lunar new year and stuff

today marks day 5 of my vacation for the lunar new year here in the china. a near week characterized by nothing short of over-consumption: food, drink, battlestar galactica (feel free to roll your eyes, naysayers!). gluttony totally rulezzzzz!

i should also note that there have been some annoyances, for what is a blog of mine if i don’t complain about something. there’s a well-founded stereotype about the chinese and their fireworks. you can buy fireworks pretty much anywhere. we’re not talking just bottle rockets and sparklers, though those are in abundance. but anyone can walk up to the convenience store, or any number of little stalls set up along the street, and purchase the fuck-off big ones, a la jefferson city, mo’s “fire in the sky.” the shit they launch from the barges on the river. anyhoo, you might be saying to yourself “hey, large, fuck-off fireworks are cool!” and yes, i agree with you, but it sucks to hear these arguably minor explosions 24-7. you buy them, you can light them whenever and wherever you want to, including the wee-est of morning hours. great.

funny thing, fireworks remind me of my old dog, lobo. they used to make him shit instantaneously; those and the start gun for the little olympics. you need only make the mistake of taking a large alaskan malamute with shaky bowels to a public fireworks display one time. i seem to recall bahb handling it a lot better…

the other annoyance would be my water. on day 1 of vacation, some random water pipe of mine broke. i live in a ginormo apartment complex, and MY pipe chooses to break at the beginning of the biggest, most important holiday of the year. people don’t work during this time. daily life ceases to exist, rippled metal doors concealing each and every vibrant shop front. taxis? gone (funny story here, though. i was at the grocery store, arms full of various sundries. a taxi rolled up and i was nearly tackled while a man carrying nothing raced in front of me to steal my taxi. so that was cool. and not uncommon). people? gone. the logistics chick who handles these sorts of inconveniences for the foreigners from our school? gone. but she could still text message! ha ha! the point being that i couldn’t use the bathroom, shower, wash dishes, cook, do laundry for 4 days while I waited for anyone to avail themselves on the complainy chick’s behalf. but yesterday morning, my landlord showed up. he was wearing a nice suit and shoes that appeared to have been recently shined by one of the many women shoeshiners (sp?) along my street (apparently they still had to work). he gave me about a half an hour with limited water flow to wash dishes, take a shower. neither of which i did. it was a nice gesture before he turned the water off again so the plumber could come fix things. so the plumber banged away for a while, then he left. i walk out to see the landlord, in his nice clothes and shiny shoes, tiptoeing around, mopping my laundry area and cleaning the outside of my washing machine, ever so tenderly. so that was part of my day yesterday.

this vacation comes in the middle of ef’s winter course, a “beast” i had been conditioned to fear months prior to its commencement. so all the teachers at the school had prepared extensive lesson plans for the droves of new students said course would garner. the day comes and i have one new class with 2 new students in it. that’s it. ultimately, i worked less last week than i have the whole time i’ve been here.
i am reminded of a year ago in korea and our winter intensive session. 12 hour days, editing many an essay. drinking in gangnam and having to take the 5:00 am subway to make it back to work in time in the morning. group lunches at the japanese restaurant 2 storefronts away. judy eating seafood fried rice everyday. me eating number 23 every single day. the shrimp, tuna and salmon sashimi appallingly consistent. and i hated it all while I was in the middle of it—the inefficiency of my days, hours spent just waiting to leave, simply for the sake of everyone working the same 12 hours; the city itself and the lack of anything to do besides consume in various aspects (back to that thing about gluttony earlier. throw in some mindless shopping for good measure. i seem to recall having much more money to waste on pointless trifles); a general dissatisfaction with absolutely every aspect of my life. the irony is, with everything i think i hated about various stages of my life, in retrospect it’s quite easy to only consider the good bits. this is true of columbia, of austin, of columbia again, of suncheon, of ilsan. for each of those locales, there were things i hated enough to motivate a very physical separation from them, but it’s been maybe too easy to romanticize things as my [also] physical perspective has changed. at this point i will refrain from inserting any number of proverbial clichés, but I would be remiss not to mention that a number of them would lend themselves quite well to my ruminations. you heard it here: all my epiphanies are indeed wholly unoriginal.

on the flip side, i have this tendency to be nostalgic for things that aren’t even gone yet. what would you call that? pre-nostalgia? but the inevitable and impending fleetingness of these miniscule and/or arguably grandiose things makes me sad anyway. it’s a sadness that hovers so close to happiness. therein lies a big problem of mine: difficulty in separating the tragic from the beautiful, the mundane from the significant. prime example: the winding concrete path that leads to my apartment. there’s a row of scooters haphazardly parked on the left to denote the last bit of light i’m usually overtly granted. and so i shuffle slowly along, knowing precisely where the concrete raises and dips, where the ratty particle board covers one particularly depleted manhole. there’s usually just enough of a residual glow off of distant buildings, or the moon. and so the cold, ugly grey concrete of the daytime hours is transformed by this little bit of light that deigns to grace my path with its presence. and this is one of those things for which i’m already nostalgic. the montage of ugly concrete, particle board and the transformative nature of the moon.

but back to that winter course and my two new students. they’re starters, which basically means they’re very young and have little to no english language. I’m teaching them phonics and things from their coursebooks. I got to name one of the girls. she has been deemed cindy. I think it sounded relatively close to her chinese name. the other girl is katie. katie always has her hair in two pigtails crafted by someone with a poor grasp of fractions. besides the less than equal halves, one “tail” is always significantly higher than the other. at first, katie believed it was possible to practice the short ‘a’ sound while stuffing bits of chocolate muffin into her mouth. and who am I to dissuade that gumption? not a good multi-tasker myself… she eventually figured out that, contrary to various studies, chocolate muffins do not actually aid in speaking or language acquisition. and then we have cindy. cindy has a bit of a wonky eye. this eye waters and drips continuously. cindy adores me. i’ve never experienced such unfailing, unconditional love from a complete stranger before. and a chinese kid, to boot! cindy spent the majority of last week holding my hand and kissing it, while her wayward, wonky tears rolled down her face and onto my skin. so these two girls are pretty much amazing. and i get to teach them. so i don’t hate or fear ef’s winter course. not one bit.

probably other things to report, but i’m spent.

oh yeah, i'm reading a story about the unabomber from a collection of mcsweeney's stories. is that strange?