pantsfarm

I feel pretty silly for even thinking about this as much as I have already.

When I go and do social things, a lot of the time I will end up meeting somebody and we’ll be talking and at some point they will suggest that we exchange phone numbers or something. Generally in such a case I will offer my number and shortly thereafter they will call it. I will save the number and a few weeks later I will go through my phone and delete all the names I can’t recognize – chiefly the people who I got one call from when they got my number and then never heard from again.

So why is it that all of these number exchanges are ultimately so fruitless? Am I just remembering this incorrectly, and in fact I have called a lot more of these people back than I am admitting here and to myself? I don’t think so, but I guess I’m not really sure.

If somebody asks for my number I’m not about to lie or give some excuse for why I can’t or won’t give it out. I can’t very well suggest “if you need to get in touch with me we obviously have mutual friends, ask them for my number” because that would send a very clear “please only consider getting in touch with me if you really really want to” which they of course will not because we’ve only just met.

I should clarify that all of this idle thought is gender neutral because in cases where I am actively soliciting girls’ numbers I am inevitably faced with the decision to call or not call and that is a decision I am usually comfortable making.

But returning to the general case of numbers of people I am not interested in sleeping with (eg met at a poker game or talked to at some gallery or a friend of a friend while out) – why is there never, or so rarely, a call later?

Of course I must consider for myself, why do I never call them? Presumably whatever reasons I have for not calling are the same as theirs… but maybe not because I am not usually the one initiating number exchanges?

Perhaps it is because it is nice to have the numbers of people if I should come up with a good reason to call later, and it is less troublesome than having to ask a mutual friend how to get in touch later. And there might not even be a mutual friend, I guess.

I don’t know. I don’t take it personally but have no real insight on this, so, I unceremoniously delete another handful of numbers from my phone. Alternatively, I could get a phone that is not older than my duration in China and doesn’t have such a tediously low limit (feels like approximately 4) on how many numbers it can store. On second thought, it’s kind of like people I meet once, add as a friend on facebook, send one message and promptly forget about.

I was listening to “First Sight” by These United States yesterday and it occurred to me that it sounded an awful lot like Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”.

I don’t mean that the songs sound exactly the same, but only that maybe the same sequences of notes are used.

The whole thing reminded me of a Gladwell article I recently read, Something Borrowed, about plagiarism.

Over the Chinese National holiday about a week ago (ended a week ago) I went to visit my sister in India. When I can get my hands on any of the photos from that trip I’ll probably write up a new post here about that trip (delicious!).

The flight I took was on Ethiopian Airlines which runs a route from Beijing to Addis Abeba with a stop in Delhi. On the way back, I was seated next to a group of Chinese dudes from Tangshan.

When I first boarded the plane, I was pretty tired and fell asleep pretty much right away, as I am wont to do during air travel. Later though, when I was awake and eating some chewy chicken thing, the guy sitting next to me struck up a conversation.

In the past I’ve been really unreceptive to striking up random conversations with people because in Beijing the only people I ever encounter who try to strike up random conversation are people trying to sell me something, but during my visit to India I met a lot of people who were really just friendly and wanted to chat.

So anyway, I’m chatting with this guy and he’s trying to figure out what my deal is since I got on in Delhi, am flying to Beijing, and don’t really look that Chinese or Indian. I noticed that on this flight, in contrast with my flight out of China, it’s mostly Chinese (the flight out was much more Indians and Africans) and I asked what they were all doing in Addis Abeba.

He wasn’t sure about most of the people on the plane (and I’m not sure why I assumed he would have any idea) but him and his 3 buddies were all coming back to China from Zambia. Apparently they’d been traveling for something like 17 hours when I got on the plane in Delhi and were closing out 24 hours of continuous travel (final stop was Beijing where they all lived now).

I knew basically nothing about Tangshan and Zambia both (couldn’t locate either on a map either) so I asked these guys about what they were doing and where. First I got that Tangshan was in Hebei, so from this I guessed (correctly) that these guys were working in some heavy industry or mining or something and had been sent out to Zambia since China seems to have invested a lot in lots of African nations lately. That was exactly it, as they all had backgrounds in coal mining and had been sent to Zambia to investigate digging for something else (coal? oil? this got lost in translation a bit). They were coming back at that time because their Visas were up.

It was around this time that our conversation was getting to be too much for our mutual lack of each other’s language, so the guy next to me asked his buddy to switch seats him because the buddy’s English was better. I found out that this was their first ever trip out of China, and that Americans speaking English are much easier to understand than Africans and British and pretty much anybody else. It’s because all the TV and movies that these guys use to practice are American!

He lamented a bit how he wants to get better at English but he has nobody to practice with and not enough time outside of work to do so either. I sympathized though really for him it’s a lot more legitimate considering that I am a foreigner in China learning Chinese while he is not a Chinese dude in America learning English.

About this time the conversation turned as my conversations so often do to basketball. The buddy likes Garnett a lot, and the first guy said he likes the bulls, but also Kobe. The Bulls fan was apparently the best of the four of them, and wanted to know if I was very good at basketball because I am American (so obviously I play basketball all the time!). Compelled by my duty to truth I explained that I am not in fact much of a basketball player.

That’s pretty much all there was to it as by this time we were landing and we exchanged cards and pleasantries out at the luggage carousel and then I headed off.

This morning while biking to work I saw two funny things. [Read more →]

I like Natto. I think it is delicious.

That said, natto is definitely an acquired taste. When my chef sister first tried it she didn’t think it especially tasty, though allowed that it could have a place in fine Asian cuisine. Another friend of mine on taking her first bite declared that it was “like eating little solid bits of alcohol” (a description I didn’t really understand, though perhaps it was in reference to the somewhat ammoniac taste) along with a facial expression conveying very clear distate.

To what I assume is the typical western palate, natto is unpleasant at best (a funny read, but don’t take it too seriously, it’s not that disgusting). Just today I discovered “The Natto Project” an interesting account of some people who also decided to acquire a taste for natto, and their experience has proven interesting to me to read so far, though I’m only a couple days in at the time of writing.

In the rest of this post I’m going to recount my personal history of acquiring a taste for, as well as where in Beijing one can get, natto. [Read more →]