Hey, thanks Word Nerd!
I kind of feel like I should write something thoughtful here today for the occasion. But I'm afraid that though I have done a lot of thinking in the past 24 hours, most of it has been on the exceedingly mundane topic of cultural difference in the paying of electricity bills.
It started last night. I had just started boiling a pot of water so it would be both potable and cool by morning, and I was about 5 seconds from turning out the light over my head when ploink, it went out for me, and at the same time the pot of water stopped heating itself.
You'd think I would be puzzled, but I knew instantly what was up. I had run out of electricity. Like everything else here, electricity is on a declining balance basis, and you have to buy it at the bank. At the beginning of the year I had bought 1000 RMB worth, which my landlord said should last six months. Eight months later, it's not all that surprising that it should finally run out.
Here's the thing though. If I had had one fewer light on all day or boiled one fewer pot of water, the electricity would have waited until morning to go out. And I would not have had to be mildly anxious about it all night for no good reason. I mean, it's not like I was going to want to turn on the light in the middle of the night--but what if I did!? I wouldn't be able to! This is the level of rationality I achieve after midnight on a day when I have done no dissertation work at all and instead read an entire novel by John LeCarre. (It was Absolute Friends--a real downer, I'm afraid, in the Constant Gardener vein. I like him better when he gives you at least the narrowest tiniest strand of redemption for someone...)
Lack of electricity precluded the two things I usually enjoy most in the morning: hot tea (no way to heat the water) and talking to Pocket of Bolts (the laptop has batteries but the modem doesn't). Fortunately, I had a plan: there's a Starbucks downstairs. I would get caffeinated there, use their wireless, and hang out until the banks open.
I devised this plan at 6 AM while showering by candlelight. Why did I wake up at 6 AM when Starbucks was guarenteed not to be open yet? Search me. I got all dressed and dozed for a couple hours, also a weird choice, then went to carry out my plan... only to discover that May 1 is a holiday in China, and this apparently means that the Starbucks is closed for three days. But what about banks?
To make a long story short, I found caffeine and wireless, though both were inferior and in two different places, and discovered that banks were indeed open. And popular. I waited, holding number 1044, for 45 minutes at China Construction, only to be told that they do not sell electricity. Try Shenzhen Development. Shenzhen Development told me they do not sell it either, try China Commercial. Fortunately, China Commercial was able to do it, and I only had to wait in line for 20 minutes with number 172, due to numbers 151-158 not showing up.
Finding the well-camouflaged electricity meter was a whole other adventure, but there's not much to tell--just lots of me walking up and down saying to myself, I'm positive it's around here somewhere... finally finding it in a totally unmarked cupboard with no handles.
I was very glad to have my electricity back, I will say!
Some other thoughts I had today:
Black sesame porridge actually tastes a lot better plain, without extra milk and sugar; it also smells a bit like coffee.
When you live in a foreign country, holidays that they celebrate and you don't are really a drag. There's nothing to do, everywhere you want to go is closed, and everyone you need to see is out of town.
Moby Dick, which I have been reading at the approximate rate of a 4 chapters per week since I came to China, is an incredible novel. But I never would have appreciated if I had tried to read it at a younger age. Also, the relationship between Starbuck and Ahab strikes me as extremely Chinese.
Okay, there's a slice of my life from today. That's all the thinking I have in me, I'm afraid. But thanks for the inspiration Word Nerd!
2 comments:
Moby Dick?? Maybe I should reread it. Maybe *I* was not ready when I was younger. I've always said I was glad I *had* to read it in college, otherwise I never would have, but there were huge sections in the middle (the parts that seemed like textbooks on whaling) that I skipped.
Maybe I should try it again.
But not until after the last installment of Harry Potter comes out this summer ;)
I am totally looking forward to the last Harry Potter as well, and have had to strenuously resist pre-ordering it. After all, if I can manage to wait a month or so, it will probably be available half-off in used bookstores, as all best-sellers eventually end up.
The thing about the textbooks on whaling is that they are subtly parodic and/or symbolic. And is the obsession with whales a characteristic of the narrator, who is a character in the book, or is it the author, who after all is the creator of Ahab? These are the kinds of questions that got me through the middle bits, that and being in China without all that much English stuff to read, and reading it in small doses.
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