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.