sassy taxi

the other day, when i was paying a taxi driver for taking me home, he looked at the crumpled bill and exclaimed, why is this so shitty?! you need to love your RMB.

ttl picturesque

26° out today breezy perfect. went to a park, two subway stops further into pudong from where i live. walked in rubble, flew a goldfish kite i bought outside of jin mao tower yesterday for 20 kuai. lied in grass and dirt, smoked cigarettes, tried to skip rocks on the river, failed. had some of the best chinese food i've had in shanghai.

Robert: ok well... be well, live well... and keep in touch please... tell Val I says hello and all that... miss having you both as roomies or housemates, whatever

jeffer

this morning i got an hour-long massage at this chinese medicine practice on huafeng lu that was so mind-numbingly painful that i could feel my eyes rolling into the back of my head. it was like experiencing an exorcism. in a good way. i've had a chinese hairdresser tell me my hair is unusually dry and knotted, a chinese makeup artist asked me why i have such sparse eyebrows, do i overpluck them? no they are just that way, and this chinese masseuse told me that some muscle in my back is misshapen. and he dug into my acupressure points until i thought his hands would delve through dermis and separate muscles strand by strand and come out grasping on the other side.

tonight i had wine and cheese during sunset at cloud 9 on the 87th floor of the jin mao tower. nice view.

germany

there were over one million people in the expo, which makes the day where we ooh-ed and aah-ed over six hundred thousand moot. there was a massive line, staffed by chinese military, to get into the line of the german pavilion, which already wrapped several times around the building.

my guide, lina, was the cutest german-born vietnamese girl. she had enormous eyes and would cover her mouth with both hands and giggle like minnie mouse.

mao livehouse

as i predicted, boys noize opened with kontact me and closed with my moon my man. great show. third time i've seen him this year, but i've never seen him from so close before. i heard jeffer live for the first time, which i've wanted for a long time.

ghost

i haven't been sober in a week. it's been festive lot's to talk about. nothing to show because i lost my camera, naturally.

high blood pressure

i could not be more exhausted and frustrated from work than i am today. it was one of those days where you had to tell the old woman hitting your arm not to touch you, stop some kid from pissing all over the floor, get continuously mobbed by a hundred people every ten minutes, pushing and rioting and knocking down all the stanchions that bar them from your body, all yelling and demanding different things and complaining and betchin and blaming you. i'm lying in bed with the shades drawn and my heart still won't stop beating a million beats a minute.

extremely deutsche

upcoming two-day german experience. tomorrow, boys noize from 10 pm to 3 am, and then working at the balancity GERMAN PAVILION (on exchange) from 9 am to 4:30 pm. i am extremely excited, to say the least.

I WILL BE IN THIS MAGNIFICENT STRUCTURE

predestination

not only am i moving out and losing my room with a view at the end of the month, but the view itself will be gone when everything is torn down ephemeral

this morning i dreamt about having to write a screenplay sequel to batman

party in the usa

closing time today

puppy patrol do-gooding

body hurts from digging trenches for habitat for humanity in the rain with shovels and pickaxes. hand hurts, back hurts. we were completely covered in mud. we unearthed centipedes and earthworms and broken bowls. all the people in the area spoke a completely unintelligible (to me) form of Old Shanghainese, and an old lady talked to me for a solid three minutes as i nodded at her. the family had a very large pig with moist contracting and dilating nose, little piggies, baby goats, and bitty puppies. when we finally got back to shanghai we had our first and last party at our pavilion. big turnout. one of the kazakhs, whom i'd accosted at the last australia party, came up to me and said, you should have told people in our pavilion that you can speak russian. i said, why? i'm really bad. he said - we are very interested in people who can speak russian.

olivia was just doing stretches on the floor, downward-dog sort of stuff. i can't even imagine moving my body like that right now. we did this horrible brick-passing stuff yesterday and my right bicep feels like it's being stabbed by a sharp knife.

festive

our boys

i once asked them what's up with the peace signs. they said they don't know, they've just been doing it since they were kids.

killing like i'm supposed to

this morning, via skype, my parents couldn't agree on how my name is pronounced in chinese. identity crisis. i maintain that the second character is second tone, not third (opinion of my father)

tonight, the resident Beautiful Dane of building 14B said that my danish is "very funny." when i asked for further clarification, he said it is "cute." it's shit, but it's much better when i'm sober, promise.

double ten

I spent 07/07/07 in Shanghai at the 7th Absolut Icebar in the world, now closed.

I spent 10/10/10 somehow in Shanghai again, wandering around the A zone of World Expo with TTL. Amongst others, we saw TTL's Anhui province, the slang and funny dialect of which I have been trying to learn, and Fujian province, the probable land of my extreme ancestors.

Today was Taiwan's national day, uncelebrated here of course.

Taiwanese has extremely extensive tone sandhi (tone-changing) rules: in an utterance, only the last syllable pronounced is not affected by the rules. The following rules, listed in the traditional pedagogical mnemonic order, govern the pronunciation of tone on each of the syllables affected (that is, all but the last in an utterance):

If the original tone number is 5, pronounce it as tone number 3 (Quanzhou/Taipei speech) or 7 (Zhangzhou/Tainan speech).

If the original tone number is 7, pronounce it as tone number 3.

If the original tone number is 3, pronounce it as tone number 2.

If the original tone number is 2, pronounce it as tone number 1.

If the original tone number is 1, pronounce it as tone number 7.

If the original tone number is 8 and the final consonant is not h (that is, it is p, t, or k), pronounce it as tone number 4.

If the original tone number is 4 and the final consonant is not h (that is, it is p, t, or k), pronounce it as tone number 8.

If the original tone number is 8 and the final consonant is h, pronounce it as tone number 3.

If the original tone number is 4 and the final consonant is h, pronounce it as tone number 2.

qianyu

At work, I was helping a group of older people from New York and one of the men asked me where I learned my English. I told him, as I've so often had to defend myself so far - I am American.

I hate to berate him because he was, previous to this, a pleasant man. But this was infuriating. I wish the fact that I was wearing a full uniform, a name tag with my first and middle name and USA printed on it, spoke perfect English, and maybe the fact that we are an immigrant country, could have clued him in to the idea that I just might be American. I learned my English in the same place you did, sir.

The subject of the end of Expo came up again today - as it often does now - and a baoan quoted a poem to me about good friends never actually being separated, as they are under one moon, by one river. i said - what river. he said that there is a very long river that runs through china. i said - this does not work internationally.

dajiangyou 打酱油

i've learned to say hello, goodbye, and i have come back in shanghainese. i forgot how to say i love shanghai. in the anhui province dialect i've begun to learn sort of unsavory phrases that boys teach you and then hastily tell you not to actually say to anyone.

today a chinese man showed me the elaborate book of stamps he had collected from each pavilion and very seriously explained to me what better city, better life means to him and his hopes for world peace. i stamped his book on a separate page set aside especially for the united states, because it is an important country in the world and he did not want it lost amongst all the other stamps.

on the bus home from work a baby kicked me with it's small foot, which will become a big foot, which will stomp on the earth.