Hi Blog

It's pretty hard to make myself update the blog at the moment. For whatever reason, I feel pretty exhausted (most likely because I haven't been sleeping enough, surprisingly). To compound that, I hurt my knee playing ultimate yesterday. No problem for about the first five minutes, then a bunch of swelling, lack of flexibility and pain. Lots of pain, more than I've ever felt out of my knees before. At times it hurt enough that walking was painful. I played some more in the second half, during which we blew an 11-8 lead to lose 13-12. as you can imagine, I wasn't all that happy, and then to compound matters the pain came back in full force. I found some ice in the evening (not an easy task here in china) and also elevated the knee for a long time, but it's still pretty tender, and I've been trying not to walk around too much if I can avoid it (one might argue that this is a good excuse for being lazy). this weekend other than that was highly enjoyable, other than my newly bought "kaiweiyi" (cute, a loanword from japanese, as learned in class today...not sure what the characters are) water cube mug, complete with jingjing the panda hua/mascot thing on the side...adorable, really...except that the first time I put in boiling water the mug immediately cracked, spilling boiling water on my hands, my desk, my textbook and most of my papers. Beyond that rightly justified outburst of profanity, the weekend was very much smooth sailing, beyond not getting enough sleep.

On Friday night I went on a shopping spree, if you can call spending ten dollars a "spree". But a friend of mine and I together spent about three hours wandering around the little roadside goodsellers finding trinkets. I have an increasingly long shopping list, and it remains quite protracted, but I managed to acquire a belt (unfortunately too long...I was so worried about it being too short that I had them give me the longest one they could find), a rubik's cube which I plan to learn how to solve in the near future if my computer will ever fix itself, new headphones, a murakami book and...twilight. I have no idea why I felt the urge to buy it, other than my ever-present desire to gain favor with the ladies. But so far I've already knocked out about 200 pages. It's pretty swift reading. I feel that the longer I read the weaker the writing gets, and there are also all of two, rather wooden characters in the entire book, as far as I can tell. But it's not meant to be fine art, and it did cost maybe a buck and a half US. It's worth mentioning that none of the things I bought could possibly be real...how can headphones cost 10 kuai (haggled to a buck US)? But they sounded decent, and if they break next week I guess I'll just go back again.

wow, I can tell I'm tired by my overuse of clauses. sorry about that.

My principal leisure activity the last couple of days has been checking in on the outcome of the National Scrabble Championships, being held as we speak in Dayton, ohio. It's the first time I haven't been to nationals since I started seriously playing. That's not all that significant to me, but I really do miss playing. I played my first game in two months today after finding a way to surpass the great firewall of china and download quackle, the best computer-playing program out there. The tiredness means that my brain is having trouble refinding its scrabble brainways, and it's sort of frustrating that I can't play whenever I want. Even more frustrating is that I can visualize myself being there right now, and the thought kills me. I could be competitive with the folks who are there; a lot of my friends are doing pretty well for themselves. Maybe it's more the camaraderie that I miss - for all the great people I've met here, I definitely miss my scrabble buddies. I already missed a wedding this summer - and sure, that's not a reason not to go to china, but sometimes I feel as if I'm asleep, in a protracted dream, and when I go back everybody will have changed and be older and moved on with their lives in directions perpendicular to my own.

The blog topics I have written in my journal are starting to feel out of date. They've been on my mind for a month, two months, and maybe I've processed them and come to my own conclusions about them. That being said, I think I'm going to try to pick my favorite one and write about it. I'll get through the backlog some day. if my computer problems are ever fixed. grr.

These are all fairly good topics, but I think maybe what I'll talk about right now is how I feel about my peers. And while I assume that pretty much no one else reads this journal except for my two followers (mom and dad...thanks, guys) I think I'll apologize in advance if anyone's hurt by what I said. anyway. the composition of the different courses is interesting. second year is mostly freshmen, with the occasional old person like myself. third year seems to have a lot of heritage speakers, fifth year is mostly grad students. fourth year consists of a big majority of preppies, your good old-fashioned sort, the kind yale doesn't actually seem to have that much of (maybe I hang out in the wrong crowds). I was pretty curious about why that should be, until I had an epiphany: If you've made it to your fourth year of chinese, you're probably in one of two situations: you either grew up speaking chinese at least part of the time, OR you started in high school. what kind of high school has a chinese program? probably an elite private school. my high school classmate here, lanben, started in high school. It only placed him into second year. but other fourth years went to places such as eton, andover, the usual bunch. leading to the curious demographic trend in question. Although maybe there are other explanations.

on a whole other note, something that I talk about every so often is about the nature of the community here. Because after all, everyone here, just about, is from harvard or yale, which tends to imply that they have secretly already done ridiculous things with their lives, even if they're only freshmen. But I went through a period when I felt let down by the student community here. A lot of them work extremely hard, and it's hard not be impressed with their skills. but some of them I feel are here for the ride. A lot of folks speak english in private, fourth year students especially, for whatever reason. one fourth year buddy of mine had a great observation: not all of the people here necessarily like china that much. Maybe some people are here for resume boosting purposes, which hadn't occurred to me until someone else pointed out. More troubling to me, though, is what I feel is a sort of disrespect for local culture. Sometimes it's in small ways, sometimes big ones, but I often feel that people are here to take advantage of the country rather than understand it. I wish I had better examples. But I feel that there's a pervasive mindset, even amongst people who have been here for a while, of using the countries developing status as a boon. Whether it's getting a business started in china's booming economy, or plundering the local grocery store of their 2.5 kuai bottles of beer, a lot of people are here to make a profit, whether in small ways or with future intentions of working on a large scale. And I suppose I don't know why I'm here, or why it makes for a better worldview than anybody elses. But it's sort of a reality I'm learning to accept. Being at HBA is much like yale, or high school, or life anywhere else. A lot of people aren't in it for the purest of motives. But I've found a few people I seriously respect and will miss very, very much. So take this paragraph less as a plaint, and more as a retrospective on my early experience here in 中国。

My last little paragraph is about a chance encounter, this weekend, playing ultimate. Rumors abound in the beijing ultimate community about this guy named gareth, one of the best players in china, dating a beijing player. Well, I ran into him this weekend, and he's none other than a high school schoolmate of mine. I knew he was getting really good at ultimate but it somehow never occurred to me that it was the same guy, even though gareths are few and far between. but he's currently in chengdu, just started the first pickup group there, and writes for an english journal. Sometimes the best thing is running into people you haven't seen for a long time and finding out that they've done some extremely cool things with themselves. He's also moving to beijing, which will probably improve the local squad a great deal. I'm looking forward to having him around.