Caribou

Yesterday is brought to you by Caribou coffee. They have their new holiday napkins and java jackets. While I am generally unimpressed by business' holiday decoration-type things, I find the Caribou efforts kind of endearing. It's a startling variation in something whose visual sameness is usually so completely ingrained that it's invisible.

Anyway, I ended up having breakfast at Caribou today because the milk in the fridge soured and I forgot to go get more. I figured, if I had to go out anyway I might as well go out and get started on my workday.

I had a very pleasant morning at Caribou as it turned out. Coffee and pumpkin pecan bread. I find that I enjoy coffee shops in inverse proportion to the amount of time I've recently spent there, and since I hadn't been to "close Caribou" in quite some time, I enjoyed it quite a lot.

Also, owing to my mounting pessimism about the job search and various other factors, I have changed my attitude toward my work. I can't make myself do it from grim determination and self-loathing anymore. Mind you, grim determination and self-loathing can get you a long way. Probably almost anyone who's written a humanities dissertation knows what I mean. You can get a lot done fast. But lately I've instead been returning to the root of the project in my psyche, the feelings about it I had in the beginning, why I initially decided to do it. Thus the work I do is slower, more circuitous. I have gone back to running with tangents, following up on little puzzles, translating delightful but unrelated anecdotes that I happen to run across. Here's one I found yesterday morning (Chinese names abbreviated to prevent sinologists' Google searches from landing them there.

When [ZG] was young, he went around with WA. When WA’s reputation was not yet established, ZG commended him to [his own teacher, an illustrious statesman of the day]. But when WA become successful (because of this introduction), he dropped ZG. The emperor once asked [ZG], “Who does WA resemble?” ZG answered, “In literary learning and moral conduct, WA is not inferior to [the brilliant Han dynasty philosopher] YX, but because he is miserly, he is not quite as good [as YX].” The emperor objected, “WA thinks nothing of wealth and honor. In what way is he miserly?” [ZG] said, “What I mean by ‘miserly’ is just to say that he is bold in his actions but miserly in correcting his faults.” The emperor concurred.

It may be a "had to be there" sort of thing, but I found this little tidbit rather delightful.

In the afternoon, I went downtown to have coffee with my Chinese acquaintance from the bus stop. My instincts proved correct about him, by the way. He was extremely pleasant, polite, respectful, and friendly. He is also well-educated and really good with words. I'll call him the Reporter, although really he is a former reporter. Apparently, he worked for a rather important newspaper in China (I won't name it here, though he did tell me) and worked his way up to become an editor. However, it was a really demanding and high-pressure job and in the end he resigned and took a job in the government instead. Now he is here doing a one year program at IIT. I had told him what I work on, and he had gone to some pains to learn something about it. We had a really pleasant chat about that and the recent election and all sorts of matters.

He had, incidentally, been very curious about the voting process, and even managed to talk his way into one of the polling places, at least for a moment, so he could see what goes on. His overall impression was that voting is too difficult and complicated. (I could just see him thinking: how could Chinese peasants possibly manage to do this?) I asked him what he thought about freedom of speech and the press. He said that owing to the internet, people already have it in a de facto sense, and there's really not all that much the government can do about it. I asked him if he thought that was a good thing and he said yes.

We conducted our conversation in a funny mixture of languages. It is common in language exchange relationships to try to set a period of time for talking in English and a period of time for talking in the other language. However, in practice that hardly ever works; one language or the other just takes over. The Reporter proposed that we each do the hard thing: he would speak English and I would speak Chinese. You'd be surprised how well that works. We both get plenty of passive listening comprehension practice in our classes, but very little practice actually speaking. I brought a pack of notecards for us to write on, vocabulary words, things we didn't understand, etc. It worked better than most language exchange efforts I have engaged in, mostly because the Reporter was an interesting person with a lively mind.

Incidentally, it is so useful being married. Marriage is something that people respect in a way that they don't respect "having a boyfriend." As Pocket of Bolts said, "I have a boyfriend" sounds like a challenge. "I'm married" is--or should be--an incontrovertible "no trespassing" sign. I like it that way, very much. With the Reporter, or in fact any male I encounter now, there is no element of potential sexual tension, mixed signals, or what have you.

Anyway, I think I will continue doing language exchange with the Reporter. It seems like a worthwhile use of my time, and he is certainly grateful. He reports that it is hard to meet Americans because most of his classmates are also Chinese! I was amused.

I did some grocery shopping on the way home. Over dinner (pasta with red sauce from a bottle and chopped up boca burger), I watched the first episode of Dexter. It had been recommended to us by some friends who are not especially good recommenders--as in, our tastes don't really match theirs. So we hadn't tried watching it. But then I noticed it was available for watching online through Netflix, so I decided to try it. It was dark, really dark, but fairly successful I thought. There was this element of black humor to temper the horror. I'm interested to see if Pocket of Bolts will like it or not.

As usual, I didn't use the evening very productively. I miss PoB, in the evening most of all. Good thing he is coming home today. I hope very very much that we won't have to work in different cities next year.