Lucha

I went to Lucha last night for drinks and socializing with people from the office.  I haven't been there since basically the end of December, so I figured it would be good to see people.  I talked to DJ for a bit, and also Dave K -- mostly because he bought a generator (???).  I also met the new office manager, Jai, who wasn't going to the restaurant, and mostly just shook his hand and then stole some candy from the candy bowl.  He probably thinks I'm a bit weird.

I think I mostly talked to Jess once we actually both got there, which was after I finished yelling at DJ for not watching the Superbowl at all, even the terrible bobble catch and the interception afterward.  She said that she was feeling pretty stressed about the current project -- a pretty large insurance company that's rebuilding things from the ground up -- because she's being paid by one person to accomplish a certain thing, but the customer basically won't allow her to accomplish that.  And she said it makes her feel increasingly flight-risky.

I saw a girl there who I had met recently at a gathering.  Near the end of the party, she had said something to the effect of, "It was really nice talking to you about stuff tonight.  I'd actually like it if we hung out sometimes."  I said pretty much the same.  I guess I didn't make eye contact with her at Lucha, but it wasn't a very crowded place, and I think it would be hard not to see and/or recognize me.  Regardless, this is maybe the third or fourth time that we've crossed paths without her saying anything.  Yes, I did reach out to her one time.  Anyway, I guess that's how it goes.

At one point while I was talking to her, I was looking over her shoulder and noticed two waiters, both guys, wearing black shirts and leaning back against the wall right near the entrance to the kitchen, which was at the northwest side of the place.  A waitress walked past in a red shirt, and maybe said something to one of the guys as she walked into the kitchen.  She stopped, backed out a step to get closer to him a little bit, and he held up his left hand (she was on his right side) for a high five.  She put up her right hand to go for it, and he moved his left hand behind his head and stroked his hair back.

Both of the guys threw their heads back and laughed.  Even though I was looking at this from behind her, I can't imagine she would have any reaction other than saying ugh, and she shook her head and walked away while the two guys continued to giggle.

Peace out.

The Wrong Maria

When I was teaching at gov school in 2013, I met a student named Maria K, and she became one of the students I was closest to, so we eventually traded phone numbers and occasionally check in on each other and the like (she lives and goes to school in the opposite corner of the state).

In early 2014, I met another girl named Maria K, where the "K" here is the same as the "K" there, and became pretty good friends with her, so I got her phone number as well.  Since I already had a Maria K in my phone, I put her in as "Maria K (Jefferson)."  I generally text her more often since she lives a few blocks from me and such.

Anyway, last Friday, I was coming home from a mini-reunion with some kids from 2014 at the KOP mall, and realized as I pulled into a grocery store parking lot that I had some free time that night for hanging out.  So I went down my text conversation list, knowing it had been a while since I'd seen Maria, found Maria K, and then wrote a text, "Busy/free?"

A minute or so later, she responded, "Mostly free!  What's up?"

So I said I was grocery shopping, and what time will you be actually free?

So she said, "Just tell me when you're done and I'll be free =)" or something very close to that.  I finished shopping, drove the car back to the garage, got on my bike, pulled out my phone and texted her, "Biking to your place now!"

When I got off my bike about five minutes later at Maria's place, noticing that everything seemed to be dark, I figured I should check if she had texted me back and maybe was at the library or something like that.  When I did, I saw a text that said, "OMG This is the wrong Maria K!"

=(

Peace out.

The Things He Loved

This Saturday, I went to the Melrose for the first time in my life with Chloe and two of her friends, Wes (her boyfriend) and Harry (a friend).  I can't remember exactly how we got onto the subject other than that we were talking about funk, or things being funky, and also it turns out that Wes is a drummer for a funk band sometimes.

So he told us about this show that he played in a pretty small venue, and the entire time there was some guy dancing alone up near the stage, pretty apparently drunk, but really just having the time of his life.  He continued doing that through the entire show, and after the band stopped and cleaned up, he went out to find them.

Once he did, he just started talking to them -- keep in mind, pretty drunk.  Most of what he did was basically just hyping them up, talking about how great their show was and how much he loved it.  And then towards the end, he said, "Yeah man, you know I just loooove funk." Then he paused as if he was going to say more.  "...and women."  And he paused once more.

"...and my children."

Peace out.

The Salt on the Earth

My dad always yells at me for not wearing a helmet when I ride my bike and, additionally, not having any lights or reflectors really on my bike.  I know that it's clearly a bad decision and nothing but bad could come from it, but it's kind of annoying =\ I really have gotten lucky for my entire life having not been killed or severely screwed up because of this, though.  I should really probably put some lights on, at least.  But also, I'm planning to not use my bike very much once my motorbike is fixed.

Anyway, I really haven't had any incident on my bike pretty much ever, so I was pretty surprised at how the first one came about.  I was biking back home from my parents' parking garage after the hockey game on Sunday night, and I was through the Convention Center I think on 7th street and was heading towards 9th Street -- that is, I'd be biking past the 7/11 and then turning right to go up 9th.  Since that road goes the wrong way for me at that point, though, I got up on the curb.

I wasn't going very fast at that point.  I would guess maybe something like 10 - 12 miles per hour.  I was hardly looking at the ground because there was no one in front of me, and as I was arcing the path of my bike back to the part of the sidewalk that I wanted to be on, I just felt everything stop responding to what I wanted it to do.  I was still trying to pedal, but wasn't going faster.  I was trying to stay straight up, but was not.  I pulled on the brakes, which only made it worse, and my bike tipped right over onto its left side, completing dumping me in the process.

Once I landed, I knew why it had happened.  That portion of the sidewalk had been salted to a ridiculous degree.  I mean, so salted that I actually couldn't see the sidewalk for most of that area through which I had fallen... with the exception of where my tires had swiped the salt side to side and away.  So basically the sidewalk was just covered with little orbs of friction-reducing death.

Fortunately, I really wasn't hurt.  The chain didn't even come off my bike, which is surprising, because my bike is very much a piece of crap.  My jeans didn't rip despite the fact that they are also pieces of crap, though they did have stains of white salt on them.  I definitely made a pretty loud screeching and thudding sound in the process, and when I turned around to see what was around me, I saw a young black woman on the other corner.  She looked at me, never stopped walking, and then looked away without a second thought.

I do feel pretty fortunate that I as wearing mittens.  If I hadn't, I'm pretty sure my hands would've been torn to shreds.

Anyway, so that's the story of the first time I got hurt on a bike.  And I have absolutely no one to blame, really, but myself.

Peace out.

It's Working

I wrote a Chrome extension tonight that redirects me to my to-do list if I try to go to Reddit.  Or, at least, it redirects me 95% of the time.  It was basically four lines of code:

chrome.tabs.onUpdated.addListener(function(tabID, changeInfo, tab){
  if (tab.url && (tab.url.search("www.reddit.com") != -1)){
    if (Math.random() < 0.95){
      chrome.tabs.update(tabID,{url: "https://keep.google.com/#home"});
    }
  }
});

So far, it's working.  I can't believe it took me as long as it did to get around to writing it.

Probably because I was on Reddit all the time.

[Well, not really, but the joke isn't effective otherwise.]

Peace out.

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.