it's been awhile since i've updated, probably cause the purpose of this blog has shifted from me rambling on about nothing to having to provide actual substance in the form of describing my everyday life here, so naturally i've been lazy. sorry, i've been reading too many long-winded novels (all borrowed from kevin) so i'm probably gonna use a bunch of big words incorrectly.

some highlights from the past few weeks:

- today my friend sent me a link to an article written by some dude, called The 10 Men for Whom I Would Consider Turning Gay...his list started with ed mcmahon and ended with bob newhart (whoever that is). needless to say, my list would be quite different, probably starting with brad pitt, or maybe a young tony leung, and ending with brad pitt (or a young tony leung).

- one day after it rained i tried getting some students to play mud football in the main field. there weren't many people there however, so i ended up just throwing the ball around with a couple guys, and the first time i tried punting it i slipped in the mud and totally ate it, and a gigantic tidal wave of laughter erupted from the invisible onlookers in the buildings surrounding the field.

- so far i've burned about 15 movies, 26 episodes of cowboy bebop, and 60 simpsons episodes onto cds.

- i went to a convention of provincial artists and was forced to drink baijiu (disgusting bat barf liquor) with lots of stranger artists to prove my friendship to them. i got completely hammered off about a thimbleful...the day culminated with a very drunk artist, the dude who invited us, trying to make out with me (you weren't there!) and an entire goat being roasted on a spit (not that tasty).

- 2 of the first 4 segments contain homoerotic references if you're keeping score.

- i showed the first half of the Jsus movie (dubbed in chinese) to the kids in sunday school this past week. for the hundredth time, that movie must have been specifically anointed by the Holy Spirit to have been able to lead millions of people to faith, since i (along with the kids unfortunately) was bored silly by it. that sounds bad i know, and the story is the most important of stories, but seriously, it's a poorly made movie.

- i went christmas tree hunting in the mountains for the first time in my life, we picked out a 10-11 foot tall one and carried it back to town, singing:

i'm a lumberjack and i'm okay
i sleep all night and i work all day
i chop down trees, i wear high heels, suspendies and a bra
i wish i were a girlie, just like my dear papa

it might've been just me singing that.

- we had a big christmas party on christmas eve, decorating the tree, exchanging gifts, building gingerbread houses, poking people with candy canes, singing and dancing to christmas songs, about everybody we've made friends with (~ 45 people) showed up, it was lots of fun.

- micky mao: reloaded - the school is having a new year's ceremony this sunday and is requiring the foreign teachers to put on a minimum of two performances. me and kevin are gonna perform intergalactic planetary by the beastie boys (set to the instrumental version) and loser by beck, of course (him on vocals, nicky on guitar, me on drums). thus far our repertoire includes the sweater song, ice ice baby, 1979, basketcase, creep, and the two songs mentioned above, though if we get booed off the stage, the ceremony never happened. cd due out whenever china stops pointing missiles at taiwan.

enough for now, i'm outtie, merry christmas everybody, and more importantly, happy birthday to mao! (...)

yay our internet's back, it's been down for awhile. sometimes i'm really glad that i'm teaching in china and not the US. yesterday when i walked into one of my 4th grade classes, there was a girl in the back bawling her eyes out, and when the rest of the class saw me they all pointed at these two boys sitting next to her. i went over there and tried to figure out what had happened but couldn't get a straight answer and was about to start teaching when one of the boys put his head down on his desk and started making weird frog-like sobbing sounds. i thought he was making fun of the girl's crying and totally exploded on him. i marched him out of the room and when he turned to face me his whole face was wet with tears and he kept making those weird frog sounds...needless to say i felt pretty scummy. luckily this is china and parents expect their kids to be yelled at everyday.

the chorus has been canceled for the rest of the semester. the headmaster of the primary school wasn't happy with the results of the midterms and blamed all the teachers, so they've all been feeling a lot of pressure and have been keeping the kids for a long time after school ends everyday, which is 4 pm. the chorus is supposed to start at 4:30 but last week we only had about 6 kids show up until 5 pm. i'm gonna talk to the headmaster of the middle school to see if we can start one here instead.

not much else to report...i went to zhangjiajie a couple weekends ago, which is a national park about 4 hours away and is pretty breathtaking. the park is about 20 km outside zhangjiajie city, which has the nearest airport to baojing. so come visit me, darn it.

i just had a nice four day weekend thanks to midterms. midterms in primary school...another reason i'm grateful everyday that my ancestors moved to taiwan and my parents moved to america. i did nothing of use at all with my time off, just fatted around, watched movies, simpsons episodes, etc. i started watercoloring a bit too; nicky's mom is a painter and she tried to teach me a bit, poor nicky.

i don't quite remember how it came up but we got the idea to paint all 152 bean cards for the game Bohnanza; it took us several hours spaced over four days...gonna play later tonite and see how it goes.

today for sunday school we talked about sin some more and the 10 commandments and how it's impossible to obey all the commandments in the pentateuch and grace being the difference between chrstianity and other religions. during the lesson i asked the (four) kids to imagine themselves as Gd, with their own nation called by their name, and to come up with their own ten commandments for their nations, in partners:

1. Do not fight.
2. Do not lie.
3. Cook me good food everyday.
4. Be good to everyone.
5. Do not do to others what you don't want done to yourself.
6. Do not mess around irresponsibly with fire.
7. Do not gamble.
8. Do not smoke.
9. There must be music (and funk - ed. note)!
10. Plant many kinds of fruit trees.

1. Do not fight with others.
2. Be good to everyone.
3. Do not steal other people's girlfriends.
4. Do not steal anything at all.
5. Respect the elderly.
6. Do not kill.
7. Help each other out with a lot of things.
8. Give offerings such as food, snacks, candy, etc. to me everyday.
9. Do not mug other people and take their things.
10. Help each other buy candy.

not bad, pretty reasonable attempts, i think. they seem to understand the impossibility of doing everything right and being perfect and that we have to count on Gd forgiving us, which is good. afterwards the six of us played hide and seek in our 2 bedroom apartment (though kevin was in his room with the door closed), which lasted about 5 seconds each time till we blindfolded the seeker. yeah...kid's games..fun...apu me friend good.

the weather dropped 30 or 40 degrees a couple days ago. friday i was laying around outside in shorts and a tshirt and saturday i had to wear my heavy winter coat and scarf...i even put on socks! sign of the times...

a few stories about dogs in china:

1. the first day me and kevin went into town to try to buy a dog we had to ask people where they sold them.

me: excuse me, i wanna buy a dog
random vendor: alive or dead?
me: what?
random vendor: pet or meat?
me: begins to cry

2. xujun, our cook, volunteered to adopt the puppy that kevin had received for his bday this past sunday, since he already has a full grown dog. when the puppy, a male, was introduced to the other dog, also a male, he mistook it for his mother and in trying to find his/her nipples for milk, he bit the other dog on the nuts. like fark would say, hilarity ensued.

3. a couple days ago kevin was on the MAIN STREET in town when he looked in the middle of the road and saw two dogs stuck to each other. unfortunately he was buying cookies from a bakery on the MAIN STREET in town at the time, so he couldn't go in for a closer look, but they were somehow joined at the hip at an approximately 90 degree angle and frantically trying to pull away. while he was watching, a third dog approached the stuck dogs and began to violate one of them, periodically pausing and resuming. while this was happening, a fourth dog approached the three dogs and sat down to watch, occasionally shouting encouragement. kevin appeared to be the only human who paid any special attention to this incident. what a weirdo.


about a month and a half ago, nicky's mom mailed her an american football. one day one of the high school gym teachers saw us throwing it around and asked us if we could teach the students how to play and coach some teams. we agreed, and today we had our first practice. about 20 kids showed up, some of them surprisingly large for this town, and me and kevin ran them through some throwing and catching drills.

i don't know anything about football! the most experience i have is playing street football with the neighborhood kids in junior high. after i bought madden 01 on sale for $10 i never even tried playing it cause it looked so confusing. also, who is our team gonna play? i'm pretty sure we're the first high school (american) football team in xiangxi prefecture. at least there definitely won't be any parents suing about injuries and stuff (since we are playing without pads - i pushed for two hand-touch or flag football, but the gym teacher wanted full contact, so we're working out a compromise at the moment).

as you can probably tell, i alternate between feeling excited and feeling in over my head about the team. i suppose everything'll sort itself out eventually, like most things do here.

we just had our third sunday school. last week we did the fall of man and today we covered the prodigal son. the format is pretty simple, we usually start off with a game and then we ask them some questions and then we tell them the story using a small chalkboard and discuss it at the end.

it's challenging because my religious chinese vocabulary is pretty crappy and because i'm not sure how to change the feel of the lesson from impersonal and academic to life-applicable. today we again talked about the similarities and differences between buddhism and chrstianity. if you have any ideas i'm quite open to hearing them.

today we explained the idea of parables to them (kinda) and asked them who they thought the younger son in the story represented; their answers were adam, eve, and satan. that last one kinda threw me off, i asked them why they would think it's satan and they said because he messed up but Gd forgives people who mess up. i didn't really know how to answer that so i kinda glossed over it and told them that the son represents all men. it's interesting though, how come we get a second chance and satan doesn't? i guess the answer has something to do with election.

the nba season finally starts again this week. supposedly they show some games on the sports channel here, though i dunno how they'll find room among all the soccer, tennis, ping pong, and go (the board game...ahem...not the board sport). i'm so desperate for football or basketball footage i've been watching the same basketball preseason highlights on espn motion over and over. lebron definitely sucks at shooting.

two entries in a row from my daily xanga update, from two people who both kinda grew up in taiwan:

matcheaven:

this entry is dedicated to madame Chiang Kai-shek, who pased away yesterday at age 106.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, you were always a example of what a chinese woman is like. Strong but gentle.

joytofu:

Chiang Soong Mei-Ling dies in NYC.

my dad's been talking about that all day. he does not like her. her husband, chiang-kai-shek, was a notorious dictator. my dad still has bad memories from that time when the Chaings ruled taiwan.

no brainwashing going on in taiwan it seems. i'm not sure what to make of madam chiang; the soong family seemed to be one of the most influential chinese families of this century, early examples of global beneficient chinese making their mark on the world. from what i remember, charlie soong, the father, was a rich plantation owner who lived in hawaii, and his kids all went to yale. one of his daughters married sun yat-sen, one (obviously) married chiang kai-shek, and one of his sons became in charge of the chinese economy under the guomingtang government and made some good things happen. the family was said to be all chrstian too; supposedly charlie soong wouldn't let his chiang kai-shek marry his daughter meiling unless he became a professing chrstian (which happened, again supposedly).

anyways, i don't know enough details to form an opinion. from talking to people in taiwan last year, they seem to have a love-hate relationship with chiang kai-shek, which seems fitting.

today is both kevin and karen's birthday and yesterday we threw a party for both of them. one of the teachers at my school brought a 1 month old puppy as a present to kevin, who was stunned into shocked silence pretty much the whole night. he decided that we shouldn't keep the dog, since there might be lingering clouds of distemper in our apartment from jiujiu and it wouldn't be healthy for the puppy, as well as simply not feeling up for keeping it.

overall, the routine of things here have started to move from comfortable to uh, routine i guess. just that kind of slugging it out feeling...hopefully i'm just pmsing and the feeling'll go away soon.

the weather here's been cold for the past couple weeks. the change was really abrupt, on september 30th it was sunny and 80 degrees out and on october 1st it was cloudy and about 50 degrees, and it's been that way ever since, with one sunny exception. the lack of a gradual temperature decrease takes away from the autumn feeling around here, where you feel the first chill of the year and it reminds you of all the previous chills and autumns.

along with the change in weather came changes in people's behavior and habits, most notably with food and clothing. for some reason as soon as it got cold, a horde of popcorn vendors materialized on the streets, selling bags of popcorn that taste exactly like Honey Smacks the cereal. really, i don't see the connection here. street vendors also started selling sugar cane and chestnuts, which is one familiar thing at least.

the clothing change is the most remarkable to me. during the summer, the locals dressed really casually, in tank tops and thin white tshirts and slacks; when it was really hot the men would pull their shirts up and rest them on their nipples leaving most of their torso bare, it was quite attractive. as soon as it got cold, however, everyone started wearing dark-colored blazers and suits around town, really fancy stuff. it feels unnatural buying sticks of pork meat from a guy in a full on three-piece suit. i guess they don't really buy into the idea of sweatshirts or casual long-sleeved clothing around here. if the headmaster at my primary school thought i was young and immature before (the impression that i got), he must be thrilled when i show up to school in a bright yellow sweatshirt and sandals these days.

this past sunday me and duncan taught sunday school to five kids at kate's niece's apartment, our first one. i thought the kids would be like 9 or 10 years old so i prepared accordingly, but when we got there they were 14-17. we scrapped the black and white pictures for them to color and instead taught them the creation story using a chalkboard. it went pretty well, they were pretty attentive and asked a couple questions. afterwards they told us the buddhist creation story, at least the local version of it. this is gonna be a regular weekly thing from now on, next sunday we're gonna cover the fall.

one more thing, kate told me last week that she got CCTV-9, one of the nationally run television channels to agree to come down here in december and tape the chorus singing a couple christmas songs. i'm not clear on the details or the exact likelihood of this happening, but the idea of being broadcast on national tv to a billion people makes me miss my mommy, or the halcyon days of my youth. whatever.

i've put off writing about it for a couple days but i guess there's no point...our dog jiujiu died two nites ago. she'd been sick for about a week and a half with all sorts of diseases; she had worms, an eye infection, stomach and leg rashes, nausea, and a fever. we gave her local human worm and diarrhea medicine and had some special dog worm medicine sent in from the states and we took her to two doctors, one for humans and one for animals, and they each gave her a shot. we went to the animal doctor on the last day; after he gave her the shot she had a big seizure and went through a cycle of having a seizure, sleeping, and barking at nothing for the rest of the day, until she had an extended seizure for about two hours and passed away around 2 am.

we buried her in an uncultivated plot of land on campus. ben, our school liasion, brought tools and his little daughter brought some forget-me-nots to lay on her grave.

i dreamed about her last nite, for the first time. we had her for a month, 9/1 - 10/1...the students loved to come to our end of campus and play with her in the afternoons and the teachers always asked after her. so long, jiujiu, we miss you.

next wednesday is China's national Liberation (uh...yeah) Day, so we get 7 days off, from 10/1-10/7. of course this is china, so they're making us teach this saturday and sunday to make up for two of the lost days. doesn't that kinda defeat the point of a vacation? apparently the gov't just decided this today, so every school in the country has classes this weekend. i've said it before...freaking commies.

this afternoon i was already kind of put out because the primary school had informed me in the morning that i had to work this weekend and our dog's been sick and not eating for a week, and then at the basketball game in the afternoon the 'coach' didn't play me at all in the second half (i'm not sure why) and our team lost by 2, our first loss of the semester. i was just feeling pissy so as soon as the game ended i left and rode straight back to my apt at the middle school. so i can't make fun of immature nba players anymore, just the funny looking ones.

it doesn't seem like much looking back on the events of the day, but today i felt kind of cramped and suffocated here for the first time. after dinner i asked xujun to take me for a ride in the mountains and he took me to some random strip of grass near the river and we laid down and looked at the (shooting) stars. the sky was much clearer than it is in town, it reminded me of all the other times and places i've laid down to watch shooting stars. i'd make a joke about being comforted by a guy taking me to lay down in the mountains to look at shooting stars with him, but there's not much i can really add to that.

one day i was in town and i said 'good morning' to some acquaintances and they just stared at me and said 'what' in chinese, so i repeated myself and they laughed and asked me why i was saying 'big brother touches you'. i guess that doesn't make sense if you don't speak chinese, but i thought it was pretty darn funny.

the chorus finally started this week. it's about 40 kids, which is what i requested. it's pretty fun, we meet in the afternoons after classes are over and i can teach them whatever songs i want; i pretty much have complete control over my little workforce, i mean chorus.

nobody in the school stays up past 11 pm. lately i've reverted to a vampire so i end up roaming the halls of our apartment (ok hall) at all hours of the night looking for someone to ponder the imponderables with, such as, do they really show all 82 rockets games on tv here? the school gate even gets locked around 11 or 12 so i can't leave campus without having to scale the multiple levels of strategically placed glass shards to get back in.

by the way, chinese chocolate is the most disgusting thing ever. it tastes like stale fudge made from spinach and it doesn't dissolve; when you chew it, it flattens out like gum instead of breaking apart.

what's wrong with these people? why do they sleep so early? tara and duncan wake up everyday to go running at 5:45, the mere thought of which makes me fall to the floor and curl up in a little ball. i might have to start sitting out on the pavilion overlooking the river and softly murmur verses about the moon at midnight to myself. as they say, nighttime heightens, sharpens each sensation. actually nobody says that, unless you're the Phantom, which means you ride a horse dressed in purple spandex and nothing but. bedtime.

i need to start being careful of what i say and who i say it around. about 3 or 4 weeks ago a few of us were eating dinner at the main western restaurant in town with some teachers from the primary school. Also with us was the primary school's security guard, who i refer to as The Professional (this is the guy who's made comments such as 'I'm the number 1 citizen of Baojing...not number 2, number 1' and 'if you walk around town with me a couple times nobody will dare to mess with you.' one nite during the second summer camp he took me out to dinner at a nice hotel in town, just the two of us, and ordered a steak for me and a couple bottles of beer for himself. halfway through the second bottle he went to the karoake machine and serenaded me with three chinese love songs. you know, since i was the only other person in the room. i'm getting the shakes just writing this down.)

during dinner that nite at the western restaurant, i half-jokingly said that since the restaurant served western food, they should let me sing western songs on my guitar; all i would want as my fee would be unlimited drinks for all the foreign teachers (they have great pearl milk teas, milkshakes, and fresh juices). before i could suck another tapioca ball into my mouth, The Professional had the restaurant manager over and was excitedly jabbering at her in the baojing dialect. she left after a few minutes and i promptly forgot about the whole thing until three days ago when i went back to the restaurant. as soon as we sat down, the manager came up to me and asked if i could still come to the restaurant once a week to sing. i was kinda surprised so i said sure, why not, and she said great, how about monday from 7:30 to 8:30 pm?

so yesterday i debuted at the western restaurant. they made fliers and a big poster for the evening; the manager even came into my class at the primary school that morning and dragged me outside to confirm that i was still coming. it went off better than i expected, they had two mikes prepared and there was a decent number of people, not too many and not too few. the audience was pretty receptive though maybe they were just applauding me for bringing along nicky and tara for them to leer at. duncan even came up and sang a couple songs...next time nicky and tara are gonna do a few numbers too. at the end the owner of the restaurant came out and we all shared a pitcher of beer. i estimate that all together we drank about 70 yuan of drinks, or a little less than 9 bucks, which isn't bad for an hour. i also get free drinks anytime i go to the restaurant but i don't wanna abuse that power right off the bat.

i'm really relieved that the evening went well, since i thought the whole situation had a lot of potential for getting me run out of town, or at least the restaurant. i made a joke to the other foreigners that next week i'd give a sermon...they thought it was a joke, at least. heh. anyways, i do hope it can be a good platform for that kind of stuff. last nite i sang 'and can it be' by chrch of rhythm and asked the audience in chinese to guess who the song was written to. of course nobody understood the lyrics, but according to karen they were curious, and hopefully some people will ask me about the songs next time.

the children's choir hasn't gotten put together yet. i bug the music teachers at the primary school almost everyday about it, and they keep putting it off. yesterday they said they'd get it together next week; i think the hard part is figuring out which students to put in the choir and when and where to meet, since it'll have to be outside of regular class hours.

jiujiu is getting pretty fat. i don't get it, a week ago she was just another normal undernourished chinese dog and now she's like a plump little princess. we give her 3 regular meals a day and she's always bouncing around with a lot of energy...where is it coming from? is it just from being in my presence? is it possible that i have the power to enfatten the things around me?

we got a puppy yesterday...not sure exactly what she is, but she has a bit of wolf in her, she's 2 months old. we decided to call her jiujiu, cause 9 represents longevity in the chinese culture, and also it sounds like jojo for josephine. so now jo, you have to name your first kid after me. anyways, jiujiu is super friendly, she's always going up to strangers and sniffing. she's pretty smart too, after we yelled at her for pooping and peeing in the house yesterday, she's waited till we go outside today to do her business, and she comes when you call her name. pictures to follow.

today was the first day of classes at the primary school too, i had two classes of fifth graders today. i didn't manage to convince the headmaster to give me fewer classes multiple times a week, so i have 13 different classes a week for a total of 700 kids. i'm gonna spend the week giving everybody names and practicing them, soon we'll have 13 different rasheeds, tupacs, and arwens running around china. the kids are great and most of the teachers are pretty cool, though i did get thrown into another basketball game tonite almost on the spur of the moment. this one was important, since the primary school teachers were playing the best club in town; apparently the primary school teachers have the best teachers' team in town and they split the last two games with that other club so there's a nice rivalry brewing. i was feeling a bit sick so i only played a quarter and a half and we managed to hang on to win 73-72, pretty exciting. being in china has definitely gotten me into much better shape.

i really like this country, more and more as i see and learn more about it.

a lot of people here have asked if i'm korean or philippino, maybe it's the dark skin (my sandal tan is worse than ever, my feet look like optical illusions). when i tell people i'm american they don't believe me, since i look asian. apparently if you're born in america you come out of the womb a full-on white person, even if your parents are from taiwan.

one nite when we were in xi'an i got really annoyed at karen because i was talking with this guy, will (the son of one of the jishou college officials), about america and different attitudes and stereotypes that americans have towards chinese people, and karen cut in from behind and said 'pete's forgotten his roots and that he's not really american, he's chinese.' it wasn't the first time she's made a comment like that but for some reason i went off on her that nite and started rambling about the melting pot of america and how there're no 'real' americans anyways and such...to her credit, karen's always quick to admit a mistake and she apologized.

it's definitely been interesting being the only chinese-american in the middle of hundreds of thousands of chinese and a handful of white americans (plus diane, the black lady, but her perspective is a whole other story). in case you're curious, i am definitely not going through any sort of racial identity crisis. boo to those. for me, at least. i'm really glad for my background and i think there's several obvious advantages that come with it. for example, talking with people. by the way, mom, when i first got here and tried speaking chinese to people they'd start trying to speak english back to me, but now random people that i talk to think that i'm a local till i tell them i grew up in america. also, a huge part of the culture is already familiar to me since i grew up with it, even if i neglected a lot of it, heh. the advantages go both ways, being familar with both american and chinese culture and mindsets allows me to explain certain things to both the americans and the chinese, and the chinese can understand me without a translator (most of the time). it may seem like only a formality, but it really makes a big difference, even with something as simple as being able to stop and have a short conversation with a friend on the street.

the moral is that more chinese americans need to come here and keep me company, so we can talk about buying mcdonald's hamburgers for 29 cents and smelling like mothballs and that stuff.

i start teaching on tuesday. i'm gonna be the only foreign teacher at the primary school across town; the situation so far is that i'll have 13 different classes of 50 students a week (not including the chorus). that's 650 kids, unless my pleadings to the school officials have changed their minds.

the high school starts tomorrow so all the other foreign teachers (except nicole, who's at the other primary school in town) start tomorrow. i'm thinking of pretending to be a student to sit in one on of kevin's classes and standing up halfway through the lesson and screaming ' this is bulls---! comunism sucks! taiwan forever!'. since my chinese is just that good. (it's not, really)

650

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well i'm back from the two week vacation we took around china, it was pretty incredible. first off, lemme say that you can't really grasp china's population problem till you travel around. for example, we went to the northeast part of china, what used to be manchuria, and visited this city i'd barely heard of, called shenyang, which happened to have over 10 million residents. i mean, come on now.

the itinerary (for illustrations see the pictures that i'll hopefully put up soon):

beijing - we first took a train to beijing (24 hours) and spent a day there; we didn't really do much of note except eat peking duck, which was really really arughfhwughaaaa....

northeast - from beijing we took a train to the northeast part of china (14 hours) and spent 4 days there, in the cities of ben xi, shenyang, and dandong. we went to the biggest water cave in china and a famous buddhist mountain called qianshan, which was gorgeous. the highlight of the trip was definitely going to the border of north korea and trying to spot hidden nuclear caches and smuggle koreans over. seriously though, the difference between north korea and china is like night and day; the chinese side had large skyscrapers being built and the korean side had fishermen sitting on half-rusted boats. in shenyang we went to the palace where the first emperors of the qing dynasty lived, when they invaded china from manchuria.

beijing - we went back to beijing after the northeast and spent a couple days there; we went to tiannamen square, the temple of heaven, the summer palace, the great wall of china, and the forbidden city. beijing is an awesome city, it has this incredible combination of history and modern pop culture, like we drove past a random 500 year old imperial garden on our way to one of the night marketplaces. it's humongous too, both its area and its population, which is between 13 and 15 million people. i really loved it there, hopefully i can spend more time in beijing later.

xi'an - from beijing we took a train (12 hours) to xi'an, the old capital of china, which has about 8.5 million people. there we visited the city wall, built during the tang dynasty around 1300 years ago, the wild goose buddhist pavilion, where the stone monkey's monk stayed for 17 years on his way back from india, the huaqing imperial springs, and the tomb of qinshihuang, the first chinese emperor ever (ruled from 220-206 b.c.), where we saw the pits of the terra cotta soldiers, the '8th wonder of the world', which were discovered about 20 years ago.

luoyang - from xi'an we took a bus (4 hours) to luoyang, one of the 7 ancient cities of china, and went to the grotto by the yi river, which has over one hundred thousand buddhist figures carved into the cliffside, ranging from 2 centimeters to 17 meters tall. we also visited a shaolin temple and watched a kung fu demonstration by young shaolin acolytes. once again, why did my mom make me take violin lessons as a kid? from there we took a train back to jishou (15 hours) and took a bus back to good old baojing.

the sense of history around china is amazing - i'm really glad i read up on it a bit before i came here, it added so much to the tour, especially walking around the old imperial palaces. i have to say, chinese people really know their history; they can rattle off emperors and wars and important dates like nothing, even the ones who didn't graduate junior high school.

of course i ended up buying tons of crap everywhere we went. among them were some small imitation terra cotta soldiers from the tomb of qinshihuang, a long knife from the shaolin temple, a small bamboo flute from beijing, 8 dvds from xi'an (for about 85 american cents a piece), and a large chess set carved from cattle bone from a jade factory outside beijing. i totally splurged on this one but i knew i had to have it the moment i saw it; the pieces are carved into the likenesses of qinshihuang's army, with one set painted and the other left plain white. the original price label was 1880 yuan (mom and dad don't flip out), but i argued them down to 600, which is about 72 american dollars. so far i'm undefeated against kevin, duncan, and xu jun (our cook), rock on.

we met up with the rest of the foreign teachers in beijing, so now the full crew for the year is assembled. a quick run down:
me - me
kevin - 25 year old white boy from tennessee
duncan - 23 year old white boy from lake tahoe, graduated from berkeley in may
danny - 40 year old white fisherman from hawaii
diane - 27 year old black lady from all over the place, born in south carolina
tara - 22 year old white girl from baltimore, went to college in the northern part of new york state
nicole - 22 year old white girl from an island off the coast of washington state, went to university of arizona

we also met up with some of the teachers who'll be teaching in jishou. one of them is a 60 something (i'm guessing) lady from maine, who actually grew up in red bank, nj, right next to holmdel. how random is that?

finally, after much scientific examination of the empirical data, here are my final power rankings of the hotness of the girls in the cities in china that i've been to so far:

1. beijing - one of the early favorites that managed to come out on top, like maryland basketball a few years ago; very deep and fundamentally sound, can overwhelm with sheer talent when necessary.
2. xi'an - a solid and safe bet, like picking kansas to win the ncaa tourney every year.
3. jishou - the southern illinois of china; a random 'town' of only 300,000 in the middle of nowhere, the salukis are definitely china's cinderella city.
t-4. ben xi, shenyang - corporately, they're like gonzaga; manage to outperform the name recognition and rep.
6. shanghai - completely abandoning college basketball, one can note the rams-like descent from heavy favorite to completely missing the playoffs. despite all predictions from the so-called touts, shanghai was completely unimpressive. of course i was only there for a couple days, so who knows.

not applicable - shenyang, dandong, luoyang; not enough time spent in these places.

alrite, enough from here. school starts in 3 days and most of us haven't even learned which school we'll be teaching at yet (there's four schools in town which will have foreign teachers). actually i'm the only one who knows for sure; i'll be teaching at the primary school across town (i bought a bike a few days before the tour, for about 22 bucks). of course this hasn't led me to do something as ridiculous as preparing lessons and materials in advance or anything. good nite!

i've never really had an excessive amount of taiwanese pride, not compared to other taiwanese-americans i know, but the ignorance of the chinese here is infuriating.

today on our field trip to the hydro-electric plant (yeah i dunno) one of the local english teachers asked how it felt to be visiting the motherland for the first time and i somewhat jokingly replied 'taiwan is my motherland' and she responded with 'but taiwan is part of china anyways' at which point i very curtly said something along the lines of 'actually it's not and it never will be' and changed the topic.

later at dinner the subject came up again (ok i brought it up) and we entered a full on argument. i laid out what i knew of the history of taiwan, mostly gathered from the search for modern china and the numerous times i've been to taiwan, which was different from her account, though unfortunately i was wrong on some points. i asked them what kind of country would threaten one of their own 'provinces' with missiles (and not in a no-nonsense squashing-rebellion kind of way) and sit idle while a major earthquake affected thousands of taiwanese, to no avail. the most frustrating thing was when i told her (and the other local teachers at dinner) that the entire world, including the UN, regards taiwan and china as two separate countries, they shook their heads and flat out refused to even consider my words. they said taiwan would inevitably return to china, just like hong kong did, even though that had been an issue of british colonialism from a contract signed 200 years ago and hong kong had tried to prevent the annexation as much as possible, simply not the same thing at all.

this kind of thinking seems to be common in china. i came across an example that captures this attitude when i flipped through a chinese date book that someone had left in our living room the other day. in the beginning was a list of the area codes for all the different provinces and major cities in china, and stuck at the very end, at the bottom of the page, was 'taiwan province - taipei'.

time to sleep...if you don't hear from me for awhile, it's either cause i'm on our vacation around china, from aug 15-29, or i got censored and thrown in jail, in which case send me some tasty cookies and snacks please.

this is so stupid -

some pastor in texas gave a sermon condemning the Episcopalean Church's approval of the gay bishop. a quote from a member of the congregation: "I have never in my life applauded a sermon," Mr. Breckinridge, 51, said as he and his wife, June, left Christ Church Episcopal after the 9:15 a.m. service. "But I did today because this is so important." how is a sermon condemning the installation of a gay bishop more important than a sermon about the good news? shouldn't any sermon about Jsus be more important? and what's with kenyon martin and the nets? i'm very frustrated here.

well, today was the end of an era, and the beginning of a new...era. the camp officially ended yesterday, and most of the foreign teachers (chris, jd, charlotte, sam, dan, and liuliu) returned to their homelands, leaving just me, duncan, kevin, and danny. today the school felt like a totally new place, since a lot of the new high school students moved into the dorms today, and so many of the teachers were gone. for the next 6 days me and kevin'll be teaching 3-5th graders at this primary school across town, with classes of about 40 kids each. we're teaching them english, as well as the history of american music, that should be interesting.

due to the heat, me and kevin have taken to walking around the house in only our boxers on occasion. this morning, alan, our nerdy liaison, knocked on our door around 9 am, while we were still sleeping. he knocked for about 5 minutes until i finally got up and answered the door in just my boxers and stared at him for about 10 seconds before i remembered to say good morning. later today, around 4:30 pm, he knocked on our door again while i was taking a dump, so he knocked for another few minutes before i went to answer the door, again in just my boxers. when he saw me he made this 'how much lovin do you guys need to do everyday' face before he controlled himself.

yesterday was full of ceremonies. there was one in the morning for a student who got accepted into beijing university; over a thousand people showed up at 7 in the morning to celebrate this kid and they unearthed this humongous vat of baijiu that they had buried on school grounds. about baijiu: it's translated 'white wine' but it's not wine at all, it's disgusting putrid barf that's made of corn, rice, monkey toenails, buttsweat, and other things. the percent alcohol varies between 50% and 56%...for some reason, the miao and tujia minority people love the stuff and drink it at every opportunity. anyways, they broke open the vat and poured cups of baijiu for everyone in the audience, even though half of them were kids from the summer camp. after the ceremony i wandered over to my class where they'd been seated and found them half-drunk and begging me for water, though unfortunately i didn't have any.

return of the mickey mao club: the closing ceremonies were last nite and they included performances by the classes and the foreign teachers. i didn't think we could top the sweater song from our performance last time, but we totally blew it away. we decided to do three songs, basketcase, creep (by radiohead), and the climax of the entire camp, ice, ice baby. kevin rapped the entire song FROM MEMORY, i did beat box on my own mic, jd played the background riff on guitar, and chris and dan danced around the stage. when we walked off we were greeted by 'i love you' shouts and marriage proposals from every schoolgirl in the audience.

a funny thing was that today, me and kevin had dinner with some officials from the primary school we'll be teaching at this week, including the school's two music teachers, one of which is said to be the best chinese fiddle player in baojing county. they told us that they'd been at the ceremony the nite before and could tell we were good musicians from the performance and listed ice ice, baby as their favorite of our three songs.

kevin, henceforth to be known as ice, is hilarious...he has the mentality of a sharp-witted urbanite but he's from south carolina, so everything he says comes out in this slow, measured drawl, even though the actual words always sound like something out of the new yorker.

the day before yesterday the principal of the school took all the teachers on a boat ride down the river. while the boat was still in dock i saw this big old white dude walk up with this guy from the jishou teacher's college, and it turned out to be art simpson, the guy i'd talked to on the phone a couple months ago, who was trying to build a chrch in baojing. we had a long conversation on the boat, but i'm not sure what to make of him. anyways, i asked him if he could tell me how to find the underground chrches in baojing and he couldn't. luckily, duncan seems to be a believer, he went to first bptist chrch in berkeley, the one across the street from first pres...we've talked about our faiths a few times, not in depth yet though.

a few nites ago karen, one of the local english teachers, took a bunch of us to a local karoake place. about halfway through, me and jd snuck out to go see a show put on by midgets from all around baojing county. they sang songs and danced, and at one point during the dancing they dropped all semblance of order and began a full-on brawl; the midgets began tossing each other across the stage and trying to rip off everyone else's clothes, it was the most bizarre thing i've ever seen in my life.

anyways, i need to sleep, tomorrow we're waking up early to teach...word to your mother.

two days ago, the school told us that we were gonna take a two day trip to a nearby scenic spot to do some hiking, which i thought sounded cool. so yesterday this guy alan, who takes care of foreign teachers and is incredibly nerdy and polite, knocks on our door at 6 am to wake us up and drag us to the riverport.

(a bit about alan: one of the guys from hawaii, jd, has taken to saying vulgar things to alan whenever they interact cause we're never sure if he understands our english; i must have laughed for ten minutes straight when alan handed us copies of the new schedule and jd shouted 'sweet beautiful breasts!' in his face...i said it was vulgar =9)

when we got to the riverport we all got on boats with our students and ended up taking a 3 hour boat ride to this gorge, where we climbed for about 4 hours along the craziest hike ever...it was seriously the most dangerous thing i've ever done in my life. about two full hours of it was spent clinging to chains nailed into the side of the gorge while we dangled above the river at the bottom and under random waterfalls, walking on thing 6-inch wide logs, thin metal ladders, or my favorite, metal spikes nailed into the cliff spaced about 2 feet apart...a lot of the time i was climbing more with my arms than my legs. sometimes we climbed straight up the mountain, using tiny footholds carved into the rock, and i cursed my (relatively) large, ungainly feet.

the most amazing thing was that the chinese kids, even (and especially) my students, who're the youngest, flew along the path. i'm telling you, they're made of freaking rock. when we took breaks along the river at the bottom, some of my kids would catch small crabs with their bare hands and eat them raw. i really don't understand why the chinese army hasn't won a significant war in the past 150 years or so.

i took a buttload of pictures, but unfortunately the coolest ones didn't come out, which i was really pissed about, since i defied death to take them, climbing one-handed. so no one will ever believe how dangerous the hike really was, which sucks. i would pay money to ship a busload of 10 year old american kids here and force them to go through the gorge.

afterwards, we stayed in local farmers' houses which had no electricity, so we slept around 9 pm and woke up before the sun. seriously, the kids are more like bedouins from the gobi desert than chinese schoolchildren. on the way back to the school, we stopped at a town with a lot of small shops and markets, where i bought an old set of small bottles with river scenes somehow painted on the inside, a beautiful hand-dyed batik, and a hand-weaved grass hat, for a total of seven bucks. china rules!

for some reason, half the girls in the summer camp have decided to pick me as their summer crush. i can't pass a group of them without hearing them giggle like schoolgirls (...) and the occasional 'peter i love you, marry me' shouts. jd and chris tell me about how their students sing this song that goes 'i like peter, i don't love peter, i like peter, i don't love peter...'. i dunno why i'm writing this, probably cause my ego has outgrown hunan province. it's intriguing though, since chris and jd are both good looking guys, and authentic white foreigners to boot, and jd can even speak chinese. who knows what goes through the minds of these crazy banshees. i hope i use my mojo for the forces of good and not evil.

speaking of which, i still haven't found other believers yet. i've talked about my faith with a few of my chinese co-teachers, i haven't really gone in depth, but they seem pretty interested. us foreign teachers also had a discussion about religion, thanks to the news about the gay episcopalean bishop. i taught the song making melodies to my class, but they had no idea who the 'king of kings' is, and didn't really understand my explanation. one step at a time, i suppose.

we took a two day field trip to a nearby miao village this week. on the way there, my soldier (every class gets a soldier to train the kids in military drills) led the kids in singing communist army songs, and they began shouting for me and kevin, the westerners on the bus, to sing american songs. we obliged by alternating Jsus loves me this i know, america the beautiful, and silent nite with their commie tunes.

at the village, there was a big ceremony with lots of performances at nite, there must've been over a thousand people gathered. the school asked us foreign teachers to put something together, so i played a phil keaggy piece on guitar, chris sang a hawaiin song, and then me, chris, kevin, dan, and jd played and sang 1979 and the sweater song for them (we called ourselves the micky mao club). me and jd did the mini dialogues in the sweater song in chinese, we rocked all of them.

a normal day, which happens about half the time, looks like this: teach for and hour and half in the morning. that's it...the rest of the time is free. sometimes there's activities the school has for us, like when they asked us, five minutes after we finished dinner, to play basketball for their teacher's team in a game that was beginning then. they gave us all uniforms and threw us in the game at the 2nd quarter, that was interesting, it was the first reffed game i've played in since those rec leagues in 3rd grade. i had about 10 points, a few assists and rebounds, and 100000 turnovers in about 30 minutes. unfortunately we lost, i blame it on the hole our team got into during the first quarter.

today su-jin, the cook (who's in his young twenties), took me and chris on his motorcycle (3 man sandwich) to this spot in the mountains to go swimming. at first he took us to this stream right off the mountain road, but when we got there it was packed with butt naked 50 year old men, so he took us to another place and dropped us off, where we hiked to this super random mini-waterfall and pool in the middle of the mountains, which soon became populated with naked 22 year old men. it was beautiful, and so was the scenery. seriously though, it was exactly like the one described in balzac and the little chinese seamstress.

it's so hot here, the average temperature is 40 degrees Celsius, which is 104 degrees F. it's too bad the river right outside my apt is dirty, otherwise i'd jump in everyday.

that's it for now, tonite we're heading into town to get massages, 2.50 (american) an hour! stuff is so cheap here, i love it.

notes from Game 2:

8:50 pm: spurs go on 7-0 run to open the game

8:50.1 pm: run upstairs to put on jason kidd jersey, force grandmother to watch basketball (for added karma)

11 pm: nets win 87-85

11:01pm: allow grandmother to go to bed. haha just kidding she went to bed around halftime

11:02 pm: see kmart and jason kidd making out at halfcourt, feel jealous

11:45 pm: watch dikembe mutombo interview, start thinking of cookies and become hungry

12:25 pm: eat some cookies

12:30 pm: farewell and good nite!

man, i just had the worst phone interview ever, with my mom's own company. the interviewer was asking questions about stuff that i learned in college, but i kept blanking and couldn't remember anything, so he kept dumbing questions down, but i still couldn't answer them.

interviewer: so what can you tell me about deriving the coefficients of an ARIMA(2, 2) model and using them to forecast?
me: gah?
interviewer: hm...let's move on to data structures. what's the most common order of retrieval in a hash map?
me: er...geh?
interviewer: i see. so in your engineering economics class, did you learn how to do continuous compound rates?
me: uh...e to the...guh?
interviewer: what's one plus one?
me: ...
me: i wash myself with a rag on a stick

haha, sorry jesse, i recycled some lines. here's one more: i've resigned myself to sitting in my loft in my parents new condo and eating peanuts all summer. i'm also considering changing my name to mr peepers.

so we have an unnamed friend who's having an issue with this guy she kinda likes who's been spending a lot of time with this other girl. she's discussing it with jesse, and then as if it was relevant AT ALL, she asks him, 'i mean, how would you feel if you saw pete hanging out a lot with some other girl?'

another quote:
me: yay, game 1 [nets-spurs] is finally here
bing: yeah, seriously
bing: too bad i'm gonna be at the justin timberlake concert tonite

how the freak did bing get married? to a woman??

please, come visit me. i'll have plenty of room, and peanuts.

first quotes ever postBHOT, freudian slips from jesse:

j: i need to find someone i feel comfortable with and who shares my interests
j: i can't be a girl forever

j: gotta go, installing dead IAM
j: err, dead AIM

j: i like a girl in fifth grade

haha...ask mister wordsworth himself if you wanna know what he was really trying to say with those...

a motherly quote:

mom, to my sister on her birthday: you're 25 and ben's 25, so the two of you added together are still 1 less than me

i just picked up the book no man is an island by thomas merton...it's pretty gripping already. From a couple pages in:

This matter of 'salvation' is, when seen intuitively, a very simple thing. But when we analyze it, it turns into a complex tangle of paradoxes. We become ourselves by dying to ourselves. We gain only what we give up, and if we give up everything we gain everything. We cannot find ourselves within ourselves, but only in others, yet at the same time before we can go out to others we must first find ourselves. We must forget ourselves in order to become truly conscious of who we are. The best way to love ourselves is to love others, yet we cannot love others unless we love ourselves since it is written, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others. Yet there is a sense in which we must hate others and leave them in order to find God. Jesus said: 'If any man come to me and hate not his father anid his mother...yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.' As for this finding of God, we cannot even look for Him unless we have already found Him, and we cannot find Him unless he has first found us. We cannot begin to seek Him without a special gift of His grace, yet if we wait for grace to move us, before beginning to seek Him, we will probably never begin.

The only effective answer to the problem of salvation must therefore reach out to embrace both extremes of a contradiction at the same time. Hence that answer must be supernatural. That is why all the answers that are not supernatural are imperfect: for they only embrace one of the contradictory terms, and they can always be denied by the other.

wow that was long...deep tho...like the grand canyon...

quote n + m + r + q from the BHOT:

talking about a certain nameless girl:
pete: i don't get it, why do so many guys like her? is it like wanting to conquer unconquered territory or something?
eric: actually i think she's already been conquered a lot

please direct all further inquiries to eric huang.

another motherly vignette:

last may when my parents flew out here for my graduation, my mom couldn't stop playing foosball, she was addicted. it was like mom we're eating dinner; hold on, one more game...mom it's time for church; ok after i score...mom i'm graduating now; no, tell them to wait... (i might be exaggerating). anyways, it got to the point where she even started trash-talking me...i tried to be nice and ignore it, but she was relentless, and in the end i was goaded into destroying her...of course i felt immensely guilty afterwards.

the moral: i guess even my mom's susceptible to that bit of evil that girls pull on guys when they're competing, where if the guy's losing they make fun of him and call him unmanly names, and if he's winning, they cry injustice and call him a bully. evil.

another story about my mom:

when i was in my early teens i had a penchant for accidentally destroying things...it got to the point where i'd walk into our living room and the pictures would fall off the wall. so one day i was sitting at the kitchen table, probably going through one of those 2nd grade level handwriting books my mom used to force me to fill out (up through high school), when she walked by carrying a big tray of muffins and dropped them all on the floor. naturally when she spotted me sitting innocently at the kitchen table she started yelling at me and (probably) made me go outside to pick up sticks in our backyard (we lived in a forest).

the moral: thought i forgot about that one, didn't you, mom? =)

well, now that it's been confirmed that my parents read this somewhat regularly, i'm gonna have to tell embarrassing stories about them.

when i was in junior high (i think), for christmas one year my sister and me bought our mom a cat-in-the-hat beanie; it was a regular beanie with a big cat-in-the-hat figurine protruding from the front of it like a horn...we gave it to her as a joke but she wore it to and from her job on wall street everyday. this encouraged me to look for fubu gear to get her next year, unfortunately i couldn't get my hands on any. this past winter break, i left my puffy blue-black jacket that i got at foot locker at my parents' house in philly by accident, and my mom told me my dad's been wearing it around. i wonder if he wears it over his favorite outfit, dark green corduroys and blue flanel shirt with black splotches.

the moral: now you see where i get my fashion sense from?

it's april! you know what it's time for!

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

awesome...i think i get too much joy out of that verse, and it takes away from the tragibittersweeticity factor.

bing is married!! some of his last words to me as a single man: 'pete, whenever you come visit, there'll always be an extra room...for melissa'

i shaved my head again, stupid ncaa tournament. you know what, my life seems very cyclical. i bet i could go to the archives and copy and paste stuff that i posted here a year ago and it'd still work. well hopefully not...let's see, i think my love of food has increased, and i'm not in school anymore...i haven't had any toe nails fall out this year...i guess i'm a whole different person.

i'm reading a book on china and it's talking about the boxer uprising in the early 1900s. what happened was large numbers of chinese peasants and other poor chinese rose up against foreigners in their country, especially missionaries and their chinese converts. when the uprising reached peking, all the foreigners and missionaries in the city banded together and retreated into a defensive area consisting of the british, russian, german, japanese, and american compounds and tried to defend themselves from the boxers. i wonder what would have been the right thing for a christian to do...would it be to not resist and not to fight and defend your family and simply be killed by the boxers?

a parallel would be when the early christians were killed by the romans and didn't resist, but the difference is that that was the roman government, and the bible says God appoints all civil authority, which means to obey their laws even to death, though not to stop preaching the gospel. however, the persecution of christians during the boxer uprising was not from the government (even though the boxers had the support of the evil empress dowager of the time) but rather from ordinary chinese who took matters into their own hands. so what should christians in the western defensive compound in peking have done, especially with other westerners fighting around them, trying to save their lives?

this particular situation confuses me because it seems to fall into a category between war and persecution of christians.

Hosea 7:5 - 'Throw out your calf-idol, O Samaria! My anger burns against them. How long will they be incapable of purity?'

Hosea 7:14 - 'They do not cry out to me from their hearts but wail upon their beds.'


ug

here's a picture of what i did to dave when we were getting off the lift while snowboarding last week, if he's jason kidd and i'm george lynch.

I scored a 87% on the "How Jersey Are You?" Quizie! What about you?

a conversation me, eric, and carolyn just had, wherein we were all engaging and addressing each other, in sequence, like in a normal conversation:

carolyn: come on guys, go to the asuc ball!
pete: it's kind of confusing how arizona and kentucky are both wildcats and projected number 1 seeds
eric: it's cool how dead aim lets me know who signs on and off while i'm playing counterstrike
...
jesse: i like robert miles

haha, arg, nevermind.

a conversation i just had with joyce:

j: talking to the german guy's brother is like drinking water
p: then talking to me must be like drinking soy sauce
j: then talking to me must be like...something equally unhealthy
p: yo, come with me and jesse to china in the fall
j: but...i can't speak german
p: um, i don't think they speak german in china
j: i would never survive in china anyway
p: no, food is really cheap there so we'd just eat all day and get all fat and happy
j: but i thought you were supposed to be preaching the gospel, not eating all their resources
j: ...the less we have to do, the worse our conversations get

going to other people's xanga sites and seeing them have five thousand people under the sites they read makes me feel like a loser with no friends. oh well, to cheer myself up i can always go to mitc pan's xanga. i mean, cause it's so cheerful, not cause he has no friends, cause he has millions.

quote n+m+r+3 from the BHOT:

carolyn: mah bootie's the finest bootie in the world!

don't tell me you can't hear her saying that, with that little head shaking thing...mine eyes...

i tried to randomly get from west coast to east coast on people's xangas, to see if i could go from someone i know on the west coast to someone i know on the east coast. didn't work though. dunno what to make of the xanga phenomenon, love/hate i suppose, like with korean girls, just kidding. though i did notice that people from both sides are part of the asian american christian blogring, that's pretty cool.

i just realized that yesterday all i ate all day was french fries, popcorn, more french fries, crackers, cereal, and more crackers. i think i pooed one big fiber.

that little thing on the right in the picture on the xanga thing is dave's hat...no ear could be that big or stick out so narrowly. disclaimer: i joined xanga just to comment on other people's xangas. ok so it lets me get away with some self-promotion. oh, i'm shameless...and a bad father...and i'm fat too!

i love this song, don't change your plans by ben folds:

you have made me smile again
in fact, i might be sore from it

all i really wanna say
is you're the reason i wanna stay
but destiny is calling and won't hold
and when my time is up i'm outta here
all i know is i've gotta be
where my heart says i oughta be
it often makes no sense, in fact
i never understand these things,
i feel

i love you, goodbye
i love you, goodbye...


of course i have no one to apply this to, heh. and it's not like i'm going anywhere. heh. well hopefully i'll be in china next year, teaching english or something. and if so, i guess jesse could be getting a serenade...

it's 2:30 am right now and i'm worried about being able to wake up for an 11:30 lunch tomorrow. a couple days ago, me and eric went to sleep before jesse and steve came home at nite and woke up after they left the apt in the morning. i've posted on the blogspot three times this week. i am definitely a college grad with no job.

quote n + m + r + 2 from the BHOT:

eric, late at night: where's jesse? i bet he has a secret life, frolicking in the city with some girl right now
pete: no, mitch is asleep already

quote number n + m + r from the BHOT:

eric (to carolyn, on why she got together with her boyfriend in 8th grade): he was hot and you were horny

quote number n + m + r + 1:

eric: drawing a winky face on a note to somebody is basically like proposing marriage

there are three facts which juxtapose to form one inescapable conclusion:

one, my grandparents on my dad's side spoke fluent japanese, which leads me to assume that they were in taiwan during the japanese occupation of taiwan in the earlier half of the 20th century, so they preceded the chinese nationalist emigration of the 1950s.

two, the first wave of mainland chinese immigrants entering taiwan in the late 1600s was a group of chinese pirates fleeing the newly instated Qing emperor Kangxi.

three, i'm developing a ring around my stomach and getting fatter by the minute.

the conclusion: 'TIS NOT A MAN, 'TIS AN EATING MACHINE!

jesse's right, this xanga madness is too much. i know he thinks that cause he wrote it on his xanga site, not cause he said it to me. really though, it's too much.

if there's something here that doesn't seem to make sense, it's probably either a simpsons or calvin and hobbes reference.

i think i'm too much of a malcontent to ever get married. it's difficult for me to lose myself in the company of another person...experiences and stuff are valuable, but it's like i take what i can from them and then withdraw into myself, or i'm thinking 'ok...what next?' not to sound callous or bored, but it's like i'm on edge, waiting for the next milestone to happen. ok, i have no idea what the hell i'm talking about.

ok, it's like this. i was talking to someone about this the other day...i was thinking about how sometimes you have special friendships with people, no matter if you haven't seen them in a long time or haven't talked or whatever (yeah yeah, i know everybody thinks about this in college). i don't mean you're the most important person in that person's life, just that you have a special connection that's different from other relationships. maybe you have just a tiny tiny piece of that person, but it's still a piece that no one else has; the most obvious examples of these relationships to me are my family and extended family. then i wondered, maybe that's what heaven is like, and why Jesus said there's no marriage in heaven, because everyone has a special unique piece of everyone else, and it's not twisted and weird cause everything's pure and our souls will be infinite; then we will know fully and be fully known. please God don't strike me down for taking that verse out of context. the point is, maybe that's the only thing that'll make me content, to construct the perfect match for myself out of little pieces of other people. alrite, it's midnite, time to put the crack pipe away.

meanwhile, i have no job. i might go apply at peet's coffee on shattuck and vine, someone told me they have an opening. what if they hire me cause my name is pete? that would be the saddest moment of my entire existence. like after i was born, i could've stuck my head up my ass and stayed like that for 21 years and still have gotten the same job.

a strange thing happened last week when i went in to 'the other change of hobbit' (a fantasy/sci-fi book store) to apply for a job. the lady at the counter looked at me and asked me what i knew about science fiction and fantasy, so i spent the next few moments trying to convince her that i was nerdier than anyone else who'd want to work there. of course, there wasn't much source material to work with...i mean, did i say moments? i meant hours!

does eric really have to sleep naked?

a friend of mine told me a few weeks ago that the husband of our piano teacher (from 3rd grade to 9th grade, when they moved to ohio) passed away. today i got a call from my mom; she told me that he had committed suicide. she's sending me my teacher's address tomorrow so i can send her my condolences.

what should i say? i'm not sure what to make of this. i never knew him very well but he was always friendly to his wife's students. our families were on good terms; a couple of times he took me to the local tennis club and we played some tennis, just the two of us, where he toned down his game a few thousand levels. he used to be a professional tennis player but i guess he never succeeded very far. they were childless; my sister visited them a few months ago in ohio and said she got the impression that they were sad because they had no kids.

i think i'm gonna send her lament for a son, a book written by a christian professor after his son died while hiking in europe. i know it's good for grieving people but i'm not sure how much comfort she would find in it...it's such a twist that his life wasn't taken away by accident.

i spent about 20 hours over the past two days looking at a tv. yesterday i watched 5 movies in a row with jenny liu (2 more than i've ever done before) and today i drove back to philly and vegged in the house doing nothing all day. now i'm gonna eat 63 slices of american cheese and go blind.

being in the east coast makes me feel kind of like david eggers in AHWOSG (on a much smaller scale and without all the sex). ug, what a pretentious comparison. i mean, cause berkeley is so different from here, and i've run across a bunch of random people from high school and before in the past couple weeks.

can't process. time to bed.