Bad Bicycle, Missing Stars

Friday: the Duke of Zhou says, If you dream that the sky is shaking and the earth moving (fancy way of saying an earthquake), it means you will change jobs and probably be demoted. It was unlucky to move earth or engage in buildings in renovations, but it is a lucky day to sign a contract or to do business generally. Darn it, I should have waited until Friday to buy my ticket!

I found my bicycle tag at last. It is green on one side and white on the other side. It turns out it was lying on a white table-top, perfectly camouflaged with its green side down, in plain view. Well, this is why chameleons haven't died out long since. Their strategy for remaining unnoticed is quite an effective one!

After more than a month of not bicycling, I was clearly out of shape. Maybe my bicycle was too. We made very slow progress anyway. Fortunately I had anticipated this and left the house early. It took me nearly an hour to get there (it's usually a 35 minute ride), and I arrived at my Chinese lesson red in the face, just barely on time, quite out of breath.

It was a good lesson. I think I have recovered most of the ground I lost while Colin was here. I had prepared in advance a long "Report on Buying Airplane Tickets." I don't mean prepared in the sense of wrote down and memorized, but prepared in the sense of decided what to say and rehearsed in my mind the order of events. I think my teacher was amused, which was definitely the goal. She was most amused that I had talked to her without realizing it, and said she had had no idea I didn't know it was her. What a silly situation!

We also talked politics some--I wanted to explain to her about the program I had watched on television. She said I should have been a politician. Ha! I am over-educated and under-socialized, at least of politics in the US. I know that if I were a Chinese politician, though, there would be two goals foremost in my mind: environmental clean-up/protection, and rule of law. If these two areas could get sorted out, I think China might have a shot at becoming a pretty great place. Of course there's still the problem of form of government--who makes and enforces the laws--but really this is less important in practice than the idea that there be laws. Besides, as far as cleaning up the environment is considered, in the short run (an possibly even the long run) not being a democracy could very well be a tremendous advantage. Environmental protection, while being against nearly everyone's short-term interests, is vital to long-term interests. Since people care more about now than tomorrow, it's a problem that democracies are singularly ill-equipped to resolve. It's one of the very rare issues where I'd say the end justifies the means.

Anyway, I chattered on so long (but that's part of the point and very good practice) that we hardly had time for the lesson. But I did get my poem for the week. I'm not sure how many of these poems will stay stuck in my head, but as I work steadily through them at least I can be assured that I'd recognize them again if I heard them. It's a start.

I had Korean food again for lunch, which agrees with me well. And then the long road back, cursing my increasingly decrepit bicycle. It began to have that maddening problem where the seat gets loose and begins to rotated back to front, guaranteeing a totally uncomfortable ride. I will definitely have to fix that before next Friday.

After a brief interlude at home, I managed to drag myself into the library and spend the afternoon and evening working. A highly virtuous day!

Apologies by the way for the recent lack of pictures. I have just really been not in a photo groove. It sometimes feels like everything I see lately I've already seen a hundred times before, or otherwise--if it's fast-moving or people will think it a weird thing to photograph--I can't seem to summon the psychological energy to try to photograph it.

Here is another picture I made though. It is hard to paint stars--especially when you hardly remember what they look like!!