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.