be good/useful for them.

Part of me wishes that I had called them out for that at the end.  But also, by that point, I didn't really feel interested in working there anymore, and doing that definitely would have sealed the deal that I could not go there.  I'm not sure that I want to work with people who judge others by those standards, anyway.

Peace out.

How You Know That You're in China

As I've said before, I basically jump out of planes as soon as the seat belt sign is turned off at the gate after landing.  I happened to be really lucky on this particular flight because the flight attendant pitied me when I asked for a right-handed desk to do work (I already had a left-handed aisle seat) and gave me an open seat in the front row.  That didn't really solve the problem because it was the middle seat in a row of five, but it was better than where I was, so I did some work there and eventually just stayed there, including taking all of my bags.

So when we pulled up to the gate and stopped, I took my seat belt off, and as soon as I heard the ding, I launched out of my seat, grabbed my stuff from the overheads, and went careening down the aisle through first class as fast as I could and was probably like the 20th person off the plane, even though first class was huge.  Once I was in the airport, I made a pretty mad dash to baggage claim and, of course, had nothing to claim, so just kept going.  Next up was customs and immigration.  The Chinese national line looked pretty long -- sucks to suckkkk -- but the foreigner line was empty.  First one, woohoo!

So I went into the roped off area and walked all the way to the front.  At that time, though, there wasn't even a customs worker there to handle foreigners, so I ended up just waiting at the yellow line or whatever.  As soon as the workers all noticed me, they signaled one of their guys to go over and help out, and so he starting walking up to one of the booths where the workers sit for processing.  And as he was doing that, a middle aged Chinese guy waltzed right on up to the window of the booth, even though I was clearly standing at the yellow line first.  Didn't look back; didn't say sorry; didn't say that he was in a rush; just jumped straight to the front of the line as if it was the proper thing to do.

And that's when I knew that I was in China.

Peace out.

All I Wanted Was a Pat Down

When I was coming back from China, I had a layover in Dallas.  My plan was to -- as I always do -- jump off the plane, run to customs, and be the first one to the gate for the next flight.  The only thing standing in my way is, of course, the TSA.

And now the TSA has pornoscanners, which I think is the most ridiculous thing ever.  I don't want to talk politics too much here because I much prefer to keep this one personal, but the whole idea is just so ridiculous that I will never allow myself to do it.  Most obviously, it's incredibly invasive.  The government is literally looking inside your pants.  Second, who knows how secure those images are?  Less obviously, it solves a red herring problem.  The problem is not that I might bring a pen, a coin, or a razor blade onto a plane.  The problem is that the cockpit is attached to the passenger area.  You will never, never, never have a safe plane until that problem is solved.  It's a fundamental flaw in the system.

Sorry.  That was more politics that I wanted here.

Anyway, as soon as I got to the front of the line, I went to the side of the pornoscanner and asked to opt out.  The girl who was guiding people through, maybe 20-something, maybe Hispanic, seemed nice enough, somewhat quietly called, "Male assist?"  Yes, with the question mark at the end.  I sat at the doorway beside the X-ray machine and waited.  All of my bins went through.  All five of them, since you need a separate one for your shoes (kill me) and your computer (are you serious) and your jacket (come on).  Note, of course, that my wallet, passport, and phone are all in those bins on the other side of the checkpoint doorway from me.

I waited a while.  Someone came through the doorway with a bunch of bins.  I saw how they unlocked it, which was easy -- literally just pulling out a pin from the side of the door.  I filed it away in my just in case folder.  I felt a bit impatient because it was getting on five minutes probably, and I had plans.  I needed to eat, go to the bathroom, get some water, and most of all I needed to submit an assignment for my operating systems class which I had found out existed that morning when I was in Nanjing and needed to turn in after six hours on trains/subways and then another twelve hours on a plane.  Anyway, I asked if she could call again.  "Male assist?"

I waited some more.  I looked around.  No one was looking at me.  I was pretty sure I could just walk through the door and no one would even notice.  I also noticed that all of my bins were still sitting there where anyone could just grab my wallet, walk away, and I'd just be sitting there behind the gate yelling they stole my wallet! but basically unable to do anything as the terribly incompetent TSA would probably just let it happen.  That frustrated me, even just the idea.  I waited for a long time again, then asked for another call.  "Male assist?"  Seriously, it was like she didn't even want me to get a pat down.

I waited yet more.  At this point it was getting kind of ridiculous, like maybe 15 to 20 minutes of just sitting at this door and waiting.  I was very, very seriously considering just opening the door and walking through.  There's a good chance that no one would have noticed, and if anyone did notice, I probably would have gotten a pat down, WHICH IS ALL I WANTED, YOU GUYS.

Just as I was on the verge of making a move along those lines, a 20-something white dude from the TSA starts walking over.  I make eye contact with him.  But before he walks over to where I'm standing, he turns and walks into the pornoscanner and waves someone to come in.  I maintain eye contact, and say hey or something like that, and he pokes his head out.  "Hey, do you think you could help me out here?"

And, quite sarcastically right off the bat, he said, "Hey man, I'm doing this right now, sooooo~~~"

I said, "Yes, I know, but could you perhaps call someone to come help me?"  The girl who had called three times was clearly listening.  I didn't plan that, but considered it a benefit.

He started moving his hands flippantly, pointing at himself and showing his palms and such, "Sorry, dude, I have to do this thing right now, sooooo I can't help you, kay?"  And then proceeded to raise his hands in the air and squat a little bit to demonstrate to someone how to be pornoscanned.  I thought it was interesting that this job of his didn't include his mouth, which is what I wanted him to use to call for someone.  It's TSA agents, though.  How are they supposed to figure these things out?

She said, "Male assist?"

It was not very effective.

Eventually, probably 25 minutes after I had started waiting, a pretty polite older guy came over and gave me my government mandated pat down.  I noticed that the cocky young white guy that I asked to help me out had actually called for a male assist also after he realized I was still there waiting five minutes or so after he had accosted me.  I quietly said thank you to him as I walked through, but purposefully also smoldered at him because he seemed like a punk.  I had never been so relieved to have a government worker feel up my junk.  At long last, I could reclaim responsibility for my passport and submit my assignment.

It's the little things in life, you know.

Thanks, TSA.

Peace out.

New Year's Devolutions

I've started to feel pretty guilty about my terrible discipline in memorializing things for the past couple years.  I used to take pictures all the time, but now I find it more annoying to carry a camera around in my pocket for some reason.  I've also heard that doing that leads to the lens problems that always seem to destroy my cameras.  But really I'm just making excuses.  I should take more pictures.  I also should have been writing more.  I know that I'm going to regret the disorganized trail of breadcrumbs that I left for myself for the past couple years once I'm a little bit further down the road.  Ugh.

Sorry, self.

Anyway, so the goal is to write three posts in any subset of my journals that I feel like per week.  That might include public and private ones, or just ones that (if anyone is still reading this...) you don't know about, so... just a heads up?  Also a heads up to my future self.  =)

I guess you might also notice that this, the first entry of the year, is taking place nearly three weeks in.  I know =(  But I was in China!  So it's not really my fault.  Kind of.

The other resolution/regression to previous behavior is to floss more.  I'm not sure why I feel like that's such a big deal, but I've always heard that it's extremely important to dental health, and I know that I don't do it enough.  So....  yeah, I know, that's boring as hell.  But it's a worthwhile goal, right?

Right, guys?

Peace out.

Ambulance Smoking

The other day, I was riding my bike home from Wawa pretty late at night - maybe about midnight or sometime shortly after.  When I turned down the alley to get on the road that would take me in the right direction, I noticed there were people there, which normally doesn't happen.  I slowed down, and then noticed that the people were lifting a stretcher out of an ambulance and then taking the patient into the hospital.

And I noticed that the patient was perhaps an 80 year old woman who looked quite frail, in a night gown, with short curly hair, and had a lit cigarette in her hand, smoking it while the paramedics rolled her inward.

Peace out.

Auto-connect

(At first I thought that Auto-connect would be a really witty title for this post as a play on "auto-correct," but then I realized that auto-connect is a real concept anyway and doesn't force whoever reads it to be surprised in the way that I hoped.  Oh well.)

Every once in a while when I'm typing something on my phone, auto-correct will correct it to the name of somebody in my phone book.  Recently, I was typing a message to someone and misspelled some word, which led auto-correct to suggest "Gineros" from my phone book, and I realized that I hadn't talked to her and had hardly thought of her perhaps in months.  Also quite recently, a misspelling caused it to insert the name "Vivienne," my artist friend from China, who I had also not considered in a good while.

It was nice to think of them.  It does feel a little bit strange to me, though, that the only reason I thought of them was because my spell checker did its job wrong.

Peace out.

The Very Last Goodbye to Nana

My nana (grandmother on my mom's side) died this Friday.

I was never particularly close to her, as I'm not particularly close to many people in my family.  I haven't cried about it (yet?).  That does make me feel a little bit strange, but there are also some explanations for that.  If I have grandchildren, I hope they would cry for me.  We'll see.

Apparently Uncle Bill predicted that she would die on Good Friday.  Not only did that come true, but her death occurred between noon and 3PM, which are supposed to be the holiest hours of that day.  I'm not religious, and this doesn't change that, but it's definitely an interesting coincidence.

My mom said that the nurse who was taking care of her, a guy whose name she told me but now I forget, knew that she would die that day.  Mom also said that she had a feeling and made sure to get to the hospital earlier than usual.  The nurse told her, after she had died, that there's a process called mottling (knees, feet, and some other places turn bluish-purple) which is nearly a sure signal that death is coming within a day and that he had noticed it earlier on nana's knees and feet.  That seems so strange to me, but I've looked it up, and apparently mottling is part of what's referring to as "active dying."  Everything else that's involved with it seems scary to me.  But everything about death is scary to me.

Nana had been quite sick for a long time.  I think it was in the fall of 2009 that she had her first/major stroke.  She was about 88 years old at that time, and everyone had themselves convinced that this would probably be the end for her (or that it would come very, very quickly).  She moved out of her retirement community and into assisted living.  Weeks become months, and then eventually those became years, and she kept on fighting it.

She was definitely not herself after that, though.  She voted in 2008 and had opinions on Barack Obama and Sarah Palin and John McCain (she was a lifelong Democrat, but didn't trust Obama, but ended up voting for him because she couldn't stand the idea of "that woman" being in the White House).  After her stroke, she lost a lot of her awareness.  She would sometimes think that my mom -- who was probably the closest family member to her for many, many years -- was Nancy, my mom's sister who died around 1996.  Sometimes she thought that it was the 1960s or 1970s.  Like many old people, she began to complain that people were stealing things from her.  She stopped doing her puzzles.

She eventually started saying that she wanted to die.  It was very, very sad.

I believe that old people who are in a situation like hers do want honestly to die, even ones who may not have full awareness.  It's not like they think it's a good choice, but I'm sure they still have the ability to realize it's not going to get better, and it will just be painful until it ends, so why not do that now?  But there's a lot of shame about wanting to end your life in our culture, not to mention in Catholicism, and nana had always been a very devout Catholic.

Mom said that nana was pretty peaceful during her last few days, but that on Good Friday, that changed.  She seemed to be anxious and yelling (kind of), indicating the pain she was in.  They gave her pain medication to try to calm her down, and tried some other things too, but nothing worked.  They thought that maybe her position was getting tiresome, and that maybe they should move her to a chair and have her stop laying down.  So they picked her up and tried to transfer her to a chair, but it seems like that was extremely traumatic for her.  Her eyes went wide, and she became unresponsive.  She was still breathing.  My mom held her.  Her eyes closed.  She stopped breathing and won't start again.

My mom thinks that nana realized she was going to die that day, too, and then realized also that she wanted to keep on living.  I don't know if that's true, but I guess it certainly could be possible.  I could easily imagine myself being in constant pain and claiming that I want to die, but could I pull that trigger?  I seriously doubt that.  Maybe that'd be different if I believed in God.

Sometimes all the anxiety that people have around death makes me wonder if anyone actually believes in God.  They say there are no atheists in fox holes, but I think the truth is that there are actually no deists who are actively dying.  You know the blackness is coming and you will do anything to stop it.

I do feel disappointed with myself that I was never close to her.  I was here for almost the whole last year and saw her, I think, just once.  It's easy to just say that we're all going to die and we won't remember then anyway, so who cares?  But of course that means that the only thing that could possibly have meaning is what you do before someone dies.  I never found it very easy to talk to her, but I think that seeing her could have made her happy.  Maybe that's worth beating myself up about a little bit.

Anyway, I just hope that she's not hurting anymore.

Peace out.

That's What He Said to Me

[Quoting a WWII Naval flight nurse]

"I was checking this one boy.  And I saw tears coming down his face. I said, am I hurting you? And he said, no. He said, I'm just thinking about all the people I killed.  That's what he said to me."

Peace out.

"From the Republic of Conscience" in Paragraph Form

Just because I happen to like it better this way.

///


When I landed in The Republic of Conscience, it was so noiseless when the engines stopped I could hear a curlew high above the runway.  At immigration, the clerk was an old man who produced a wallet from his homespun coat and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.  The woman in customs asked me to declare the words of our traditional cures and charms to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

No porters.  No interpreter.  No taxi.

You carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

Fog is a dreaded omen there, but lightning spells universal good and parents hang swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.  Salt is their precious mineral.  And seashells are held to the ear during births and funerals.  The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.  Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat - the sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen, the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.

At their inauguration, public leaders must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep to atone for their presumption to hold office -- 

--and to affirm their faith that all life sprang from salt in tears which the sky-god wept after he dreams his solitude was endless.

I came back from that frugal republic with my two arms the one length, the customs woman having insisted my allowance was myself.

The old man rose and gazed into my face and said that was official recognition that I was now a dual citizen.  He therefore desired me, when I got home, to consider myself a representative and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.

Their embassies, he said, were everywhere, but operated independently, an no ambassador would ever be relieved.

///

Peace out.

Clutches

Every time that I think I'm about to escape the clutches of English teaching forever, it comes right back at me.

I got a new schedule this Saturday morning that claimed that I would be teaching nothing but math all the time basically from now on.  I'd be teaching it to the 3rd and 4th sections of kids going to USA and also the 1-year section of kids going to Canada.  I basically jumped up and down when I saw the schedule, I was so excited.

But then today, the fourth section of USA kids dissolved.  There weren't enough of them, they didn't think they had enough time, and they didn't think their English was good enough to handle the curriculum we run.  So they moved them into another section of some other crazy class, and now there's no fourth section of USA kids.

So instead, I get to teach more English.  And to top it all off, I also get to go to a meeting at 8AM tomorrow (even though I don't have anything until 3:30 in the afternoon) to tell me that I have to teach English again.

I don't know if there will be any more math classes that start this year.  I'm really afraid that I'll have to teach English all year.  What a nightmare that would be...

Peace out.

Burj Dubai

Sometimes when I'm in high places, I get really bad cases of The Call of the Void. I think it originally comes from a French term, which I don't have the motivation to Google at the moment. But basically, it means that when you're standing next to some type of high ledge, you get an urge to jump over the edge or try to fly or try to jump to the nearest platform otherwise and see how it goes.

I have a couple of problems with things like that. When I'm rooftopping, a lot of times I'll be standing next to the edge, and the next thing I know I'm experiencing a wild fantasy of myself jumping over the edge and then free-falling almost all the way down. I can kind of feel it in the pit of my stomach, but wake myself out of it before something bad happens. It's kind of similar to the feeling I get when I'm driving and I imagine myself being rammed by an 18-wheeler from behind every time I change lanes, or for some reason swerving into the car in the oncoming direction. Of course I never want any of those things to happen, but they play out in my mind all the time.

Maybe it's because September 11th was coming up again and people were talking about the anniversary before it came, but I suppose that jumping had been on my mind a little bit. And sometime over the weekend - perhaps Saturday night - I remember having a quite vivid dream of myself at the top of the Burj Dubai, somehow outside of it, and then looking over the edge and just jumping. It's about 2,700 feet down from there, and my dream held me there to experience the fall. I remember thinking about what the impact would be like, what must be going through someone's head as they're falling. Jesus, did I seriously make that decision? There really isn't any going back now. I wonder if this will hurt. I wonder how much it'll hurt if it does. How long could it possibly hurt? I'd pretty much die instantly, right? Dream me thought all of those.

Peace out.

Telecom

As you probably know if you've been talking to me (or reading my blog), I've been pretty upset with the internet speeds here for basically no reason except that it prevents me from doing the online job that I have in the states, which I am always a little bit hesitant to detail, but maybe I will do sometime.

Anyway, I went to the apartment of a teacher who lives nearby recently to check their internet speeds with regards to servers in New Jersey, and discovered that the download speed he has is about 5.3x faster than what I have. I'm at .36mbps, and he's at 1.85mbps, or some numbers very very close to that.

I need to do another test again at another time to be sure that those are actually the speeds I'm getting, but if that's the case, then it might actually be worth it to find a place that I can just use for ONLY doing work. But I'd have to figure out how much it would cost to do that and how much more I would make. So let's do that here!

In the last 10 days, I've made about $240 on the site, which is about 1/5 of what I would normally make. Of course, I would work less because I'm in China. But so let's assume that I'd make maybe $2,000 per month, as opposed to the $700 that I'd be making now, so we have $1,300 to play with. China Telecom DSL is about 190RMB per month, which is ~$25. So unless an apartment is like $1,200 I guess it looks like it is actually worth it.

So maybe I should do that. I'll have to ask if there are cheap apartments anywhere that can just be a work cave. But I also wonder if it'd be worth it if I end up getting other jobs. I guess we'll see.

Peace out.

Jerbs

Two people have offered me jobs since I got here, which is like two more jobs than I've been offered in my life basically.

Well, not really, but it does feel kind of different when people personally reach out to me to see if I'd be interested in something like that.

The first one was extremely unexpected. A couple of the girls upstairs, Jenny and Kara, were having a pot luck dinner and invited a bunch of teachers to come and join. James and his wife were there, Danni and Courtney were there, and a few other people. A former teacher at JCIE also came named Keith, who looked and spoke fluent Chinese, but was actually Korean. We all talked a bit about colleges somehow, and it came up that I'd gone to a bunch of them.

Sometime shortly before he left, Keith asked if I'd like to talk to some of his kids about the different places I went, what I liked and didn't like, and what I thought about transferring and all the applications and et cetera. I said sure, why not, and we arranged for me to go about two weeks later. After I talked to the kids for a while (just gave a presentation to about six of them because many were away), he asked if I might like to work with his company part time to help kids with all the miserable parts of the US admission process. I told him sure, though I also told him I'd likely leave China in May. So we'll see how that goes.

The second one was a bit more predictable to me. I was just sitting on the rooftop playing guitar and James, who is Chinese and married to our teacher Angela, and asked me to keep playing and singing. I sang the first verse/chorus of Seaweed Sheets, then did the chill vamp at the end of it, and figured that was enough. The song is too long to do the whole thing, so I just called it quits there. He asked me afterwards if I liked to play in bars by any chance, and if I would be interested in playing at some local ones nearby that he knows needs some players. I was pretty sure someone would ask me this eventually in China, but what I was surprised about was that he only saw me play guitar, which I am complete shit at to be very honest. I told him that I could possibly do it, but I would only play guitar for a maximum of 40 minutes, but I could do longer if I had a keyboard. I really don't feel very comfortable on guitars at all. He said he'd talk to his friends and see what they needed.

So I guess we'll see how that goes. They could both be pretty interesting, because I think both will probably help me meet more Chinese people than I do here. I mean, sure I meet the kids, but this place is kind of like a jail for them and I don't ever really see them at all after class, which makes me very sad and also makes it hard to motivate myself to learn Chinese. But maybe these will help.

Peace out.

Blue's Guitar

The guitar that I got here is a very stark blue color, kind of like the color of my eyes, though it has gradients going along the curves so it's not a uniform color. I think that it would look kind of girly with most people, but I think it matches me and my style and all the colors I wear (and also my eyes).

It's actually not a very good guitar. I got it for about $30 at a store up the road, and I thought it was okay at the store, but now I'm a little bit eehh about it. The neck is bent inward for the middle strings, which for some reason I though I had heard was an advantage for barring chords, and now I'm realizing probably, if anything, makes it more difficult, and also makes it impossible to use my capo which I brought from home. Also, I'm pretty sure some of the frets are misplaced because if I tune the guitar to within about 1Hz or 2Hz when the strings are open (which is extremely close to perfect), then some chords sound good and some chords just sound miserable, like the guitar isn't even close to in tune.

Anyway, it's fine enough because I'm not actually good at guitar, don't really like guitar, and I'm cheap as hell anyway. Sometimes I wonder if I'd like guitar or be good at guitar if I actually had one that didn't suck, or used the right strings for me so that I wouldn't still be afraid of barre chords.

The only place that I really feel comfortable playing my guitar is on the roof because almost no one can hear me, although Angela and her husband James can hear me sometimes because they keep the window open. It's starting to get a little bit cold now, and tonight I wished that I had a jacket when I was on the roof. I'm worried that I won't have anywhere to play anything as soon as it starts to actually get chilly. I think that possibly some of the classrooms might be left open at night, but they're supposed to be locked from what I know.

I've thought about getting an electric keyboard too - I found an 88key online w/ MIDI input from Taobao for $200 - but I fear that I would bug my neighbors. I considered asking to be put in the apartment down the hall so that I wouldn't bother anyone. I should actually look into that and see if it can be done.

Peace out.

Fee Lines

There are a lot more cats in my life here than I had imagined.

I just came back from the Taiwan style rice restaurant that I talked about in my last post, and the xiaomao was there again. It came in and out of the dining room, and once was only there for a few seconds, but later I managed to capture it and make it sit with me. I put it on my lap and just rubbed his shoulders and face and pet his back. I guess it's a him, but I really don't know. He's mostly white with some black and orange and is very cute and fragile. I gave him some chicken, and he seemed to like it.

There's also a family of cats that lives to the north of the school near all of the apartments and buildings there, and I think they mostly take refuge in the plants-that-are-actually-gates-and-fences that separate all of the different properties from each other. When I charge my bike, I notice them going in and out of the bushes, jumping up and down from the ledges to get back home. One of them is a kitten, a little brown and black guy, and he likes to hang out in front of the college, and sometimes even goes and sits with the security guard or sits underneath his chair. Apparently he's a little shy and doesn't really like to be touched. Angela asked the security guard, what are you going to do about him? Won't he be a problem here? And he said (in Chinese, of course), oh, no, it's okay, he usually gets bored and goes outside to do anything he wants.

I thought that was a nice attitude. And that's how JCIE accidentally adopted a kitty.

Last night when I went upstairs to play guitar on the roof, I noticed a cat in the hallway of the sixth floor when I got off the elevator. It was black and white and full-grown but looked cute, so I started walking down the hallway towards it, but it was a while away. I suppose that it got scared either by my footsteps or the elevator closing behind me, but it jumped and then ran into the door that was open in front of it. The owners closed the door behind it, and I didn't get to see it again. Kara and Jenny told me today that his name is something like Socks or Mittens. Seems fitting.

Peace out.

Don't Get Off, Just Get Off Me

I had dinner at the "Taiwan Style Rice" restaurant across the street on Friday night around 6:30, which is a confusing name because their rice is just like everyone else's in China. Maybe I've only been eating Taiwan style rice. I'll never know.

Anyway, I brought some flashcards with me to study before my food came, but I forgot to pick them up because I was pulling my wallet out of my pocket as I stood up from the table and paid. I got an ice cream cone or bar of some type and went back to the school to eat it in the main courtyard (actually a basketball courtyard), and realized just as I was about to go back inside that I'd forgotten my flashcards. I was worried they'd throw them away - actually, I was worried they would have thrown them away already - so I walked back to the restaurant right away. It's a 60-second walk, so it's not too annoying or anything.

As I was walking over, right as I got to the corner of the street, I just heard someone shouting, "Hey! Hey!" into the street. I was about 99.9% sure it wasn't me because I really don't know anyone in the area, and anyone that I do know certainly wouldn't shout "Hey!" to me in the street like that. I remember thinking the only way it was possible is if it was someone from maybe Semester at Sea or high school or PSU or something like that who noticed me. I looked around. I noticed Azam walking behind me and to my left, and he also seemed to be unphased by the shouting.

I swear that as soon as I turned my head back around, there was some 20-something Asian girl standing right in front of me. I was sure she must be confused. She said, hello. I said, do you know me? She said, no, how are you? She put her hand out to shake, so I shook her hand and said I was good. As she shook my hand, she leaned in closer and closer, and I realized that quite likely she was trying to kiss me somewhere between my neck and collarbone, though I couldn't figure out where. I backed off as quickly as I could, and also realized that she was crazy.

I tried to take my hand out of the hand shake, but she squeezed and wouldn't let go. She kept talking, but I don't have any idea what she said. I was much more concerned with the things I was saying at that point, which were along the lines of "Let go of me," "Get the f*** away from me," and "What the f*** is wrong with you, leave." I noticed that she had come from a table that included some foreign people (and also her English seemed pretty good actually). I looked to them, maybe for support or something, and they just kind of shook their heads and waved their hands. I had no idea what that meant.

Was she drunk? Was she just crazy? Did they make her do it as a dare? Did they just say, "Oh, any old foreigner, they love Chinese chicks, take your pick?" If that was her mindset, it must have been quite a shock to her when I literally jerked her off my body, getting close to throwing her on the ground, and went into the Taiwan style rice restaurant to pick up my flashcards.

I thought about staying there for a few minutes so that the girl would definitely go away, but I didn't want her to control my actions. I also thought about walking the long way home but, again, didn't want to alter my life because a crazy person existed. So I just walked back.

She saw me again, and came at me again, talking loudly, but I have no idea what she was saying, again. She grabbed my arm/hand, not in an affectionate way but in a way that made me feel like I was being assaulted, and I really, really wanted to get her off at me. I yelled at her again and tugged my arm, but she didn't let go. She held on strong and tried to pull me back. She pulled my arm across her body and I remember it touching her stomach, which wasn't quite fat and wasn't quite thin. I had managed to walk to the big road across from the school at that point, looked out in front of me, saw a few seconds of opening, jerked my arm from her forcefully and darted into the road. I figured she'd have to be absolutely crazy to chase me into the street like that. I also realized that if she continued to chase me in the street, I could hold her in the street in a dangerous position until she had to choose to either run away or die, at which point I'm sure she would choose run away. I didn't really want to do that, but I'm going to be honest, it did cross my mind.

//

I asked Azam if he remembered seeing it happen on Monday when we were at lunch. He said he didn't. I asked anyone else if they knew anything about some girl who did that at Jack's Place. No one said they knew anything. A guy in a restaurant overheard me talking about it and said, "Ah, yeah, being such a chick magnet sure is a curse," and I responded, "No, really, I felt like I was being assaulted."

So that's twice now.

Peace out.

8AM

I've never had trouble waking up early in my life before. In high school, waking up at 6:37 or so every day seemed like nothing. And I'd fall asleep at 11:30, sometimes as late as 12:30, with almost no problem every night.

What a luxury, man.

I teach 8:00 AM classes three days a week now, and they are killing me. I don't know why, I have literally no idea, but I haven't been able to fall asleep until after 2:00 AM by myself at the absolute earliest since I got those classes assigned to me. Some nights I took some fraction of a sleeping pill because I knew I was going to die in class if I didn't, but some nights I just try on my own, and sometimes I'm up until 3:00 or 4:00 on those nights struggling to fall asleep.

I got a pad for my bed, which didn't really seem to help. Making it colder so that I can use the big comforter does seem to help a little bit, but not really.

Normally I wouldn't really mind. I get to all of my classes on time, even if I feel a little dead. But I feel so exhausted afterward that sometimes I fall asleep, and that's gotten me in trouble twice so far. Once, I fell asleep at 4:00 PM or so and didn't wake up until 7:10 PM, which was ten minutes after I was supposed to be on duty at night study. That sucked. The other time, I just completely slept through a science meeting. I woke up at the tail end of it and rushed in just in time to talk to my boss about my classes' progress, but I still felt terribly stupid about it. I feel like it might have messed up other things, as well, but I can't remember them at the moment.

Sigh.

I know that a schedule change is coming up next week because some teachers have to go out to the sticks for a few weeks to teach some special program. I really, really hope that maybe I'll get moved from 8AMs because I just can't do it. But I'm also really afraid that - since some of the English teachers are leaving - I'll have to teach English again.

And god damn, do I hate teaching English.

Peace out.

Derangements

I gave my kids in my Canada class a problem today that was basically like this: A monkey is throwing a ball labelled 1, 2, 3 into boxes labelled 1, 2, 3 randomly. What is the probability that none of the balls go into the right box?

For something with such small numbers, it's easy to do by hand. One student was trying to figure out the rigorous way to do it and asked me what the answer was, so I just laid it out by hand and finished it in a minute or so. But then he said, "But what if it's a bigger number?" So I started to work on it with, say, 20 boxes.

So I started to work on it in class, but didn't solve it. I went to dinner and thought a little bit about it, but didn't really make much progress and got distracted by Chinese and also food. So I started to work on it when I came back to my apartment, and it turned out that it was much more difficult than I had anticipated for n greater than 5 or so.

It turns out that you need to use a concept called derangements, which is basically when you find all of the permutations where nothing has been mapped to its proper spot. As in, 1 doesn't go in the first position, 2 doesn't go in the second position, etc. There was a famous problem that was equivalent to "define derangements" from a long time ago called the hat problem (or umbrella problem) where n people go to a party, and you want to find how many ways (or the probability) they leave with all the wrong umbrellas.

I eventually figured out and understood whatever I needed to know about it. !n = (n-1) x (!(n-1) + !(n-2)). Basically, imagine that the first guy at a party picks a hat, call it hat #k. Now think about what guy #k does. If guy #k picks the hat #1, then what's left is !(n-2). Since there are (n-1) ways that guy #1 can pick a guy #k, this is (n-1) x !(n-2). Now imagine that guy #k doesn't pick hat #1. So there are (n-1) ways that guy #1 can pick hat #k, and then we still need to derange !(n-1), so that's (n-1) x !(n-1).

It took me way too long to understand that paragraph above. I think most of the reason why is because I misread the Wikipedia summary of the explanation. I actually went so far as to edit it with my own misunderstanding, and then edit it back when I realized I misunderstood it and why. But anyway, after that, I was able to understand pretty much whatever else there was about it, including the summation formula and another proof via the inclusion-exclusion principle, which I wish I had seen first, sigh.

I don't really know why I wrote this. It was a little bit nice to do math for like 4 hours tonight, but also a little bit dumb and I felt pretty miserable with myself for taking so long to understand some of the things I was doing and solve some of the problems I was working on. I need to do more problem solving and programming, but also more Chinese, and also more music and guitar and drawing, aye...

Peace out.

Proximity

As frustrating as it was sometimes to live in the orphanage in Cambodia, one thing that I didn't realize about it until just now was how effective it was at helping me to learn Khmer. The only other foreigner there with any regularity at all was Mike, and sometimes even he would just randomly disappear. So if I wanted to have any interaction, there was a very good chance that it had to be in Khmer. I mean, I lived with 70 kids or so, of which probably about 15 could speak reasonable English. So for 55 of the people I lived with, I had to learn Khmer to really communicate with them in any effective way.

Here, though, I live exclusively with foreigners. On my floor, there's one American guy who's married to a Chinese woman, but she speaks really good English and I don't think he speaks really any Chinese at all. And elsewhere in the building, it's the same - either only English speakers, or just people who speak really good English in general.

So there's no reason to speak Chinese here. In Cambodia, I needed it if I wanted to say or explain or listen anything at all with what was going on around me. Additionally, there was a lot more commotion because there were 70 kids running around. Here, I just live with a bunch of English speaking adults. We all sit in our apartments and stare at screens.

So I've done a poor job with the Chinese so far, and I'm pretty disappointed about that.

Peace out.