My Sticky-Ball Brain

So yesterday was Friday again, and for all I'm lonely and homesick I've got to say that the weeks fly by with amazing speed.

Unfortunately, I was a bit late to my Chinese lesson. Partly a result of a late start (I've got to remember that 35 minutes by bike to my Chinese lesson is not the same thing as 30 minutes on foot with a little room for fudging to the rest of my classes!), partly the result of my rear tire being low--I was slower and more effortful than those other cyclists on the road, which is pretty rare. I mean considering that some old geezers are biking by with their canes tucked into their belts. Biking is such a way of life here.

I called my Chinese teacher, AL, at 10 sharp to tell her I'd be a few minutes late. She seemed fine with it, but when I actually got there she seemed a little stressed out. Just very busy I think.

Slowly I learn more things. Yesterday morning I was feeling like a crazy Japanese video game I saw once (can't remember what it's called; perhaps CM will tell me), where your character is a sticky-ball that rolls over things and picks them up if it can. It starts small, but since it adds things (people, animals, trees, cars, sail-boats, houses…) to itself, it naturally gets bigger and bigger, and at the same time the perspective gets bigger so eventually you can pick up skyscrapers, overpasses, and ocean-liners. Or whatever. At the time I first saw it, I considered it an abhorrent fantasy of materialist self-gratification. Now, however, I am ready to reconsider it as a (possibly equally abhorrent) metaphorical fantasy of cultural/intellectual attainment. My brain is like a tiny little sticky-ball rolling around Beijing and picking up words and street-vendors and poems and customs and expressions on people's faces and bus numbers... all indiscriminately and all the time. And while my brain isn't getting any bigger, it certainly feels like it's getting more and more full.

(To illustrate the concept, here is a photo of me with a citrus fruit about the size of my head. It's so big, I'd determined I could only eat about a quarter of it at a time, so I'd stripped the peel off the quarter I was planning to eat. As it was I ended up eating the quarter of it in two sittings. It was HUGE!)

Anyway, that was my Chinese lesson. Oh and also I managed to recite the two poems I'd memorized from last week, but not very smoothly. I get an absurd moment of stage-fright when I try to recite memorized poems in front of anyone. I'm just not much of a performer. But I did remember them. I have to add, for those of you who might think that memorizing poems is a whimsical activity, that here in China it is an important part of the school curriculum. Any Chinese person with even a high school degree can probably rattle off at least half a dozen poems from the Tang dynasty. If you don't get it (and you can't really understand them unless you've seen them written and studied them some) then you end up feeling left out and looking like a culture-chump. So I am plugging my way through the "best of the best" corpus.

AL was too busy to have lunch with me, so I went out, stopped by a bike shop to get my tire pumped up (they made fun of my helmet but graciously helped me with the "do it yourself" pump which I couldn't figure out how to do myself), and then biked toward home. I made up my mind to try a brand new restaurant on the way. I'm rather a timid soul, so I have to steel myself for these adventures. But this time I found a real gem! Below I post a photo-essay about the place I found, and first let the pix speak for themselves.







Unlike most of the Western food here, which is dispensed from familiar franchises that are just similar enough to the ones back home to be depressing and boring, but just different enough to be alienating as well, and all over-priced, the Papaya Diner was cute and unique and reasonably priced ($2.50 for the meal pictured here). It was mostly populated by high school kids. The menu contained jokes, and had a inter-cultural mix of foods clearly calculated to appeal to foreigners of all types. The club sandwich, which I ordered (and ate 1/4 of before I remembered to take a picture) was distinctly peculiar, as it contained bacon and chicken and eggs and tomatoes and cucumbers and mayonnaise and sesame seeds. But it tasted good anyway, and was presented so cheerily on the plate with an orchid. Papaya milkshake is delicious, also, even if it in the photo it doesn't look as good as it tastes.

After the delightful interlude in the diner, I got mildly cheated by a street vendor on the way home. Well, I wanted to try this weird yellow steamed cake kind of thing, but as usual with these tall cakes, you can't get just a little. I don't understand their little scale things, even though they weigh stuff and ostentatiously show you the results. I just don't understand the results, you know? Anyway, I got some steamed yellow cake. Upon inquiring, I learned that it was made from millet and maybe some chestnuts? It was laced with sugared sweetened plum halves as well and some raisins. It was a bit gluey, but tasted good while hot, less good when cool. I liked the edges better than the middle because they were less gluey and more chewy. Always an adventure!

I spent the afternoon working on my translation, and was pretty productive. At evening I went out for pulled noodles again. I thought I had got the routine down just right, but then I came up for my noodles when it was really someone else's noodles, and this threw us all into consternation, which I made worse by trying to explain that I was so eager to eat the noodles that I had come up too early by mistake. This made them all feel like they needed to hurry, which wasn't my intention at all. But then one of the counter girls slipped an extra piece of meat into my bowl, which gave me a warm feeling despite my consternation. Another of the girls who worked there and had got off work came over and chattered to me, bouncing around in her seat and asking me all kinds of questions. Before I realized she was one of the girls who worked there, I responded to her question of "how's the food" by saying it was great and how impressed I was by how the noodle chef made the noodles. "See that?" she shouted over to him. "She's saying good things about you!" Then I was sort of embarrassed, but amused and pleased too. The noodle chef brushed off her teasing and looked on gravely.

I had about decided that the whole pulled noodle staff was one of those great cultural mysteries that I was just never going to figure out, and that the best way to have a satisfying interaction with them was to do everything according to the proper ritual, exactly the same each time just like the order of toppings they put in my bowl and the way they gesture to the condiments and invite me to add my own, although they know very well that I know. It's just the ritual of the thing, and would soon become comfortable and familiar as the taste of the noodles as long as I could avoid messing it up. But now here was this chattering girl and I wasn't quite sure what to say to her, but I at least did a good job of understanding her questions. I just hope it's not a prelude to some permanent disruption of the comfortable ritual. How mortifying if--I dunno--the noodle chef were to make a pass at me or something. It seems impossible, for surely he's married and such. But perhaps my admiration for his noodle-making is out of line. How awful that would be, to see the dignified and hard-working noodle chef humbled by such an unworthy situation. Okay, I'm being totally silly I know. This discussion is ending here.

On another subject, I have been keeping tabs on AtomicTumor and his gravely damaged wife. Since he's unlikely to come looking at my site, I am going to say something that has been bothering me about the whole thing. Before his wife's misfortune, AT professed to be an atheist, or at least an agnostic. Naturally, given her critical condition and oscillation between the land of the living and the land of the dead, there had been a lot of praying going on, and a lot of god-talk. I say "naturally" because I figure that from a psychological point of view it's natural. But philosophically speaking… well, perhaps I'm just influenced by Colin's Phil 101 lectures on the problem of evil, but I can't help thinking that they're just not praying to an O3 god (tidy abbreviation for Omniscient Omnipotent Omnibenevolent). It's hard to see why an Omnibenevolent god would put them through so much suffering in the first place, or why praying to an Omniscient god would do any good--because wouldn't he already know all the facts of the case and already know the best outcome?

As near as I can figure from the fragments of theological thought posted by AT and his commentators, this is how their theology works: stuff happens in the world mostly for the same reason that an atheist thinks it happens. A person gets sick because of bacteria, she is in a vegetative state because of a brain hemorrhage, and so forth. (And she is--it's awful. I don't think he wants to think about what bad news it is when nurses cry every time they see him. He's still in the stage of being relieved because at least SOME people wake up from brain hemorrhages; at least there's a chance. I don't think it's blind hope really--he's just tired of total hopelessness and is trying something new.) It's not explicit that God has struck her down, or called her to him, or anything like that. Things happen to her (and everyone) mostly in a normal, scientific, causal way.

On the other hand, there seems to be a parallel range of causal possibilities connected with the efficacy of prayer--if you pray hard enough, God will intervene and change the normal causal chain to your benefit. My personal philosophy tutor suggests that this is not the O3 God of Christian theology but a much more pagan sort of god, one that "has his own stuff going on" like the dudes on Mt. Olympus or the Old Testament god, whose default mode seems to be destroying things and people, and is only with difficulty talked down from destroying the world again. Not to put down these folks at AtomicTumor, or minimize the psychological benefits of believing in whatever kind of god they want to, but I just kind of worry, as I always worry when a lot of praying starts happenin', about what kind of god they're really creating for themselves, and what the implications are if you really think them out.

Myself, I'm not a believer, but if I were, my personal choice to resolve the O3 contradiction would be letting go of the omnipotence leg of the triangle. That makes for a watered-down god something on the level of Julia Cameron's "Good Orderly Direction," but I think of the three (still unlikely) O2 possibilities that's the least unlikely.

I suppose a big emphasis on prayer is probably letting go of the omniscience side: God is all-good and all-powerful but we just have get through to him by sustained and persistent efforts, like trying to make a call when the lines are jammed. Lines jammed=not omniscient.

(Letting go of benevolence is just scary, c.f. Jonathan Edwards, and no one in their right mind would want that sort of O2 god.)

Anyway, time to stop babbling naïve philosophy of religion and get back to work; actually this issue is somewhat related to my work today, but that's a rare circumstance.

I should really write shorter posts. Next time. I promise.