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.