Lost My Groove

As if he'd read my last post, the Duke of Zhou says that if you dream of snow and rain mixed, it is a bad omen. Thanks Duke of Zhou. Instead I dreamed I had a giant killer snake which was cool for a while, but degenerated into my worrying that I had been spotted while unleashing the killer snake near a subway stop. I don't usually post my dreams here because--has anyone noticed this?--posting dreams tends to scare subsequent dreams away. But for this one I'm making an exception. Today was also supposed to a bad day for going out and for getting married (again) but a good day for cutting cloth for clothes and for bathing.

For three weeks I was in China without being in China, insulated by a little bubble of couple-dom. It has its price. Today in my Chinese lesson I could definitely notice the decline in my fluency, and my teacher noticed it too. "It goes to show," I said to HJ later, bewailing my misfortunes, "that progress is temporary!" "No," she said, eager to comfort me, "it's regress that's temporary." I can only hope.

Also, I have lost my green bicycle tag. It's got to be somewhere in this pigsty, but where? where? At 9:15 AM I gave up and took a taxi to my lesson. The driver was about a hundred times nicer to me than the taxi drivers were to Colin and me together. I told him where I wanted to go and he asked the road. I knew it, because I usually bike there, and told him so. He said biking sure is tiring isn't it? And I said it as good exercise, but today I was just too late. He asked where I was from--and so on. We chatted some more about the road. I think when you talk a lot of English behind their backs, they feel left out, is all.

After my lesson, which was mostly review and me bemoaning my lost fluency, I walked down the street toward the bus-stop. It felt surreal not having my big shadow walking by me, being all alone just me and my long grey coat. It was a wicked cold day, with a cutting wind. A girl in a hot-pink hanbok (Korean garb) was obviously shivering and freezing cold as she extolled the virtues of Lao Guang Zhong Korean barbecue restaurant, trying to make her voice heard over the guy in front of the neighboring restaurant who was busy extolling ITS virtues. I ducked into Lao Guang Zhong, trying to make her thing it was her good shouting that had convinced me, and had a 10 kuai bebim bap. Might as well seize the day and have Korean food when I can, now that the only reasonable Korean restaurant within walking distance from my house has been shut down. The 10 kuai bebim bap was good.

I dropped by home, and then headed to school where I met HJ. She had texted me last night asking if I wanted to go to a lecture with her. It was her intellectual hero, LXf. Because he's wildly popular, his lecture was deliberately under-publicized. However, she has a personal relationship with him, so she found out. We took a bus to a university I'd never heard of. The room changed twice. We struggled for seats and go them.

The lecture was about Nietzsche. LXf, indeed, is known here in China as a popularizer of Nietzsche--and of Christianity, odd combination. He was a small guy with a funny frog voice, but after a while it was charming. Like HJ, he's from Sichuan and so had an accent, but I mostly understood okay. (Here, I have caught him adjusting his cuff.)

The format was mostly him going through passages from Nietzsche (in Chinese translation) and talking about them. I had become unaccustomed to lectures in Chinese, so I couldn't follow it all that well at first, but slowly started getting the gist later. He was particularly interested in Nietzsche's awkward middle period, the stuff between The Birth of Tragedy and The Gay Science. I may track down the quotes in English translation to see if I can get a better sense of his overall thrust. One thing that was interesting though was the way he (without comment) replaced "Germany" with "China" throughout the text--to make the point of Nietzsche's applicability to his audience's current situation, I guess, but it was something!

After the lecture, HJ went up to him. She had gone up to him at yesterday's lecture too (which I had missed), but he had been busy and told her that they'd talk tomorrow. She was nervous about it--would he really remember her and want to talk to her. I encouraged her, but for myself hung back. She went up and--success!--he invited her to dinner. She wanted me to go too, but I bowed out: tired and stressed and haven't got my Chinese groove back yet.

I took the bus home by myself, intending only to stay for a few minutes and grab my computer before heading out to get dinner and some hours of library work. But the terribly icy wind was roaring outside, and somehow I ended up scrounging odds and ends of food around here, and working in instead. I was more successful with the pact today, logging over an hour even. Yeah, I know, I have to work on that and get it up to at least two--preferably five. But I've got to start small. Internet procrastination: exactly one hour, as before.

Here is my bed, converted from temporary love-nest back to its normal state of subsidiary desk and complete disaster area.

Missing Colin is still an ache in me, but talking on skype helps. Doing work helps. He sent me two very sweet e-mails today. The time will pass somehow. The wind is howling and roaring and whistling. Cold is pouring in under the curtain. It would have been a good night for Colin to still be here... but I suppose I'll probably be thinking that every night.