A Whirlwind Catch Up Post

You have probably been wondering what I have been up to recently. Answer: a lot. I strap on my wrist-braces* and dive in.

*For me, tendonitis always accompanies a productive phase, or a sociable phase, and this had been both. But by now I know how to manage it reasonably well.

When I first got back, I laid low for a while. The only sociable thing I did was write an e-mail to my new philosopher friend FP. Actually, I think I am going to abandon the use of initials on this blog and think up pseudonyms for people. I reserve the right to change them at any time, though. Anyway, since it turns out that FP lives right next to a Tibetan Buddhist temple, and for other reasons, I am going to dub him the Lama. After a delay I was pleased to get a response, and after a bit of cautious dancing around we agreed to have dinner on Saturday.

This gave me something to look forward to, and meanwhile I worked. I worked really hard, taking advantage of my last few week in the library before it closed for break. Sometimes when I spend a lot of long days with only work for company it is really bad for me. But I did get a lot done, mostly in the way of collecting research materials. (At left--the library. My home away from home.)

The only break in this regime was that on Valentines Day (Tuesday), I had a Chinese lesson. I decided I would devote part of the day to finally getting my bike fixed, so I could get to said Chinese lesson. Thus on the way out, I wheeled the piece crap out of the garage and made an appeal to the ancient little bike mechanic next door to my building. I may have mentioned that there are tiny bike-borne bike mechanic stands everywhere here, and they know all the tricks to paste your bike back together with wire and chewing gum, so to speak, though they can also replace things.

He opined that some part of my bike needed replacing, and when I asked the price apologetically said 15 kuai. Done! I left the bike with him, headed off to the library for the morning, and picked it up shortly before I had to leave for my Chinese lesson. And it rode like a brand new bike! I was kicking myself for waiting so long! It was a glorious, if short-lived, victory.

The Chinese lesson was good. I felt especially proud of my ability to recite the poem. I had thought about it lots, actually. My teacher was actually leaving that evening to go home to her family for the holiday. She told horror stories about spending five hours in line to buy standing room only tickets. The spring rush is intense, surely much worse than our Christmas or Thanksgiving transportation crunches. It seems like a regular thing to go home and be unable to return simply because you can't get hold of tickets. I shudder to think. I am staying put right here.

Though it was my first Valentines Day apart from my love, it was really no more depressing than any other day apart. I got to read with detached amusement all the blog-folks' whining about the vulgar commercialization of it all. They do celebrate it here, but it's a sort of young hipster holiday that hasn't caught on really in the culture at large. There was a larger than usual demand--and of course supply--for cut flowers, but that just made the streets a little cheerier. Valentines Day red items (lots of red lace bras) in the supermarket were barely noticeable within the much vaster tide of Chinese New Year red. More couples than usual in restaurants, but the city is so deserted for the holiday that there were still fewer people out and about. I consider that I got off light.

On Friday (2/16), feeling low from working too hard, I decided to check out a LeCarre novel for the weekend. They had two I hadn't read, and I settled on The Night Manager. I should have known better. Novels in English are like crack for me here! I started reading as soon as I got home, and, with only a minor break to talk to Pocket of Bolts, kept right on reading up until 3 AM. You'd think I'd've finished it, but it was a little complicated, and my reading has gotten slower since I do less of it here, and also I was savoring it. Still--I didn't feel so good when I woke up at 7:30 the next morning! There are downsides to training your body to wake up the same time each day.

My Saturday date with the Lama I already described in a tipsy out-of-sequence post here. Since the subway was closed by the time I thought of heading home, I took a cab straight home rather than to the subway stop where my bike was parked, and then didn't get around to going to pick it up for several days.

Those several days, Sunday and Monday, were rather a low point. I'm not sure why. I really had had a fun time, so there was no reason to be down. I guess I felt like the thing I had looked forward to was over, and my Chinese teacher was gone, my friend HJ was gone, my advisor at Beida was gone--I was just at loose ends. No doubt I could have called up WW the Army Gal, but actually being alone and gloomy was preferable. If I'm strictly honest, I was also embroiled in an uncomfortable post-first-date feeling the Lama, don't ask me why. Pocket of Bolts said that the great thing about friendship is you don't have to HAVE that kind of dating-type anxiety. But I don't have dating type anxiety when I'm dating, just with friends. Go figure. I'm sure this was also adding to my low mood.

Also, just about due to pay my next three months rent, I was deeply considering moving. This place is too damn expensive. And the neighborhood's no fun at all, especially compared to the Lama's, or even Wudaokou. Part of the reason I've been so lonely and isolated is geographical, I realize--because it's just such a huge commitment to go do anything. And yet moving would be a giant pain--I have so many books--there's Tashtego the goldfish. And I'd have to piss off my landlord. And find a new place during a holiday. It just seemed all a depressing puzzlement.

Here is a strange picture of me reading in a cafe Monday night. It was the Monet Cafe right across the street from where I live and I'd never been there. Horribly over-priced coffee, weirdly uncomfortable chairs and tables. I was the only customer and they warned me right off that they were closing at seven (it was six). Fine, whatever. I don't think I'll be back, but the dark wood interior was kind of interesting. Weird shadows on my face, but whatever. You get the picture anyway.

On Tuesday (2/20), I went to the dissertation support group. By an odd coincidence it was at a restaurant right near the same Lama Temple (Yonghegong). I didn't call the Lama or anything (too shy), but I had a good time at the meeting. Sometimes when you're really down, even a slightly cheerful event seems wonderful. It's like banging your head against a wall and then stopping for a while. So we had a jolly dinner at an Italian restaurant called the Vineyard, and ex-patty place but in the nicest possible way, somehow elegant and comfortable both at once, very clean, very pretty, inside a renovated hutong. Sorry I didn't take a picture. I will next time!

Parts of the meeting I found boring, but when our "report on what you're doing" activity came round to me, I found that I had actually been doing stuff I should be proud off. After all, I HAD drafted and sent off a nine-page (single-spaced) article in Chinese. And I had just that day gotten a good start on the next phase of my dissertation. I found myself volunteering to send something out for the next meeting even. (This is a resource we all under-utilize--we happily read and critique anything anyone sends out; it's just hard to get one's act together to send something out.) Suddenly I felt like a real graduate student after all.

I happened to ride the train home with one of the funniest members of our group. I have been calling her IP and am a little stuck for a better nickname. She does child-development, is incredibly driven, organized, and ambitious, but has a sweet vulnerable caring side thoroughly entangled with those other traits. Talking to her is like getting caught up in a whirlwind, but it is a warm whirlwind. Maybe I will call her the Whirlwind. Anyway, I adore her in the slightly distrustful way an introvert adores an extrovert--knowing there's no way to keep up with her enough to be her friend, but happy for the scraps of attention she occasionally lavishes on you. Like many successful and highly sociable people, her focus is capricious but intense. When she sets her mind to talking with you, she can draw out more in ten minutes than you could learn about anyone in days. It's quite a knack. So anyway, I found myself telling her about my anxious situation with the Lama. I was greatly abashed when she assumed it was a romantic date thing. I guess that IS how I was acting though. When I blushingly clarified that we were both seeing other people and it was a just friends thing, she made a gesture both hugely expansive and laughingly dismissive all at once. "What are you worried about? It's perfectly safe then! I bet you're the kind of person who lies awake at night over-analyzing everything." (Spot on.) She's half Portuguese and half Chinese. What a character she is.

After she got off at her stop, I pondered and decided she was right. I really don't have anything to worry about, do I.

I got to the subway stop where I had left my bike several days before. You know, naively expecting that it would still be there. Silly me. The bikes were neatly sorted into: a plundered pile of junk bicycles all jumbled together, missing handlebars and seats but too crappy to be worth stealing whole; bikes that had been chained to the railing and were wrenched looking but basically intact, though also missing handlebars and seats; and one decent looking red bike which I remembered I had taken care to park next to because it looked nicer than mine. In retrospect, I think it must belong to the local gang boss or something--maybe no one dares steal it. That was it. No crappy aluminum newly repaired Zapaper's bike with expensive lock (nothing a welding torch can't hand I suppose). Efficient bike thieves must have dropped with a truck and done their deeds under the cover of fireworks.

Went home disgruntled, but at least I had an excuse to e-mail the Lama (3 days of e-mail silence): we'd talked about how his neighborhood was one of the few places where used bikes were obtainable. A little flurry of e-mail exchanges which I overthought and overagonized about, but ended calmly enough and included the "we both know we're going to just be friends" conversation in an awkward but definite form. We ended by agreeing to have lunch together on Thursday (followed by bike shopping for me) and maybe go hear some music on Saturday. Because when you clarify that yes, you really are just going to be friends, it is safe to say, What the heck, let's hang out as much as we want then.

Lest you think I spent the whole week gallivanting, though, I did a lot of work on my dissertation framework (as I'm calling it): it began with a drastically reconstructed outline, and I've decided the next step is to flesh it out by mentioning and sketching all the things I'm going to talk about--in order--before sitting down and actually filling in the details. That way, I can show it to people and get their feedback before I waste a lot of time writing footnotes, know what I mean? So if my advisor says, "chapter 2 is a waste of time; no one cares about that"--well, I have spent a day or two writing chapter 2, not six months. It's also great for my confidence, which has been sinking lower and lower as regards dissertation writing. So that is coming along surprisingly well.

Wednesday, since I'd been in the house all day, I decided I needed to go out and try something new for dinner. All the restaurants I'd been to looked lifeless and unappealing. But just south of my building there's a tiny-looking place called (in Chinese) Fat Cow, and I noticed a number of people heading in. In China it's sometimes best to go with the crowd, so I went. By some topological trick, Fat Cow turned out to be huge inside. It was a hot-pot restaurant, but had individual hot pots, so it wasn't as weird to eat there as I would have feared. A spendy meal--61 RMB--but it was probably like a pound of tasty tasty thin-sliced lamb, meltingly tender, lightly cooked by yours truly in flavorful bubbling broth, together with a big basket of spinach, bowls of scallions, cilantro, garlic, and a delicious dipping sauce. Also a pot of chrysanthemum tea. I was highly pleased.

I'm not sure when exactly I stopped trying to go out to restaurants. I guess it just got to be too much psychological effort. But my own ability to cook tasty food with just my lousy hot-plate is pretty limited, and I eat much better when I put myself in the hands of professionals.

So here I am on Wednesday night, with nice lunch date to look forward to and a good dissertation groove going. The next few days hold even more adventures, but since I should get a LITTLE work done today, and this is already long a post, I will leave that for next time.