pantsfarm

Today when I was browsing through the NYT Sunday Magazine online, I read this article The Case for Working With Your Hands.

“A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain (and there is always someone higher up the food chain). It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.”

I haven’t actually finished reading it yet, but I wanted to copy this quote somewhere. I’ve never read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” but I kind of wonder what it is about motorcycles that attracts philosophy post-grads from the University of Chicago.

Last year I tried to run a game of Assassin but it never got off the ground for a variety of reasons. The big one was that I got a lot of very fast very negative responses claiming that because the Olympics were coming up and there was a very widespread sense of heightened security here in Beijing that not only would they be unwilling to play but that I should purge the thought of running a game from my mind.

In retrospect, I should have said “fuck all you haters” and run it anyway because I don’t think it would have caused any major problems. At the time though, I was cowed into pulling back on my recruiting efforts which led into the second problem which was just not having enough enthusiastically interested people to get a game going.

This year I went after it strongly and it’s come together wonderfully. I had 60 people on board on the starting day and though a few had to drop out for assorted reasons, the game is going strong and so far (admittedly only 3 days in) so good.

That said, it is eating up a lot of my free time and screwing with my sleep schedule (all kills so far have been made after 11pm which for a early bird like me is a little tough), but I’m enjoying seeing the game unfold.

Updates are being made on a blog and on Twitter as @beijingassassin.

I borrowed a camera and so I have some pictures that I’ve just uploaded to a flickr set.

Last weekend was my first weekend after having gotten sick for about a week and on top of that it was amazing weather AND it was a long weekend. It was also a pretty good weekend. I started out on Saturday morning kind of early and decided I was going to bike out a little ways towards the NE part of town, my main destinations being some places in 798 (ultimately skipped because I went and ate food instead) and the 3 Shadows gallery in Caochangdi Village.

I had heard it would be difficult to find and it would be really far away but actually neither of those things turned out to be true. I guess my notion of far away is a little further out from the center of Beijing than the people I’d been asking. It only took me maybe 45-50 minutes to get there and I’d never been there before. If I had known where I was going, it probably could have been less, but not by much since I never actually got lost. I only had to stop next to this one highway and walk over it to the other side which I thought to do because I remembered a map from before.

If I had missed that though it might have been a loooong time before I found another way there. Ultimately though, I should have taken the advice of one of the people I asked about how to get there, because then I would have avoided this little sign:

Oh well, so I wandered around in alleys for a while, which was not really that exciting but whatever. I got a snack, walked around a bit, and decided to head back into town. There was some weird graffiti, too.

At this point me and the camera parted ways for a while so there are no pictures of what followed. I am not 100% clear on the details but first I went to a housewarming/birthday party where I was refreshingly surrounded by people who I didn’t have lots of friends-of-friends with. After that, I stopped by home, met up with my sister and we headed to this goodbye party. It was ok, I met some people I had seen before but never really met, said hello to some people who I hadn’t seen for a while, and then eventually I think I was going to go to McDonalds but ate chuanr instead and then went to McDonalds or something? Whatever, it was late and I remember meeting some artist guy who I got a bad first impression from because of a misunderstanding about something being 50% by weight vs. 50% by volume.

The next day I was pretty hungover and didn’t really get out of bed until pretty late. When I finally did, I dragged myself out to eat some food followed by… more drinking. Possibly not the best plan but it was a more relaxed setting and we were just chilling. The weather was still beautiful so later I headed home and did some reading on the roof while drinking water and trying to get back to baseline. At some point I thought to myself, “hey, I have a bunch of old chocolate sitting in a bag in my room I better use that up.” In the process, I ran out of water and since there was none to be found anywhere in my apartment I went and bought some for me and my roommates as well. In short I am the best roommate ever. I have some faults, no doubt, but come on, I get drunk and bake stuff.



It’s just kind of a shame I suck at using a camera in our poorly lit dining room. The chocolate chip cookies were a new recipe that I got from my sister in Cali which she got from one of her friends and I don’t really know the whole history but it’s pretty much amazingly delicious and I will probably have to use it more often. It calls for a kind of ridiculous amount of vanilla extract which is (in my opinion) not necessary to use anywhere near that quantity, especially considering how outrageous the price is here.

So that was all the weekend of the 4th. Last weekend, that is, the last couple days, were also very good, but I don’t really have photos.

There was a party (alas, a farewell), a few hours spent lost near the SE corner of 4th ring road, and then drunken kickball (I never did make it on base.) The only photo I’ve got is from when I was lost and biking around and I ended up on this overpass that was closed so I just sat there and ate a sweet potato.
Unfortunately this lifestyle has caught up with me and seems to have left me once again fighting off illness, so, time to take it slow for a while, or, at least for the week. Next weekend I kind of want to go on this Great Wall retreat but I still need to resolve scheduling issues.

Sometimes I wonder if maybe I cling to ritual because they are some kind of coping mechanism for me to deal with a world that feels like it changes faster than I can keep up.

This is puzzling because I don’t know why I would do anything but rush headlong into change?

Today while paging through my newsreader I came across this post on a blog I recently started reading. It made me miss both being in Chicago for the availability of such foods and even more, I fondly remembered the time I spent in Bangalore with my friend’s family eating homemade deliciousness. Undoubtedly this is also related to the conversation I had in the last week about all the delicious South Indian foods I haven’t really had since I was there.

There was also a link to this article from the NYTimes dining section about the street food of Mumbai and while I can’t say I really sampled much in India, my own experience with street food in China agrees that it’s not the same off the street.

Right now I would enjoy some dosa so much. so so so much.

One of my roommates had a guest staying at our place last week; she had come during her Spring break. We got to talking about music one night and through our mutual interest in music stalking I’ve found this song which I am digging.

It is called Strictly Game and is apparently the single off of some new album. I think my sister told me about this band, Harlem Shakes (blocked in China? why?), before but I never got around to listening to anything before today.

I decided to go through all the random crap pictures that were on my phone and here are a couple interesting ones from the last five days:

First, I read about this ridiculous thing here and decided I would try it. I didn’t realize that I would decide to try it quite so soon but I ate it. Surprisingly not horrible but entirely too much of a mess.

Second, I wish I understood what that sign up there means. I’ve seen it a few places now and I still don’t really get it. No exploding here!

And lastly I saw this car flipped over and a bunch of people gawking (like me) the other night while biking home. This was like a block from home, awesome.

Occasionally when I hear a song I haven’t heard before, I’ll make a mental note of some of the lyrics so I can go look it up later. When I do this, sometimes I’ll find the lyrics on some blog or other kind of site with comments and even though I know that internet comments are often the domain of the stupidest people on the planet, I’ll read them. Sometimes when I read comments I try to imagine the state of mind or the situation that the author was in when they wrote the comment, I’ll try and figure out what caused them to put out there this remark about some song from decades ago.

Occasionally though I’ll come across a comment such as this one:

“This song brings back a lot of memories for me. Back when I lived in the dorms at school there was this girl who would wake me up early every Saturday morning to do laundry with her. I would drag myself all hungover, down to the laundry room. She would bring her boom box and listen to music and dance as we did our laundry. This was one of her favorite songs. It moved me to see this girl dance and sing so early in the morning, so happy. It still moves me, it makes me happy inside, I miss doing that with her so much.”

And then I’ll wonder what happened to this guy? (I assume it’s a guy, I don’t know that it is.) What happened to the girl? Given that I am looking at comments on the internet, is this the wistful regrets of somebody over something they wish they had done in college and this song is a persistent reminder of that? But surely that can’t be it because it’s a positive memory that remains. Am I projecting my own regrets on to this anonymous internet person? Only a little.

I can’t decide about this Summer.

How do I decide now if I want to take a month off from my job to go to Switzerland and be a camp counselor for children (well, 9-14 years old)?

I think “of course I should go, the last time I went to be a counselor I had an incredible time”.

But last time was different. Last time, I had no job I might end up leaving to go. Last time, the travel cost was pretty trivial. Last time, I didn’t have anything else I could or even really wanted to be doing instead with that time.

If I left from Beijing for a month, what would I do about wherever I’m living then (current lease ends in May, which is another thing to worry about)? Can I afford to not get paid and travel to an expensive place for 4.5 weeks (yes, I think)? How can I do that and visit the US which I also very extremely much want to do this Summer? What are the implications for my job if I take off for that time?

Will I even want to return to Beijing if I leave for that long? I fear the answer will end up being no, and what then?

Do I really want to take on a younger-kids camp this time around? What do other counselors do? Or is this camp staffed almost entirely by people who can more easily drop everything and leave for a month in the Summer? Why can’t I let everything go and do that myself? Am I being prudent and responsible if I choose not to go, or am I just giving in to some vague sense of fear about going?

I’m supposed to have made this decision already but I asked for more time to figure it out and got it. I still can’t make up my mind.

I just want a stiff wind to blow it all away.

I set my alarm an hour early, forgetting that I couldn’t go to the gym before work today. When I look out my bedroom window I see a dark cloud. Well, I see the CNOOC mainly and above and around it I see this dark cloud. It’s not yet light enough for me to tell if it’s smog or just a mist, though I suspect the former given how things are here.

The lunar new year holiday is over and as always new years I am restless. With all the changes that have come with past new years I understand better now that the setting is only one small part of my dissatisfaction-inspired wanderlust. I think it may be cliché, but the statement “wherever you go, there you are” rings truer now. I’ve been doing better this time around though. I’ve tried out some lifestyle changes and though mostly just small tweaks in my habits, the effects are considerable and evident to me.

I’m think I’m still a long way off from complacency, so there is probably much more opportunity for vaguely introspective posts like this yet.

[note: written mostly this morning after I woke up but before showering, and edited slightly to be posted now in the afternoon]