last week i took a solo trip up to jiuzhaigou in sichuan province, a national park with a series of crystal blue lakes hidden in alpine mountains. it was incredibly beautiful and gorgeous and i recommend going there to everybody, but it was a huge pain to get to. i had to travel a total of 6 days to get there and back, which included 49 hours on a hardseat train and 28 hours on a bus. in honor of that, here are some selected notes that i wrote down last summer, when i was on a 24 hour hardseat train to beijing. they probably won't make as much as sense unless you've ever had to switch between standing and sitting in a chair where the back angles forward instead of backwards for an entire day or you've ever traveled around by yourself.

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It's been about 11 minutes. My ass is starting to hurt. K, someone said they can upgrade to sleeper beds around Zhengzhou. Should I try too, or suck it up for 24 hours, another stage in my personal resistance-building for potential future torture at the hands of the Communists due to my capitalist Christian Taiwanese-ness?

A.W. Tozer wrote the entire premise, outline, and presumably a good amount of the prose of The Pursuit of God on a train from Chicago to somewhere in Texas. I'll probably end up writing about squatty-potties for 20 hours. Maybe I'll try a short story. Traditionally I've been able to write more freely when I'm in a state of tension and I've been more creative when in a state of lethargic insomnia, so by those standards I should produce a freaking Pulitzer Prize-worthy novel by the time we pull into Beijing.

Times I've jokingly wished for death, to myself, in my own head, where I guess it's not so much of a joke anymore: 4 and counting. Um...5.

A haiku:

The track stretches on
I spend most of my time in
The squatty potty.

If I sit here and make one tally mark per second, I'd make roughly 90,000 tally marks by the time we get to Beijing. If 5 tally marks take up 1 cm, that's ~ 80 marks per line, which is 2160 per page, which means I'll, um, I mean, I WOULD, IN THEORY, fill up ~ 42 pages. More realistically, I'd make 2 per second, for 84 pages. Even more realistically, I wouldn't be driven to that degree of agony until about halfway through the ride, after which I'd probably black out every other 5 minutes, so I think it's safe to expect ~ 20 pages of tally marks by Beijing.

Without being pretentious, hopefully, I have to say that going to Switzerland [two weeks in June 2001] was one of the most defining times of my life. It was a perfect combination of setting and background - the chance to wander around an unfamiliar place by myself was perfect for that point in my life. I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here. I suppose I was just reminded of Switzerland because I'm writing in a journal and listening to music on a train going through mountains. I guess I could say that those 2 weeks greatly helped shape my life, but I couldn't quantify how. I've never been one to instantly change; I have a lot of life inertia, probably due to a mixture of pride, stubborness, confidence, and mental obesity. My clearest memory from Switzerland is walking through the streets of Lugano, listening to my cd player, and knowing that I loved the people in my life as deeply as I could, as I was capable of at that point, however flawed and inconsistent that may have been.

I think it's 12 hours later now, though the little shemale who's been yelling for the past hour shows no signs of letting up, so it can't be that late. I've said it before, some kids just aren't as cute as others. Why would you make your androgynous 4 year old child stand in the aisle of a train all night? This can only get worse before it gets better.

I caught myself on the verge of buying a tofu stick from the vendor's cart earlier. I actually reached out to stick my hand in the murky swamp-liquid the tofu was swimming in to test the temperature before I remembered that I want to live to see my parents again. I might give in and buy a bag of peanuts later, at the risk of annoying the 4 female Beijing Film Institute students who I've found myself in the middle of.

My butt has officially broken off from my body. I may have to resort to frontline Taiwanese Strait belligerence to get it back before this night is over.

Where have the past 12 hours gone? I can't really recall much other than what's been recounted above. Maybe my brain has been compressed into the 2nd dimension and I'm now a full 2 degrees away from the concept of time, moving on a line pushing itself horizontally through a solenoid of infant screams and dying nerve endings, like the helicopter pilot in So I Married An Axe Murderer.

I'd worry that I'll soon be guilty of infanticide but I think the girls next to me are losing patience with Androboy faster than I am. Taking that sleeper bus from Hotan to Kashgar and spending the whole night fighting off several Uygur men from trying to cuddle with me really built up my tolerance for these kinds of things.

Sometimes I can't believe it's been a year in China already, though things really seem different now than last July. Meeting Kevin, Danny, and Duncan in the lobby of our hotel in Shanghai has already been pushed into my Pantheon of Selective Highly-Lucid Memories.

The film girls have started talking to me. For some reason this makes me very nervous. Maybe because it breaks 12+ hours of happily ignoring each other. How'm I gonna handle being back in a country where everyone around me actually understands what I'm saying? I've already lost what remained of my tact after college.

I kind of think of Baojing as my residence now. It's been a long year. I'm really glad I made the friends I did, they've added to my life in their way. Why were the 1st and 2nd semester so different? I guess spring felt more like a job but fall was still an adventure, with all the foreign teachers on more or less equal footing.

It's been 20+ hours. Last night I had about a 2 hour long conversation with Rick, the English interpreter from the Dalian municipal government who was standing in the aisle next to me. We talked about all sorts of crap like movies, philosophy, science, Christianity, comic books, history, etc. Seems like a serious fellow; calls himself a pragmatist. I hope one day my Chinese will be as good as his English.

The fat kid next to me is making fat kid noises and glancing at my chocolate bar. Speaks for itself (and me).

About 1 hour left of this madness. Thank God it's sunny.

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