Crass is in.

This entry’s title goes out to you, “Special” K. Also, I’ve decided that since you’re working at the Reserve next year, I’m going to change your moniker from KMeck to KFed.

I was showing my youngest cousin my facebook profile two days ago. She’s 17 years old and attends high school here in Harbin, China. I glossed over the essentials: my profile picture, biographical information, etc. Out of this jumble, one particular bit that she noticed was my stated political inclination – “very liberal.” Having studied English (specifically, the flavor spoken by the Brits) in school, she understood what my declaration meant.

Her immediate reaction was to ask me if there were any implications with stating my political views so overtly. I explained to her that no, there were no practical consequences in the United States, and that many Americans take a great deal of pride in advocating for their beliefs. (I personally enjoy being angsty all of the time. Hypertension is fun.) To emphasize my point, I noted my membership in the facebook group “those to whom it is astoundingly clear that George W. Bush is full of shit” – clumsily and shyly translated to “those to whom George W. Bush appears to be a big idiot.” She was amused that I would brandish my politics so clearly and that students would choose to express their views so crudely. (Good thing I didn’t provide a direct translation for the facebook group…)

I was surprised by her reaction. Considering Monicagate (yikes, double entendre), the 2000 election, and then the 2004 Swiftboatin’, I’m accustomed to the vitriol associated with American politics. If anything, we are a polarized, indignant people. I found it refreshing to be reminded that there are places in the world where it’s not normal to be filled with ire about the government’s actions and inactions.

However, that said, isn’t pointing out the government’s bumbling failures both a Constitutional right and duty? ;)

Where'd the Blog Go?

Well, turns out that I can't view my blog on any of the 4 computers that I've used in China (including my own). I can, however, update it. I'm not quite sure why this is the case yet, but it seems that the reason involves the ISP's here.

"连接超时
位于 swissbeats.blogspot.com 的服务器响应时间过长."

Is this some weird form of censorship in action?! [Da da dum...]
(Wow, what a lame attempt to introduce artificial excitement into an otherwise boring entry...)

Anyhow, the only practical limitation on my blogging is my inability to read comments. So to all 1.5 people who read this sucker, I'll know what you think of me in about 3.5 weeks. Don't be too mean, kids (kid-and-a-half?)!

Mini Updates!

June 27, 2007, 9:15 a.m. (CST)

Today, I woke up at 5:50 a.m. to go shopping at morning market. This may seem extremely early to those of us who are used to the lifestyle of college seniors. However, there’s actually a good explanation for this very early rise. All of China is on one standard time; thus, the sun in Harbin comes up (from what I hear) at 3:30 a.m. these days. Eek.

Morning market was delightful – and dirt cheap. We went down to the Songhua River, where hundreds of people were exercising. There were 50-somethings rollerblading around and 70-somethings walking home with their totes of groceries. No wonder Chinese people (1) age well and (2) generally aren’t as rotund than los estadounidenses. I bought some flat peaches (donut peaches / Saturn peaches), lychee fruit, apricots, and melons. And I think everything was less than $3 USD. Fantastical. Also, there were some people selling leeks, and I took a picture. (Here's thinking of you, Wachi.)

About five minutes ago, I convinced Air Canada to give me a $100 expenditure allowance so that I can actually go get some facewash and clothing. I’ve been wearing the same American Eagle polo (the blue one with the maroon and white stripes) for the last two days. Needless to say, I’m getting a bit gross, even with regular showers.

June 26, 2007, 10:03 a.m. (CST)

Today, I got my hair cut. It was really, really long, but now it’s a bit shorter than I’d bargained for. According to my cousin, I looked like I was an art student when I arrived in China. I’ll take that as a compliment; however, in my heart, I knew that my appearance was dangerously approaching that of Joe Dirt. (I’m going to be a math dork here and assert that this approach is asymptotic thanks to some sense of personal dignity. I’d never let myself get to full mullet status.) Now I look more "aunthentically Chinese," according to my grandmother. Maybe I won't get swindled as much at markets now...

June 26, 2007, 12:27 a.m. (CST)

I’ve arrived in Harbin after an unexpectedly long flight. Due to thunderstorms -- It hadn't rained here for a week prior! -- we were forced to land at an airport 30 minutes out from Harbin and wait until the storm passed. I didn’t really mind since I was passed out the whole time. (Literally. I remember landing and then, er…, landing again.) The problem now is that it’s about noon in Eastern Standard Time, and it’s “past bedtime” here. Crap. Time to read for a bit!

June 25, 2007, 4:59 a.m. (EST), 4:59 p.m. (China Standard Time)

Air Canada lost my luggage. I have no clothing. This is awesome. At least I’m wearing my favorite pair of jeans.

Right now, we’re waiting for our connecting flight from Beijing to Harbin. I look like a huge foreigner in this airport, as I’m wearing a scruffy polo shirt, dark wash jeans, and green and yellow Pumas. And I’m reading The Namesake.

Survey Says, It’s Genetic

In between the many naps that I took in Brian Scholl’s Intro to Cognitive Science course, I remember learning that when it comes to the classic “nature vs. nurture” debate, some scientific evidence points to age as an determinant factor. If memory serves me correctly, a chart projected in the convenient dimness of the Art Gallery auditorium indicated that prior to age 21, personal beliefs and behaviors are primarily dictated by nurture. The reason? I’m not sure, but it may have something to do with your being an impressionable youth on daddy’s payroll. (Note: If you’re singing that awful Hoobastank song in your head now, please do society a favor and refrain from procreating.) After this milestone -- and perhaps the newfound ability to drink yourself into oblivion -- nature reigns supreme. I mean, we’re not just talking about heritable diseases like Huntington’s. Even traits like “political-ness” showed greater correlation with a person’s genes than his/her upbringing.

I’m still not sure if I buy this study. However, I am pleased to report that Air Canada flight 031 has yielded some exciting new empirical evidence of the extent of nature’s impact. Right now, my mom is asleep. This observation in itself isn’t so impressive, but I should note that she her face is currently resting directly on the airplane telephone installed on the seat in front of her. That’s right – that penchant I have for falling asleep with my head on sharp and/or painful objects? Totally inherited.

Vindicated. (Seriously, no singing-in-your-head, please.)

Oh, what’s 20 pounds between friends?

(I'm in Canada now, using the Toronto Airport's free wireless. Yay, Canada.)

My trip to China had a lively start this morning. As soon as we got to the airport, we returned our rental car and checked in at the Air Canada kiosk. Everything was going smoothly until I overheard my dad say to the attendant, “50 pounds?! I thought that the weight limit was 70 pounds.”

Great.

I don’t have much experience with international flights, but according to my parents, weight limits for several carriers used to be 70 pounds. With this guideline in mind, my mom and dad had purposefully condensed our packing and had combined several small suitcases into the titans of luggage that we were now dragging around Hartsfield International. My suitcase cleared the limit (by 0.5 pounds), but my parents’ suitcases were over by a combined total of 30+ pounds.

I’ve heard through the grapevine that I have a reputation for being cheap. Here, I’d like to illustrate that it’s genetic – or at least socially conditioned in my upbringing. My father was not about to pay the $60 heavy baggage fine for the two suitcases. So instead, he decided to eviscerate them both right then and there, in front of check-in. Out came our clothing, clothing for other people, food (gifts), picture frames (more gifts), etc. And to my parents’ credit (I would have just purchased another suitcase), they managed to cram 20+ lbs of stuff into what was previously a carry-on bag and distribute the rest of the spoils amongst us. (I am now carrying two cameras, a battery of… assorted batteries, and several camcorder tapes.) And the final weigh-in for the two bags? 50.0 lbs (he got one on the dot) and 51.0 lbs (acceptable, said the attendant).

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been that surprised. When I was 6, my father once bet a peach farmer in Alabama that he could fit all of the peaches we had picked into one basket. The farmer, having 20+ years of experience in his enterprise, begged to differ. So being an engineer, my dad bent the previously ellipsoid basket to a more spherical shape (to maximize the volume to surface area ratio, I kid you not) and fit every last one of the damned peaches into the basket. Victory. We drove away from the farm (and one very angry farmer) with a trunk full of peaches. (We’re a family of 3. I ate peaches for about a month…)

So this morning’s events have yielded $60 of spared income that I can now spend in China. That’s pretty, er…, peachy if you ask me.

Fly away with me... eh?

Tomorrow, I'm going to jet off to China by way of... Canada. I haven't heard of anyone else's taking this particular route before. But hey, I love me some Canadia (home of my first legal alcohol purchase at age 19).

One reason that I'm excited about this trip is that I haven't been out of the country (excluding Canada or my 10-or-so hours in Nassau) since the summer of 7th grade. I had originally planned to see family in China after high school, but then there was that blip on the epidemiological radar called SARS. My grandmother figured that it was safer for me to stay in the States, and being cautious/neurotic, I agreed.

So in 1.5 days or so, I'm going to see my extended family for the first time in 9 years. My cousins were 8 and 9 the last time that I saw them; now, they're getting ready for college. One of them, I hear, is 6' 2". (His mom is actually the shortest amongst her sisters, but her small stature is generally blamed on poor childhood nutrition resulting from a famine.) The discrepancy between my mental image of my cousins and their actual states is truly mind-boggling, so I had the hardest time trying to decide what to bring them from the U.S. (Seriously. Last time, it was hand-me-downs and some toys.) Since my last trip to China, Westernization has brought most goods within the reach of Chinese people. My grandmother lives next door to a friggin' Wal-Mart, for crying out loud. Thus, the former novelty of getting something "American" has largely worn off. But having no better ideas (and after consulting about 5 different people on the matter), I decided to be a stalwart in my determination to provide something quintessentially "American." I made a gift box celebrating American gluttony and excess.

Inside said gift box, there will be boxes (boxes in a box, if you will) of junk food, including, but not limited to: Sour Patch Kids, Whoppers, Milk Duds, Goldfish (baked, not fried... moms love it...), Famous Amos Cookies. In other words, I am attempting to make my relatives obese. But hopefully they'll enjoy their proverbial slice of American Pie. (The literal pie was ruled out since baked goods (1) would not make it past customs and (2) are too hard to transport.) Type 2 diabetes is all the rage nowadays, anyway.

Because of my trip, my updates to the blog will change in frequency. I'll update even less (which seems hard to do, really) due to lack of internet access, or perhaps I'll update more since it'll be the only way to mass-communicate what I'm up to in China short of making an email list.

So, my friends, a big 再见 from the DizzleTizzle goes out to each of you. I guess it’s worth noting that In Chinese, we don’t tell you to keep God with you. (I mean, are you going to die or something?!) We say, “See you again.” Entonces, hasta la vista, mis amigos.

The Power Is... Not On

One of my favorite pep-myself-up-for-impending-doom songs is The Go! Team's "The Power is On." Despite the fact that a good portion of the lyrics are incomprehensible, I find the rhythm and energy of the song invigorating. And with the coming apocalypse -- be it a hard test or an all-nighter to write a paper -- who needs lyrics, anyway? Babel babel blah.

Today, I was reminded of "The Power is On" at about 4:00 p.m., when the all of the electrical appliances in my house decided to be anything but on. My computer tower emitted a mournful whine and turned itself off. Strange, I thought. Then it became very obvious that nothing in my house was functioning properly.

Turns out that I had witnessed the beginning of a power outage that lasted at least a quarter-hour. During this time, my dependence on electricity and electricity-hungry devices became astonishingly clear. No power meant no computer, no cable modem, no television. "Ha!" I thought. I had my laptop, which has a nice 9-cell battery. But as I looked for a wireless network on which to piggyback, I realized that the power outage was neighborhood-wide. No "NETGEAR," no "linksys" -- not even any annoyingly WEP-protected ones ("Anthem" -- not quite sure where they got this one).

So I turned to delightfully low-tech entertainment. I decided to read a book. I picked up Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, flipped to the first short story ("A Temporary Matter"), and started reading:

The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight p.m. A line had gone down in the last snowstorm....

Talk about verisimilitude.

At Your Service...

I've sadly come to realize that I'm not the only person who knows how boring and pointless my life currently is. My friends all know it, too.

Crap.

Case in point: I've become a sort of personal, 24-hour Mapquesting service. (An aside: Mapquest, please enjoy your brand recognition while it lasts! Google Maps is comin' up fast.) Last week, Chris called me to ask me to Google hookah bars in Houston for him. I didn't even know that hookah bars existed. It was about 10:00 p.m. on a Friday night. After a little effort, we did find one that was open, and according to a later text message from Chris, it was "really good."

That's all fine and dandy. The sad part is that he assumed [correctly, *sigh*] that I'd be sitting on my butt at home on a Friday night. I can only imagine what the process was like. But it probably resembled this:

Chris: I wonder which of the 239087843 people in my phonebook is definitely at home right now.
Chris hits down on his Sony Ericcson phone a couple of times.
Chris: Oh, of course!
Chris calls me.

And this has happened multiple times -- most recently about 2 hours ago. Perhaps the saddest part of all of this is that I probably won't have anything more substantial to do than to find you the nearest Taco Bell. So yeah, keep on calling. I'll bookmark Google Maps.

Postscript - 6/15/2007, 2:32 p.m.

If you're calling me 3+ times per day to ask me for directions to places that you previously knew you wanted to visit, perhaps it's time to buy a few of things:

1. A piece of paper
2. A pencil
3. A bottle of decency

The Space Between

Like my parents, I am an immigrant to this country. Born on the other side of the world (if you dig a hole…), I moved to the States when I was about 5 years old. Given that my parents were already in their thirties at the time of our move, my growing up in the EEUU has put a lot of cultural space between us. Sometimes, this distance is frustrating, but at other times, it is both perplexing and endearing.

An example of this distance (mostly of the latter persuasion) was demonstrated last night. I decided to “take a nap” at about 11:00 p.m. and was basically contorted in a strange position on the extreme end of a bed. To those of you accustomed to my college antics, this description should elicit several disquieting mental images… Anyhow, my mom came in, turned the light off, and was about to leave when she stopped in her tracks. She saw something on my left arm. Quickly, she realized what it was: a tattoo.

Now this just wasn’t any tattoo. I had just gotten it earlier that day, without her knowledge, while I was out with two other friends. In an act of solidarity and/or boredom, we all ended up deciding to express our friendship through glorious excess and personal effacement. Given that both my mom and I were a bit groggy -- I have a feeling that we both had just stirred from restless slumber – I was pretty confused when my mom asked me, “Is that painted or etched onto your arm?” It took me about two seconds to realize that she was talking about my rad new tat, which I will now reproduce in its full glory here:

Tall, yellow, and lanky – just like me. This is precisely why I had picked this tattoo up at Putt Putt for 25 tickets, fresh from the Skeeball machine.

In retrospect, I can now attribute about 70% of this misunderstanding to a combination of bad lighting and mutual grogginess. However, at the time, I immediately reacted with dismay that my mom actually thought that I would have a chibi giraffe, of all things, needled onto my arm. “Mommmm,” I whined, “Who do you think I am?!” I mean, I may be really friggin’ weird, but even I have my boundaries. I’d rather die than have any Lisa Frankian murals permanently installed onto my person.

My mom replied that American kids are “unpredictable” and that they often do rash things without first consulting their parents. This is perhaps true in some cases and does reflect a difference between Chinese and American cultures. However, even at this stage in my life, I would at least tell my parents that I was getting a tattoo. I honestly hope that my mom doesn't think that I am such a loose cannon (stop laughing, Slaughter) that I would not include them in important life decisions.

This episode shows that I need to do a better job of communicating with my parents. A cultural space does exist in between us, and I need to do my best to minimize that distance. In addition, we need to have a couple of discussions on aesthetics. A chibi giraffe?!?!... Gah!

The Unbearable Lightness of Me

So here I am, back at blogger.com.

According to my records, I last posted here in May 2005 after my sophomore year of college. I'm not sure what exactly brought me back to the blogosphere, but it probably has something to do with the excruciating boredom associated with post-college life. Call me a loser, but school has conditioned me into being a workhorse of sorts. Even though I have essentially no obligations, I have been waking before 9:00 a.m. every day for the last two weeks. Couple this penchant for early rising with a paucity of ways with which to entertain myself, and you get... an unbearable lightness of me.

Now, being the unread heathen that I am, I've never actually picked up Kundera. (However, one of the benefits of having jack-diddly-squat to do is time for pleasure reading. I've just ordered The Unbearable Lightness of Being on Half.com.) So here, I interpret these words quite literally. After graduation, I feel a lightness or hollowness inside. Now one important cause of my feeling light is probably my horrifyingly low BMI, which ranks me in the skinniest 2% of America. However, humor me and allow me to consider that my post-grad emptiness may also be caused by a sudden change of environment -- my sudden removal from friends, goals, and motivations that have kept me going for the last four years. I'm more alone than I've been in a very long time. Frankly, this is a little scary.

So here I am. This blog is a pitiful attempt to deal with the aforementioned emptiness. With it, I also hope to gather and record my thoughts, which have become increasingly harder to organize as I've gotten older. As such, this little fella is mainly for me. However, if you're reading this, perhaps you, too, can relate to my lightness of being, the feeling of floating along day-to-day without tangible, palpable things to anchor you down. If you're of kindred spirit, feel free to sit down and commiserate with me.

Getting DizzyTizzy?

This is apparently the correct way to get Blogger to host my profile picture. I'm sorry if you just ate.