[warning: i just re-read this entry and it's pretty dour and unpleasant. must be the weather - early last week it was sunny and i was wearing shorts and sunglasses, and then two days later it SNOWED. stupid communist weather.]

this china-taiwan-america-north korea business is setting me on edge. what was the point of passing an anti-secession law? if china attacks taiwan, do they really think other countries will be ok with it just because china made it legal? at least the european arms embargo isn't gonna be lifted for awhile. i feel helpless reading about this stuff, like how i feel when some of my friends here tell me about their unhappy marriages and how they wished they'd never gotten married and how their kids are the only bright spots in their family lives, but a million times more so.

with my friends, i can't force them to love their spouses and i can't tell them to leave them either. nothing can be done, except to pray for them and to pray that my faith can be increased so that i can actually believe that something can change in their hearts, when their brightest source of hope right now is the possibility of divorce after their kids have grown up. for the past few months when i've told them that they must learn to love and that God can make things grow out of nothing, my words have sounded empty even to me. i know that God is not dependent on the strength of my faith in order to change people, but i need to learn hope and faith for my own sake, for my own peace.

my friend is getting married in may to a guy she met last december. i've hung out with them together a few times; my impression of him is probably a little below 'he seems allright'. regardless, i keep telling her that six months of knowing somebody would be too short even if he was the chinese brad pitt and to look at all the unhappy relationships around that resulted from a too-brief courtship, but she's feeling a lot of pressure from both her parents and the guy's parents. all i can do is hope they overcome the odds.

this year, the school's been trying to upgrade themselves from a county level school to a provincial level school (which comes with more government funds), so they've been putting up new buildings and stuff, to put on a good show for the inspectors from changsha who're coming soon. a friend of mine was asked to head up a local chapter of the communist youth league and she told me it was a big fake; apparently students are supposed to take a lot of special classes and go through special education in order to be able to join the league, but the school leaders told her to just swear in all the students first and then tell them what they'll need to know in order to impress the inspectors.

for the other stuff, a teacher told me that the school forced a 'mandatory donation' of at least 5000 RMB from each teacher in order to fund the new buildings, with promises to return the money in three years at 'a better interest rate than the bank'. if a teacher felt that they couldn't afford to give that much money or just didn't want to, it was taken directly from their salary.

ok, that's enough.

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