Point

I have had very little inspire me to write recently, and I feel bad about it, so I will try to make my life interesting as to write more here. So look forward to more soon!

As a quick aside (so there's at least something interesting), apparently I/something burned a hole in my lamp. Like part of the base melted. The lamp was always crazy and flickery and really hot, and for some reason smelled like seaweed, so I wasn't really surprised it started melting today. As my roommate Greg put it, "20块 Chinese construction". I really hope that's the right word.

Oh that's interesting! I finally, after 20 years of being Chinese, learned how to type Chinese on my computer. How exciting!

Matchmaking

Happy Spring Break for you guys who are lucky enough to have it now. Enjoy it! If you are at home, watch a Warriors game for me. Serious - Anthony Randolph playing time (or is he injured now?)!

Quick aside - I had my first apple-tini (what's the correct way to spell that?) the other night. And, amazingly enough, someone else said, "I have to get one, I just love Scrubs too much" before I had a chance too. Naturally, I responded, "Does that come in hetero?" It was quite a moment.

Anyway, today I went to the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art (I think). It was pretty cool! The place was a little small, at least compared to art museums I have previously been to, but it was very interesting. There was a lot of multimedia stuff going on. I think I have that kind of grouped with contemporary dance in my head - I just don't get a lot of it. There was one really cool exhibit that was like a room with white walls, but they had projected like walls of an actual building on to the walls using projectors, so there were like projected windows and doors and stuff, and some guy I guess just filmed a day from those viewpoints so it was like being indoors, but not. Does that make sense? There were also like some exhibits involving lots of newspaper made into mannequins and a crazy post-apocalyptic view of PuDong and some other crazy stuff. Definitely interesting, but it was hard for me to see the artistic value in a lot of the stuff. I guess I'm just not that artsy of a person. While there, though, I decided to rank the most to least confusing forms of artwork in my mind (in general of course, some stuff doesn't make any sense to me at all even in a great meduim):
1. Dance. Hella don't get contemporary dance.
2. Multimedia. An excuse not to work hard enough on any one medium (kind of joking, but I don't see how something gets significantly meaning-ier by adding bland music in the back and using a projector).
3. Theater. A lot of it makes sense, but some new stuff is just over my head.
4. Visual Art. Even if I don't get it, the colors are usually pretty.
5. Literature. It's mostly cool, but some of that stream of consciousness stuff is kind of weird.
6. Music. Sometimes whiny, but there's just so much good music. Like Soul.
I hope I didn't miss any huge artform. While at the museum, though, I was reminded that I really like observing things. While my friends were fairly contented with a cursory glance at most the "pieces" (can you really call a room with curtains and a smoky fountain a piece of art?), I felt rushed even spending ten minutes looking at some splashes of paint. Which I think is nuts. I also like what I call the "looking at art" pose. It might look something like ... Well I just spent twenty minutes Googling/Yahoo Image Searching "looking at art", "appreciating art", and "viewing art" and either no one looks at art like I do, or no one who does takes pictures of themselves doing it, or at least they don't including the words looking, appreciating, viewing, and art in the title. Anyway, I look at art standing up wiht one arm cross and a hand on my chin. I'm pretty sure I only stand like that when looking at art. It's a fun pose. In conclusion, the art museum was pretty cool and kind of weird. Oh, but it was interesting that almost all the artists were Chinese, but most the visual/multimedia stuff that included text only had English, not Chinese.

The real cool part of today, though, was walking through People's Square on the way to the museum. Our teacher had told us about this thing that happens there on Saturday afternoons, but I totally forgot about it. Apparently tons of people go there on the weekends to try to matchmake for their kids. Seroiusly hundreds of older people carrying around hand-written classified ads for their kids, including information on height, age, weight, birthdate, and a ton of other crazy stuff. Some of them were pinned up on clotheslines, some were clipped to little bags, I assume used to get information from interested people, and some were just held up by sitting people. It was fascinating. If I'm unmarried by 28 or so, and my Chinese improves enough, I hope my parents would come to Shanghai to market me in People's Square. I was even thinking about asking my dad to do it when he gets here in May. I figure, 1.72 m, born in 1988, successful parents, good education, I might be a little young but that seems attractive enough on paper right? I should have taken pictures. Yeah...it was nuts.

There was something else interesting on the internet I wanted to share, but I can't remember what it is anymore. I guess it will give me fodder for next time.

Babies

I have been trying really hard to think about things I want to write about on my blog. One idea was toilet paper, since it's come up before. It's a lot cheaper apparently if you get toilet paper without the cardboard tube in the middle, and we don't have like a rack/dispenser for it anyway in our bathroom, so I think I'm going to pick up some sweet tubeless toilet paper soon. Maybe I'll take a picture and put it here. That would be kind of interesting and also desperate.

Aceyalone's Magnificent City CD is really good. I haven't listened to this in hella days. I remember LiveJournal used to have the currently listening to and currently feeling little blurbs for each entry. That was hella days ago.

Anyway, I had a really cute experience today. I got to class a little late, but during my lunch break I was outside laying on a little patch of grass outside the classroom because the weather has just been super gorgeous in the last couple days. After maybe fifteen minutes just lying down enjoying the sun and the light cool breeze, I heard the yells of little kids. There were three of them running toward me with a jumprope. I sat up to observe, and it was just so adorable - they were maybe between 2 and 4 years old, and the older boy and younger girl were taking turns holding and jumping of the rope. It was just so cute! The boy had to go, though, so I helped out the little girl by holding the other end of the rope so she could jump over. After a while of this, she ran around to her grandmother (I think) and gave her the biggest hug over her shoulders. It was seriously a moment where I was convinced of the work of God. The little girl just clearly loved her grandmother (I think) with such an innocent, pure love. And she was really cute. I ended up having a short conversation with the grandmother (I think) about job opportunities in China versus those in America and all that business with the world financial crisis. In Chinese!

The grandmother (I think) told the girl to thank the xiao shushu (sorry I still haven't figured out how to type Chinese) in reference to me. I can't believe I'm a shushu instead of a gege now. Oh, shu shu means younger uncle and gege means older brother. I feel like that's a right of passage into adulthood, and it freaks me out. Weird!

Sorry!

I had so many ideas for things to write about in my blog, but I forgot most of them. Hilariously enough, though, our last reading text/chapter in class was about blogs and the internet. I can now talk about blogging in Chinese (or at least have the vocabulary). Unfortunately, however, when the teacher asked who in our class had a blog, I was the only one stupid/honest/reckless enough to honestly answer yes. So if any of you reading this are my classmates, I think you are awesome. See you in class tomorrow.

I promise when I think of interesting things in China that are worth blogging about I'll write about them sooner so I don't forget.

OH IMPORTANT!

Because of the glory that is daylight savings, I am now 12 hours ahead of the East coast and 15 ahead of the West. That means for those at Middlebury, just flip AM to PM and vice versa, and at home, add 3 hours then do the flip. =D

Basketball

So I've balled three times now since I've been to China. I know, that's pretty bad...but it was raining pretty much straight for the first three weeks, so I don't feel that bad. Anyway, some thoughts: it's true, Chinese kids love playing like guards. Or at least in pickup games. I haven't actually played with anyone tall enough to be naturally suited for playing forward or center. But yeah the stereotypes, for the most part, are true. I played with a couple guys today that seriously every possession, whoever brought the ball down would drive and kick or attempt an ugly finish. Every play. Four of the five people on the team. They seriously all played exactly the same. They knew each other too, so the fifth guy, who was actually pretty decent but doesn't look good, got zero ball time. It was a little depressing. Kids here (or at least the kids from Asia except one kid from Korea I met) don't play defense. It's like watching a Warrior Suns game from way back when, or I guess like any Warriors game now.

I was playing today for a while, but the one game I sat out, on a fast break one of the kids who plays like a guard (who is also Asian, has cornrows, is pretty skinny, and wears all like XXXXL clothes) went up for a dunk. He made the dunk, but came down a little too hard and broke the backboard in half. I don't know where I'm going to play next time.

As a sidenote, while I was sitting I got to do some pull-ups because the hoops have a weird structure that makes for an efficient pull-up bar. The good news is that I can do more than one. The bad news is my arms hurt like crazy and it's now annoying to write.

Not much going on?

I have class at 8 AM three days a week. It's really hard for me to wake up for those classes.

Matt Lowes told me I probably wouldn't use my water bottle (klean kanteen - I'm on the bandwagon) very often, but I'm using it all the time. Unfortunately, however, its mouth is wide, but not as wide as a Nalgene so I'm not careful when I drink from it, and it always gets all over my shirt. That just happened. Not much has been going on here - just class. I have to pick a place to go during our April vacation, and I don't know which place to choose.

Not much is happening over here on my side. My classmates are pretty cool - there's a French girl that sits next to me that like appeared the second week of class. She's kind of interesting. The other kids are Korean, American, Japanese, Italian, and one guy from Kazhkstan. Did I spell that right? We went out for dinner a couple times, eat lunch together almost every day, and went kareoking once. Did I spell that right too? I guess one of them knew this other Chinese guy who, through them, I am now friends with, and he is pretty cool. Since the foreign students all either live off campus or in a foreign student only dorm, and I'm taking just Chinese language classes, I don't get many opportunities to interact with Chinese people, so I'm glad I met him. Apparently he competes in kareoke competitions. Legit. The only other Chinese friend I have is this guy I play ball with - he says playing with other Chinese kids is boring cause most of them aren't good, so he plays with the foreigners. It's fun.

I looked at my guitar case a minute ago and saw my Alpine Shop sticker (for those of you who haven't seen, it says ski today work tomorrow), and was very obviously reminded of my lack of skiing. Depressing. I check tramdock.com (part of the backcountry.com corporation, a monolithic online outdoors gear merchant) like a billion times a day. I also check it's new sister-site, brociety.com which sells snowboard gear. I have a bit of an issue looking at a website titled "Brociety" though. It seriously makes me feel a little dirty inside.

Anyway, seriously there's nothing going on over here. I need to study for my quiz tomorrow, so you guys make the effort - tell me what's up on your end.