Chuck is good. Enough already

Started a new show today with Yuan Yuan - Studio 60 on Sunset Strip. We've been married to Chuck for the last...seems like 20 years but it's only been 3 and a half seasons. We usually watch while we eat lunch or dinner together but Yuan Yuan's been off to Korea and busy with other tours, so Chuck has been visiting us only once a week or so. Soon our viewings of the show will align with Yuan Yuan's period and then hopefully she'll decide she's ready for another. Pavlovian conditioning, my only hope.

Before a shitstorm erupts in the comments from the Chuck-loving crowd and turns this blog into a lonely and irrelevant sideline on an intergalactic flame war, let me set the record straight. I have nothing against Chuck. I like Chuck. It's often entertaining and sometimes hilarious. But it's getting very repetitive and way too emotional. In season 4, it doesn't go an episode without a heartwarming moment. We need more Buy More and less Chuck-Sara relationship issues. We get it, Chuck's a little girl and Sara's a big man with a gun, so Chuck has all these feelings and Sara has little phantom Tyrannosaurus arms where her feelings once were before they were amputated for good, but the steady onslaught from Chuck's pharmaceutical-grade pheromones finally overwhelm her (in every episode) and she starts getting sympathy pains and everything is "well" between them again.

Then there's Chuck's sister, who is completely intolerable. Mario couldn't stand her from the beginning. If there's anything Mario hates in this world, it's being babied and told "if there's anything you ever need, you come to me, you're my brother/son/nephew/mistress and I'm here for you always." Somewhere out there, Mario just felt the inexplicable but urgent need to run away as fast as possible. The only person Mario needs to be there for him is a bowl of mildewy soup. But I tolerated Ellie for the sake of contrast, which she struck spectacularly with Casey. Which brings me to Casey. Casey is slowly but surely turning into Chuck's sister. Ever since he reunited with his daughter, he's been discovering all these feelings and emotions and frankly it's disgusting. Casey was the goto guy for your dose of macho. Without him, this whole show is getting unbearably sappy.

I take it back, we didn't start Studio 60 on Sunset Strip. I was hoping for a self-fulfilling prophecy but the gods would have none of it. Just as we sat down to watch it, after I had downloaded the subtitles and made sure they matched, I unplugged my external laptop fan and set up my laptop on a chair near the bed so we could watch from there. When I hit play, VLC started spouting some nonsense about bad movie files and inauspicious weather conditions. I opened the show folder to try to start up the video from there again, and noticed the folder had disappeared. Turns out the folder was on the fan. And the fan wasn't a fan, it was an external harddrive. When I plugged it back into my laptop and reopened the folder, the first 5 episodes were gone. Somewhere on the other end of the galaxy, a black hole is slurping down one episode after another. The most epic slurping in the world, that we'll never see or hear or maybe even imagine, as black holes are so strong that they slurp up their own slurping sounds and webcam footage as soon as it begins to exist. But otherwise it would be all over the news in a billion years or so.

The Hao Women

I just noticed Yuan Yuan put a recent photo of her family on my desk right next to my computer. It must have been there for the last month but it only just struck me as odd. It's all the women in Yuan Yuan's family, of which there are so many that the photo could pass for a Wellesley graduation ceremony keepsake. I don't know what it's doing next to my computer, maybe so I'm frequently reminded that I definitely got the best bear from the flock. One of the women in the photo is a baby, terrible dating material, can't hold a candle to the one I got. Can't hold a candle at all, that would be irresponsible parenting. Plus, that would be parenting, so there goes the romance. Then there's Yuan Yuan's mom, who's a bit traditional for my taste, though I always poke fun at her that she's not traditional enough. She knows I'm joking but she can never decide if she wants to get the joke.

Me: dinner's ready!
(we all sit down to eat)
Me: wait! We can't eat until the food's cold! It's to remind us that these days of plenty are not to be taken for granted, and that even cold food is better than no food at all. It's a great tradition, trust me. You're going to love it.
Yuan Yuan's mom: ...(looks at Yuan Yuan for help)
Yuan Yuan: don't listen to him, mom
Me: hey, no respect for your elders! ...Another fine tradition from the wild wild West. You'll fit in great, honey!
Yuan Yuan's mom: can we eat?
Me: yes, let's eat, but as long as we make it a new tradition to break a glorious tradition every time we break bread.
Yuan Yuan's mom: well, we can keep the good ones

Yuan Yuan's oldest sister is a dear, or so I thought for the first 10 minutes of meeting her. I even had time to plant a sloppy kiss onto her ass, saying she seemed like the gentlest one of the pack. Of course, 5 minutes later I was flat against the wall from the shockwave when her eldest son did an no-no and got a strong dose of traditional child-rearing. I'm still a little deaf in those ears. I'm surprised neither of us did a no-no in our pants. It must be all the conditioning Chinese people get from their cellphones. A little tip for you, if you're getting bad volume from your cellphone, hand it to a Chinese person and step 50 feet away. You'll hear the other side just fine. Some kind of technological racism, Mario and I are still investigating the science behind it.

Yuan Yuan's older sister is a cutie pie, the kind you want to feed candy until they're fat enough that they lose their appeal. She's the skinniest of the four and her face is vaguely chipmunk-like. She always looks like she's about to nibble something. Alas, looks can be deceiving, and when she recently stayed with us for 10 days, I saw into the heart of the beast. She came here with her 1-year old baby girl (7 years old in China), and proved to us that babies are quite resilient creatures. They can take a beating at every meal and be just fine. To be honest, it's the baby's own damn fault. If she'd closed her ears when she got screamed at and hadn't gone deaf, she could have gotten safely screamed at for the rest of her childhood and her mother wouldn't have to hit her so hard.

Mario was shocked by all the verbal and physical violence. Shocked enough to have an opinion if you can believe it.

Mario: she just smacked the baby right in front of us!
Yuan Yuan: you don't beat children in the US?
Mario: of course we do. We just have the decency to do it secretly and then lie about it.
Mark: she didn't even look embarrassed at losing her temper. I'm kind of jealous.
Yuan Yuan: so what do you do if you don't beat them?
Mario: we just give the kid a dirty look, as in "when we get home...you're dead"
Yuan Yuan: does it work?
Mario: ...

I tried to stay out of it though I felt sorry for the baby, but I was involved against my will. Somehow they noticed that the baby would eat better in my presence, so they started bringing me in as a consultant whenever the baby needed feeding. Her sister would say something about Uncle Foreigner to the baby in their dialect and the baby would eat like a charm. Later I found out that the sister was telling the baby that I was going to yell at it if she didn't eat the food right away. I was used, and not in a good way, no handcuffs or oils or anything. I was used to scary some appetite into a baby. Anyway, my relationship with her sister didn't suffer. We're friendly as always and she probably doesn't even notice how I skip to the table like a unicorn whenever she says it's time to eat.

Yuan Yuan's younger sister, the last of the brood, is currently experiencing the dubious benefits of higher education. She's cute and friendly like the rest of them, but she also packs a temper like the rest of them (well, I got the mellow one), which I've luckily never seen firsthand. It's not her fault, she'd be a darling if she weren't so spoiled. And this is typical China - the youngest children get spoiled beyond all reason, in the name of love. If you see an obese child on the street, you can bet his spare butt cheek he's the youngest. One time I overheard during dinner that Yuan Yuan's mom loved her youngest daughter the most. I couldn't understand why she didn't love me more than all of them put together, but I stifled my righteous indignation and asked politely "why the f??" To which Yuan Yuan's mom replied, like I'd asked her why the sky is blue:

"Because she's the youngest."

Tradition. It even tells us who to love more. It's amazing how straightforward life can be.

Yuan Yuan the bear

My plank-holding times are steadily improving, but Yuan Yuan, whose body is some kind of mystery of science / voodoo, is gaining on me quickly. When we started out a few weeks ago, I could do 2 minutes and a bit. Today I hit 3 minutes 45 seconds, but then I had to lay there and drool on the floor for a while, until there was enough of a buoyant force for me to get up without popping an absicle. Yuan Yuan started out at a max of 40 seconds or so, and hit 2 minutes today, though she was whooping like a Native American at a scalping for the last 30. In a few weeks she'll catch up and overtake me. She could always do handstands longer than me (1 min 24 seconds), she can hold a bridge for 3 minutes, and she holds the record for jump-roping - 650 in a row. Mario would just shrug and say "that's impossible, I refuse to believe it," when she would beat us both at some new exercise. I often call her bear-related affectionate names, but I'm starting to think she might really be part bear. She sleeps a lot, 15 hours a few days ago, 10-12 regularly, she's super strong but she can barely do 5 push-ups, she can eat twice as much as me easily and being full is no deterrent, she's got a big head and her yawns are closer in shape to a banana (vertically) than an apple, she runs uphill faster than downhill, and she's covered with 3-inch long thick brown fur all over her body. The only thing not in her favor is that she's completely indifferent to meat. Maybe that's the only thing standing between me and a bloody puddle of me-leftovers.

Sick again

I caught another cold yesterday night. I've had colds on and off for the last month. It's hard to tell if it's one long cold or if I've wandered into some kind of buffet and can't find the exit.

I went down to the pharmacy a few minutes ago and slammed right into the barrier between Chinese and Western medicine. In America, they usually ask you about the symptoms you're experiencing and then pronounce a diagnosis - you have a cold. No shit. Sometimes it's cancer. Then it's "oh shit." But things aren't so simple here. In Chinese medicine, there are several different types of colds, depending on the season and how you acquired them.

Me: I have a cold, can I have some cold medicine?
Pharmacist (a nice elderly lady): What kind of cold?
Me: Excuse me?
Pharmacist: is it from running the air conditioner, or were you in a cold place, or did you catch fire? (上火 - Catching fire - the most common ailment Chinese people complain about, symptoms ranging from diarrhea to constipation to scratchy throats to pimples and many more. In general, it means something is inflamed, and you need to fight that fire with something intrinsically cool, like cucumbers and water. Foreigners are generally mystified by the concept.)
Me: I...have no freaking clue
Pharmacist: shame on you, you don't even know your own body!
Me: could someone have sent the cold to me in an email?
Pharmacist: don't be a smart ass, you need at least realtime audio to catch a cold over the network. Here are three types of cold medicine, pick one yourself.

I ended up picking the "wind-heat cold" (风热感冒) medicine. The other prominent choice was "wind-cold cold" (风寒感冒) medicine. We'll see what happens. Or maybe we won't. Chinese medicine is very much a slow cure, you never know whether it helped or you managed to recover on your own.

One of the things Mario was always better at than me is urination. Not only could his stream cut metal (you could hear it from the local KFC), while my stream couldn't cut the line at the KFC, but he could empty out 0.75L at a time. I averaged 0.25L with a rare max around 0.4L. How do I know this? Occasionally the bathroom is taken, and there's a bladder emergency among the leftover roomizens. If the bathroom is occupied by a girl, everyone knows that there's imminent danger of permanent bladder damage, so they usually grab a bottle and pee in it. Then everyone else grabs a bottle and pees in theirs. Don't worry, we do this privately, we don't compare equipment or anything.

Anyway, I've never managed to fill a 0.4L bottle in one go, and no amount of practice or holding it in seemed to help. But this morning, that looked like any old morning, with no hint of the epic feats about to transpire, I woke up to a bladder emergency. The bathroom was taken by one of my new roommies, the one with breasts. I found an empty bottle, 0.45L, and filled it up with pee to spare. This is momentous day, make no mistake about it.

30 day trialarama

I'm experiencing extreme withdrawal. If any of you have ever been addicted to heroin, tips would be much appreciated right now. Today is the first day of six 30-day trials, the most important being a rerun, a classic, a killer, a challenge about which epic love songs have been written - no sugar. I don't know why I do this to myself, I would not approve if I were me. So far I've managed to slip into daydreams about candy roughly every 10 minutes. If I could just do a reality check every time I craved a piece of chocolate, I'd have already had 50 lucid dreams today.

The other trials are:
2. 300 pushups / planks mix & match, where a 2 minute plank is equivalent to 50 pushups. In 30 days, my lower back will have bigger pecs than my chest and I won't be able to do planks anymore because my abs will touch the ground. Children will use me as a rocking horse.
3. Read with Yuan Yuan in English for 30 minutes. Currently we're halfway through Lamb (The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal), hopefully we'll finish that this month. I'm accepting suggestions for the next book. Candidates need to be either extremely funny, or at a middle school reading level.
4. Being vegetarian. Piece of cake as chocolate is the only meat I care about.
5. Stretching - 2 mins each of 5 different stretches. I hear that being flexible can extend your lifespan and it makes sense; corpses are the least flexible people I've ever met.
6. Blogging every day. This one started yesterday. I've failed the previous two times I attempted this one, but will never admit it.

No sugar is undoubtedly the hardest; I've yet to invent a doable 30-day trial that's harder. Even the trial of doing 25 pushups every time I wanted to sit down, and the trial of no sitting down at all for 30 days (except to poop), pale in comparison. I've been to the fridge more times than I've done pushups and there's never anything new there. I've forgotten all about Mario. Unless it's secretly him that my subconscious is looking for in the fridge.

Mario is history

Mario left yesterday, back to the land next to the land of the burrito. For the last three months we've been singing the refrain "if Mario leaves..." then "if Mario leaves in July..." and finally to "if Mario leaves at 1:30AM on July 9th..." (Note to self: good outline for a song). It started because Jia Yan and Yuan Yuan are hopelessly romantic at heart, having their brains filled from an early age with Chinese soap opera sludge. It still leaks out their mouths though we've stoppered their eyes and ears. If life were a soap opera, there would be a final "if" at the airport, a plaintive "if you leave me now..." and Mario's heart of anti-(social)matter would finally signal to him in furious Morse code that he has to stay. For the orphans, of course. Alas, the orphans will have to fend for themselves this time. Mario would appreciate the irony, he loves Charles Dickens.

When the game started, Mario would roll his eyes as he hadn't the shred of a Parmesan cheese crumb of a doubt that he would leave on schedule. But eventually he joined the party. "I haven't decided if I'm going to live with Ben or by myself when I go back. If I go back, I mean. And if Ben doesn't move here..." We all laughed at each episode of "If Mario leaves" and I'm sure Jia Yan's heart broke a little each time but she did a great job of hiding it. I only once saw her puffy eyed and that was on the last day, when the mystery was about to be solved and the "will Mario leave?" question was about to be casually duh'd out of existence. Apparently it was a four player game because it doesn't seem as fun anymore.

Today our new roommates arrived, fresh from the roommate factory. They're a Chinese couple, and half of them are pregnant. The first thing the pregnant half did upon arrival was jump on our electronic scale and complain about not being fat enough. I'm in love with her already.

They seem...nice. Like elves. After the weigh-in, they offered to take me out to dinner, which I politely refused, then they walked around outside until they hit their quota of toxic air and went promptly to sleep at 10:30. I have a feeling they might get up at 6 and make me breakfast, then leave some on the table and quietly slink off to work so I won't be shy about eating the leftovers in front of them. Then they'll come home and quarter me for eating their food. Cause they're evil elves. We'll see.

Here's a slice of Mario before you go:

Mario: what do you think would be easier, if space was limited or time? ...Probably space.

Mark: unless you're stuck inside an egg

Mario: yea, good point. Even if the egg is light years across. Uhh...I feel so claustrophobic

Iron Man and Chuck

Iron Man 3 is on the horizon. I make it a rule to have low expectations for anything that ends with a 3, so I can be pleasantly surprised no matter how bad it is. Usually I do such a good job with the first part that I end up not watching the movie at all. But I don't always have a choice in the matter because frequently all the other movies in a 2 month radius are made in China (I live in Beijing and sadly Chinese film is even more mediocre than the sweetened garbage that comes out of Hollywood), and Yuan Yuan needs to be entertained. Otherwise she'll entertain me, Gladiator style.

Recently we've been on an almost exclusive Chuck diet. I'm usually busy so entertainment hour coincides with feeding time for efficiency. This has interesting side-effects:

1. Yuan Yuan is more likely to volunteer to cook, since I can go without eating meals and she needs her helping of Chuck.

2. I have no idea what anything tastes like anymore, but sometimes I'll find myself cracking up when I put Yuan Yuan to bed and grab a carrot for a midnight snack.

3. Mario has watched more TV in the past month / 2 seasons of Chuck than he has in the 9 months before that. He never admits to watching, and he's really good at looking away just in time when you try to catch him sneaking a peek, but when he's studying the same syllable on the same flashcard before and after the episode, it gives away the game.

Instant mastery for sale

I asked Mario today how much he would pay to instantly become master of After Effects. Not THE master, but a decent master like Andrew Kramer, one of my more personal personal heroes. Mario started at $1k and I massaged him up to $5k with promises of future riches, but he wouldn't budge past that, despite the fiercest massaging. He finally shelled out $10k to become an instant badass actuary but that one was just a hypothetical scenario.

$5-10k seems like a miserly sum for even the most average greatness. I think I'd pay at least 10 times that amount. Now I just have to find someone to take my money. And then write them a check. The people in the Matrix didn't know how easy they had it. What the hell were they thinking going back to the real world to fight crime. They could have been After Effects masters!

Yesterday's discussion was much cheaper, but entertaining none the less. We were hypothesizing what would happen if everyone suddenly switched gender. How much chaos would erupt in Muslim countries? Would the next US president be a woman? Would I still be with Yuan Yuan and would I develop a taste for male? Would there be a frenzy of revenge rape? Would Mario get up and pour me some water like a good girl? Would there be no one in the streets the next day because they'd all be at home playing with themselves while shopping for shoes?

Obviously our research, and I don't hesitate to call it that because we used the scientific method and because it was inconclusive...was inconslusive. But mark my words, one day I'm going to give you a sex change and then you'll wish you thought about this sooner.

Epileptic Verbiage

I don't know if anyone noticed but Michael Jackson's been spinning in his grave like a driedel on X for the last fifteen minutes. No...that would imply he's buried standing, maybe more like the spoke of the wheel on The Price Is Right...or a piece of pecan pie in the microwave/centrifuge. He was spinning so fast that the angular momentum of the Earth fled straight into the complex numbers. Yes, I started the "learn the moonwalk" 30-day trial. 10 minutes a day is the commitment, unless my kneecaps pop off, in which case I'll take my day of rest like God did when his did.

Sometimes I get really sick of Chinese thinking. I'm supposed to meet Yuan Yuan's mom one of these days and as I made some delicious Salad Olivier a few hours ago, I offered Yuan Yuan to swing it by tomorrow, give mommy dearest a taste of Russian medicine. To my surprise, Yuan Yuan, who can shotgun a keg of salad faster than you can say "damn it! I wanted some too!", told me to forget it and just invite her mom out to get some hot pot. Confused, I got to asking stupid questions and eventually got to the blunt answer that it's more meaningful to ask someone out and throw down some shekels than to cook a delicious foreign meal for them that'll probably give them the runs.

I guess in one respect this is good: it evens the playing field. If you can't boil an egg--and I have to say I've failed many a time in this department...there's just so many steps, I always forget to turn on the fire or turn it off or wait long enough or peel the egg after instead of before, or spin the egg counterclockwise, which as you know doesn't work as eggs have intricate networks of gyroscopes lying in ambush in case you should attempt this--you can still make your girlfriend's parents feel like you're earnestly sucking up to them. But it also obviously takes no effort. It's like getting money on your birthday; it's simultaneously great because no one really knows what you want to buy except Google, and meaningless because they obviously didn't make any effort to divine your secret wishes.

But whatever, I guess. When in Rome, buy your Chinese girlfriend's Chinese mother a typical Chinese meal. Or maybe this is all a ploy to keep her from noticing that I have white skin and a nose with extra nose on it.

The knot of the day is The Rapala Knot! Oops, scratch the exclamation point.


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Unfortunately I haven't been able to locate explicit directions on how to tie the Pocket Knot - the one where you put your earphones in your pocket and take them out the next day and then go to the Apple store and get a free iPhone cause they can't prove there isn't one trapped in the middle of your Pocket Knot. If I were a sailor, I'd get on that right now.

Mario's soliloquy of the day:
i was looking at some of the stock games of real masters or something, there is one where a guy sacrifices rook and queen to get a checkmate
unfreakin believable
did u ever have any victories like that ?
i have many losses like that
without the checkmate part

I think my writing style is getting more epileptic.

Windows Necromancy

Windows has been reinstalled, my drives have been formatted, I'm back on a clean machine. Took me quite a few hours to reinstall all my software and uninstall all of the prepackaged crapola, but now I'm all ready to download more viruses.

Funny:

Mario: did u like the songs
Mario: i've been listeing to them continuously
Mark: not bad, but they repeat too much
Mario: they dont repeat enough...if it repeated more i wouldnt have to click "replay" so much

Coming Soon To Your Friendly Nearby Internet

I've been writing and recording music lately, trying to get enough songs together to get an album up on iTunes. Quantity has finally reached its goal, and I've been sneakily testing quality on various so-called friends and family. The reviews/reactions so far have been pretty mixed. My friends in China generally give me at least one thumb up, partly because their culture doesn't allow them to voice criticism, and partly because of the One-Person-One-Thumb policy in China.

My family is generally supportive, though they express this support in very different ways. The "generally supportive" average is reached primarily thanks to my sister, who lavishes praise with a heavy hand regardless and especially irregardless of quality. (Somewhere Perry is getting very very angry about my word usage. Lucy, do what you can for him). "Mark! You wrote that!?" she shrieks. "It's soo good! You're amazing!" My guess is that up till now she thought I was clinically retarded, because I can literally play one chord and elicit that response.

My mother, the most musically inclined of my subscribers, is eager to listen to my creations but only has time to do so on the 32nd of every month. Never fear, my supreme patience is holding stong.

Gene, who now runs out of the house if you call him "Dad," gives a two-for-one deal: reserved praise and vague criticism. "Hey! That's...pretty good...but something's missing...I don't know what," is his well-rehearsed response. He is as consistent and oblivious to quality as my sister, though in a different slice on the spectrum.

Grandma and Boris never say a single word about the quality of the music. They react, but I haven't decided how to interpret their reaction yet. Usually it goes something like this:

(a three course meal is shoved down Mark's throat to lull him into a false sense of security and a very real sense of nausea)
Grandma: sing us one of your songs! You never sing to us!
Mark: ugh...I only sing to my microphone. But you can hear my computer imitate me. Want to?
Grandma: you didn't eat anything today! Do you want some strawberries? Plums? Chocolate? Herring? Pickles? I know! Let's drink a shot together!
(If you're wondering about the exclamation points, Grandma lives at around 130 decibels)
Mark: no thanks, I only drink with Michelle.
Grandma: well at least have some bread. Nuts. Potatoes. Want me to make you a steak? Pancakes? Why aren't you playing your song to me!?
Mark: uhh...good point. (Turns song on)
Grandma (listens for 5 seconds): BORIS! GET OVER HERE, MARK'S PLAYING US HIS SONGS!
Boris (from the kitchen): meh? You say something?
(They arm themselves with megaphones and yell into each other's earpieces for the next three songs. Boris finally comes over. Mark writhes in pain on the carpet; he is congenitally incapable of habituating to sonic warfare)
Grandma: is that your song playing?
Mark: ye...e...e...s.
Grandma: Boris, listen! Don't fall asleep, you old goat!
Boris: I'm not sleeping, I'm listening!
(5 seconds pass)
(Mark quietly gets up, negotiates the two blissfully snoring geezers, packs his things and drives himself to the hospital)
(scroll down three days and repeat)

Neither Grandma nor Boris has stayed awake for the duration of a single song, which is 3.5 mins on average. Good? Bad? I don't know but I'm going to be optimistic. At their age, if they don't die of something, it's probably really really really ridiculously good.

Mario is the only one who gives constructive feedback. Unfortunately, by some crazy coincidence, he's the one person whose advice I never listen to. Can't do anything about it, the decision was made a long time ago.

Chun is busy 758 hours a week so she has no time to give feedback. My turn to be the object of her attention was coming up, but then a little thing called Daylight Savings Time stole my spot. Now she's back in her exercise wheel, dancing her way into medical school. Don't stand in her way, she has a mean left pirouette.

And finally, there was one person outside the usual circle who got a taste of this album (that's coming soon to your friendly nearby Internet). That was my aunt. Around Christmas, she demanded I send her a song. Being an obedient little nephew, I obliged...and that was the last I heard from her. I should really go check if she's OK. Hmm...nah, I'll just wait till next Christmas. If she doesn't show up, then I'll know something's wrong. Never too late to call 911.

Q & A

Morning meditation:

Oof. Today was one loooong hour-long hour. I was really impatient for some reason, even more than usually. Maybe it's because today I meditated at ~11:30AM instead of the usual 9:00AM, and my brain had already had time to sink into the afternoon mindset, apparently one of ADD. Also, there were lots of distracting sounds today. Planes, trains, automobiles, humming refrigerators, ringing cellphones, garbage pickups, the walls crackling from minute changes in temperature, pretty much everything you could ask for except for the ice cream truck and carolers. And Santa Claus.

I did have a couple of interesting moments when I felt curiously misaligned with my body, as if I had drifted over a couple of inches, but was also simultaneously in the original spot. It was a tricky feeling to hold onto, because the moment I'd notice it, I'd snap right back into place. The day I can hold it I'll probably end up blaming it on excessive calorie intake.

I was thinking yesterday that God is a lot like the Placebo Effect. It doesn't really matter whether he's a sugar pill or an antibiotic or a big jolly bearded guy in a cloud, riding a dinosaur. If you manage to believe in him, even if you're tricked into doing so, you can extract benefit for yourself. Or harm of course. Let's forget about God for a second, and just think about the Placebo Effect. Basically it says that whatever you believe, happens. Like, if you take a sugar pill thinking it's a cancer cure, you have a 99.99% chance of being cured (Note: figures are not to scale). Or if you jump out of an airplane and believe you have a parachute, but you really don't, then you're totally screwed. Actually...ignore that last one. OK, if you believe in Santa, your parents will give you presents addressed from him. If you believe in a wrathful and vengeful God, I will come shoot you in the head. If my physician tells me my lymph nodes are OK, I will believe her, and they'll stop spraying fountains of blood. So you see that the Placebo Effect is very powerful. And now I forget where I was going with this.

A joke my friend Pei wrote about me:

It happened as mark was in primary school...
teacher : mark, how come u r late again!!
mark: I met a lost 3 year-old kid by the railway on the way here.
teacher: come on... pls use a better story next time.
mark: I did send him home.
teacher: where is his home?
mark: ya when I asked him that, he was pointing to the railway. So I put him on the rails.
teacher: .......

(my reaction)
Mark: that's good!
Pei: when I was thinking of u, I thought, mark, he is a baby-killer... here we go...

A joke I wrote about my friend Pei:

Pei: talk dirty to me, I love it when you talk dirty to me.
Mark: mm...your apartment's so dirty, so dirty, I'm going to go clean it right now!
Pei: yea baby! you know what turns me on!

Yea...that may take some background to understand.

And one more about Pei (we're collaborating on a joke book that only the two of us will understand):
Pei is walking down the street. She sees a 5 year old kid and his mother. The kid must have been misbehaving, because the mother is beating the crap out of him, spanking him like there's no tomorrow.
Pei: ah...I wish I had a kid.

(today, in the kitchen)
Mark is peeling a clementine. Michelle walks up and puts her hand out, demanding some. Mark shoves the whole clementine in his mouth.
Michelle: Mom! Mark stole my clementine!

I tried writing some more jokes today, but in a different style. I tried posing a question and then thinking of responses from different people, with the responses caricaturing the answeree. I can't really tell if it's funny, and you'd have to know the people reasonably well to understand what I'm getting at, but it made me crack up when I wrote them:

Question: You have 24 hours to live, what do you do?
Mom: 24 hours...that's 12 movies!
Dad: 24 hours...that's eight 3-hour meditations. No, wait! Twenty-four 1-hour meditations!
Mark: 24 hours...can I at least get an extra half-hour to blog about it after?
Grandma: 24 hours...do you know what happened in Israel in only the last 3 hrs? No? Well let me describe it to you in gory detail for the next 24.
Boris: 24 hou...(snore)
Pei: 24 hours...that's enough time to try 240 new sex positions!
Manlin: 24 hours...how fast do they deliver chocolate?
Zhang Xiao Yi: 24 hours...damn, my parents are going to kill me when I tell them!
Chun: 24 hours...OK, first 5 minutes - call my Mom and Dad to tell them the news. The next 23 hours and 50 minutes - plan out the remaining 5 minutes. Aha! Not a minute gone to waste!
Tina: 24 hours...wow, life sucks.
Mario: 24 hours...that's time enough to learn 3 new Chinese words, forget 5 Russian ones, and start learning three new languages!
Igor: 24 hours...Renata! What am I doing for the next 24 hours!?
Frank: 24 hours...no problem. I have a business plan just for the occasion! It's a franchise. We're going to have 12 stores open within the first 10 hrs and we should be up to McDonald's scale by hour 24.
Serge: 24 hours...that's enough time to build a successful family, right?
Perry: 24 hours...convert as many Christians as I can to antheism. Now that's time well spent.
Lucy: 24 hours...bull. I bet I can live longer than that.

Question: What will you do when your son's begging you for a new toy he doesn't deserve?
Mom: don't give it to him, but then cry myself to sleep at night.
Dad: don't give it to him. Instead, make fun of him till he develops a serious psychological disorder.
Michelle: I have a son? That means I had sex! EWWWW!!!
Grandma: buy him every toy in the store. Oh, wait! Did you say son or grandson?
Mark: my son? Did the condom break? This is a completely unrealistic situation! Fine, I'd probably go get a DNA test then, see if he's really my son. There's no toy in existence that a son of mine wouldn't deserve. Ah, he's already so much like his father.
Chun: tell him he can have the toy in installments. Get him planning his life early on!
Mario: how old is he? 5? Trade him in for five 1-year-olds. No! Half of a ten-year-old!
Pei: give it to him. I love him, so why wouldn't I buy it? Wait, that's not how you raise children?
Zhang Xiao Yi: Chinese children know better than to beg for toys. I knew I shouldn't have married an American. They're inferior!
Manlin: play mind games with him. "You really want that toy? You don't not really want it? You wouldn't want not to not want to want to not have it?" Hehe.
Tina: toys? Yay! Mine mine mine mine! Phew, OK, sad now.
Igor: oh Christ. Renata!
Frank: wait, how did he get out of his cage?
Serge: buy myself a new car. And a new house. And then work harder and earn more money so I can buy the toy. Man, where does the money go!?
Perry: you know those noise-canceling headphones? What did you say? I can't hear you.
Lucy: beat the little devil half to death. Studies show it's optimal for his development.

Question: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Mom: because we're vegetarian.
Dad: it's a reincarnation of a nomadic tribesman, come on dude, ask me something harder.
Mark: I told you ten times already! Don't tell me any news unless it's good news! I've heard this all a million times. People are dying, there's war and povery, blah blah blah.
Michelle: a chicken? Where?!? I'm scared. Wait, are chickens dogs or insects?
Grandma: a chicken? Do you know that ten people were blown up in Israel today?
Igor: Renata, didn't we discuss this the other day? What did we decide?
Chun: aha! All part of my plan for getting into medical school! Check!
Frank: I don't know, but someone grab that chicken! The chicken/turkey exchange rate is climbing faster than my blood pressure!
Paul: hahaha! Someone saw a chicken! That's so crazy, man, that's so crazy!
Mario: I don't know, but I trust it. I'm getting outta here.
Pei: chicken? Who cares about chickens? Ask me about fish.
Tina: crap, I had this at my Google interview...and I remember getting it right...what was it!?...ugh!
Manlin: mmffhhahmm...sorry, was eating chocolate. Umm... (pause) did you get that? My MSN died. No? I said "maybe there's better Internet connection over there?"
Serge: a chicken crossed my road!? Where is it? Give me that chicken, we have some words to say to each other if you know what I mean. Quickly, before I forgive it!
Perry: don't even get me started. And no, chickens were not created by Jesus, they were created by a little thing called evolution, heard of it?
Lucy: did you know that chicken blood is green? I swear. It's true. Fine, look it up nay-sayer. It's not true? No way!

Hot hot hot

Today I popped my "do something stupid and burn yourself" cherry. I had long figured I was immune because Mario averages three burns a week, making him a sort of lightning rod. My optimism didn't save me.

I'm afraid to say my burn was up to the stupidity standards Mario has set. His typical story is: "I opened the oven to get the chicken out and when I pulled out the pan with my bare hands, it burned me. How was I supposed to know it was hot?" To which I normally respond with a condescending laugh and a deprecating joke. Well my story merits the same treatment. Good thing Mario's asleep and doesn't read this blog.

I boiled myself some water for tea, made the tea, picked up the cup, and forgot about it somewhere on the way to setting it down on the dining room table. This is the hazard of trusting your body to your autopilot; sometimes, even he gets fancy. I realized I was in trouble just as I finished a complex dance move with my cup-bearing hand, and saw the liquid in the cup splash all over my first three fingers. There was instantly lots of pain, and for quite a while, especially since I didn't:

1. Drop the cup and run to the faucet to put out the six-inch flames on my hand.
2. Scream like a girl. Everyone knows this alleviates even the worst pain. This is why when a woman is screaming in the delivery room, you shouldn't panic. As long as she keeps screaming, she's as good as under general anaesthesia.
3. Put my hand up to my earlobe as Chun would have me do - according to her, earlobes are natural refrigerators; they absorb heat like a firstborn does your savings account. Well in this case, I would have ended up with a big blister instead of a face.

Instead I stood there and let the pain feast on my stupidity. Only when the water in the cup became completely placid did I put the cup down and do some of the aforementioned items.

I am reasonably sure this was a fluke, and that the next burn victim will again be Mario. Of course no one knows for sure but the burn gods. I'll be crossing the fingers I have left.

MCATs and Squirrels

A love triangle meets several times a week on the left fence of our backyard. Two of the squirrels clearly form a couple, but the third invariably attends their dates.

These squirrels, now that I think about it, are an almost exact replica of my life at college with Chun and Mario:

One lies draped over a fence bulb as relaxed as a loogie - he's usually off to himself, sleeping, or observing the other two. He turns away when the cuteness of the couple approaches disgusting. This is Mario across the board, though not nearly as lazy as the real one.

The second lies in often awkward-looking positions, with arms and legs branching at impossible angles, and head sometimes stuck in between the posts, like an ostrich in the sand. Nevertheless, he manages to look eternally relaxed; his eyelids teeter up and down. This is me.

The third runs circles around me, and climbs on and off in frenzied attempts to weed out something that's apparently permeated my entire hide. Though the squirrel version uses her face and not her hands to administer the cleansing, this creature is clearly Chun, who loves picking things out of other things, the first usually being dandruff, and the second - my hair.

The other, more obvious details of the love triangle's existence are not appropriate for the multitudes of 5-year-olds who peruse this blog daily, and I wouldn't want to be in breach of blog-writer-blog-reader ethics. Use your imagination.

NY/NJ forecast for tomorrow: pain, anaesthesia, death. Chances of root canal - 99%. Chances of overpaying for parking - 100%. Chances of watching a movie before going to bed - an ever unflagging 100% - that's destiny. Big day tomorrow NY/NJ, 299% worth of various crap.

Georgia forecast: light breakfast followed by 5 delicious hours of MCATs. Everyone wish Chun good luck, though this time the test is the underdog. Good luck Chun!

I Love Watermelon

I have pimped out all of my skills on Craigslist, with the frail hope of earning a dollar here and there giving private lessons. If there's something you want to learn that I don't know, and that you are willing to pay for, tell me. I will learn it and teach it to you.

Went to Barnes and Noble's again today, read a bunch of books that failed to make an impression on me. My sentimental half screams that this is because I'm still heartbroken from The Time Traveler's Wife, but I punished it with a Civil War book. Next time it'll keep its fat mouth shut.

Did some writing today - got well on my way into a song that started out about Tina, but tragically lacked a necessary depressing quality, and thus slowly transformed into a love song for Chun. I am now frantically juggling Tina between a slow blues, and an open window.

Meanwhile, Mario has come out with a new single, mourning his love for Iris, who is unfortunately a willing captive of a better man. The song is nearly complete, lacking only lyrics, but they will undoubtedly come around soon and be somewhere high on the scale from 1 to Pathetic.

Michelle asked me to tuck her in today. I considered it for a brief moment and then laughed in her face, a move which somehow doesn't hold the same element of surprise as it used to.

Michelle has a fat friend, who conveniently stores all self-consciousness for her condition in Michelle. Whenever Mom says "hey Michelle, where's fatty?" or Dad asks "where's Piglet?," Michelle inexplicably gets as offended as if it were her own liposuction-filled future they're talking about. Being intrinsically mild-mannered and considerate, I generally restrain my witty insults, and if anything, try to turn the conversation to safer and less fertile ground - such as how fat people contribute to society. By the way, has anyone found the answer to this one yet?

Blah and Blah

Ohhhhh Shaymalayma. I was wrong about you. You managed to make me laugh with your stupid stupid movie.

Mario left today, I think. I guess we'll find out soon.

Chun uploaded a bunch of pictures today, from senior ball, our trip to Maine, so I freed up some time in my busy schedule for some narcissism. Our house is already a narcissist's dreamhouse - wall-length mirrors in every bedroom - but when you're as special as me, you can't help wanting to be surrounded by yourself from all sides.

The trip to Maine, in case someone doesn't know, was an extreme adventure into mother nature. For four days, twelve of us (6 guys, 6 girls) camped out, without even so much as a firepit(!), in a beautiful home in Acadia National Park.
There was only one Wii, two TVs, central heating, and a half dozen bedrooms worth of accomodations, but luck favors the brave. We managed to survive the harsh conditions by always looking for that silver lining - the Stop & Shop at the end of the driveway, our two cars, and 12 credit cards. Everyone made it out more or less alive, and no one got pregnant from the late night orgies. Still, I wouldn't recommend it.

Almost got roped into a Dickens movie today, an idea that could only have spawned from the Masterpiece-Theater-zealot mind of my materfamilias. At the last moment I was stricken with a sudden case of jaw-breaking yawns and I was mercifully allowed to go to bed. Dickens stayed downstairs and entertained my mother for the next two hours. Dad didn't even put up a fight, he just went straight to bed and cried himself to sleep.

Think I'll go to Barnes and Noble tomorrow. It's time to get disillusioned with Queen.