Cold Caught Me Thursday

I know I'm behind. I have been sick and busy and a couple of minor crises also popped up, making it hard to justify time spent blogging. But now I am well again and things are as normal as they ever are, so I'm back…to Thursday.

On Thursday the cold I was catching caught me. I sat in front of my computer, resting and playing and trying to recover from the stress of the conference, also blowing my nose and sneezing a lot.

Now ordinarily, I would not have gone to visit an elderly person when I was in such a state. However, elderly people are not so fragile about such things here. Their immune systems are like iron--they'd have to be, or they wouldn't still be around. Also, I had not met with LGs last week, and had quite a number of things to give him. So I decided to go ahead with it, trying my best to keep my germs to myself.

As always when I am sick, the bike-ride took A LOT out of me. But there was no other good way to get there. I arrived somewhat drained, but as usual it was lovely to chat with LGs. He is having deep thoughts about comparative history, which are rather beyond my scope, but it was interesting to hear him talk about them. I presented the books my advisor had brought, and also the highly relevant paper I had "captured" at the conference. He was pleased with it, happily tracing the scholarly filiations of the author and figuring how he fit into LGs's own circle of acquaintance--degrees of separation and so on. It cracks me up the way they do that; it's like grandmothers discussion the family tree. And yet for them the process is exceedingly important in determining the appropriate attitude one should take while reading someone's work! Anyway, it made me feel a little better about the whole conference experience somehow.

I did have a bad moment when LGs started asking advisorly questions about my dissertation. Admittedly, my brain wasn't working too well because of my cold, but I should have been able to come up with better answers for such a sympathetic and interested audience. He had helpful suggestions anyway, but I just feel that I missed a chance to get some good knowledgeable criticism on the basic premise of my project. What is the basic premise of my project anyway!? It was once so clear to me but it's easy to get confused in such a different intellectual milieu than the one in which I developed it.

Usually I get the feeling that I'm the one tiring him out. This time, though, I got so tired I couldn't make it through my whole list of translation questions. I was afraid I wouldn't understand his answers, or would understand them wrongly.

I biked back to the campus. It was nearly five o'clock and starting to get dark. I was oddly hungry (very light lunch) and decided to have some Ma la tang again, at the same little place. Here is a picture of the table, piled high and just radiating abundance. I'm sorry it is not a very good picture, but there's rarely a clear view--people are always crowded around! By the way, I subsequently learned something about Ma la tang, which I will mention at this point. The broth it is cooked in is what we could call "stock", but they call it "old soup." And they aren't kidding: old soup, according to AL, may be years old.

Of course it's a ship of Theseus problem, since stuff is always going out and coming in. Still, it's sort of horrifying isn't it? But also cool? Each restaurant's "old soup" is a carefully guarded commodity, and the mainstay of their reputation if they specialize in Ma la tang, or other things that require old soup. How does it not go bad? Hm, maybe it does and that's part of the secret. Who knows? It's really good, though.

I felt pretty good after eating the Ma la tang, all warm inside and my sinuses cleared from the big pile of hot pepper paste on top. However, when I went out to get my bicycle, I had a clumsy moment and knocked it over with a clatter. This caused the chain to come off, and I had to get it back on before I could ride home.

At first I thought I'd just ask the next door bike shop to do it for me, but they were closing. So I flipped the bike over and after 10 minutes of cold, dirty work managed to get the thing back on. It's a one-speed, so there are only a total of two gear-wheels, one on each end of the chain. But there's no way of making them further apart or closer together, so it just takes a fair amount of coaxing before the chain can be realigned over their teeth. And I am by no means a bike repair expert. I did manage it, but my Ma la tang and hot sauce glow was long gone and I was just cold and sick and tired. Spent a very quiet evening at home.