Superday #30

The 30 day supertrial is officially over in ninety two words, no, eighty nine words, no, eighty six words...if there were only some way to write it down without changing it...damn observer effect. I'd draw a picture but I don't want to be charged with going over quota for drawing today.

Success all around I'm afraid, no way to break it gently. The supersummary:

Pushups: at 200 pushups a day, the max number of push-ups I could squeeze out per set went up from 37 to 53. It still surprises me every time though when I hit 40 and still have a few more in me before having to take a deep breath and start bouncing my pecs off the floor to make it up off the ground on the last couple. I wish there were some way to skip the first 45 and just do the last back-crunching, eyeball-popping, vein-dilating, sphincter-cramping 7 or 8. Do pushups on one hand at a time maybe? Or do Tenacious D style push-ups?

Drawing: still an effort to do 20 minutes in a row...oof. The cartooning book made it slightly more interesting though.

French: piece of cake, I can study it hours at a time. Little Nicolas is hilarious.

Knots: fun in the beginning and then boring and forgettable after the wonder wears off. Will review though.

Blogging: highly enjoyable and never gets old, like looking at like myself in the mirror.

In other news...

My newest student is taking her IELTS this weekend. I've prepared her twice a week two hours at a time for a month now but I'm not sure the impact on her English has been big enough. She's still a bit behind ("under" somehow doesn't make sense) that hump; she knows tons of English but can't get it out of her mouth unless I'm holding it pried open with a pair of garden pryers (priers? pry-openers?).

I noticed today that English is the only language I know that capitalizes "I." Are English-speakers the cockiest cocks on the planet?

And the last knot of the trial is...The Monkey Fist:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

I wish the one I made looked even remotely like the one in the picture. Alas, it looks more like a monkey tied into a knot and then fluffed up slightly with a shotgun blast.

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.

Guitarnapping

I had to say goodbye to my acoustic guitar today. It wasn't mine to begin with, though neither is it the person's whom I returned it to. A French guy named Cyril brought it to the hostel a bit less than a year ago and when he wasn't able to take it with him upon departure, left in his Spanish friend Alex's care. When Alex temporarily returned to Spain, he left it in the exquisitely carved hands of a Russian Jew named Mark. By pure coincidence, whatever Gibbs might say, that happened to be me. Alex came back a month or so ago and I've avoided broaching the subject of his guitar, figuring if he wanted it back he'd have to demand it from me explicitly. Yesterday he did just that so I begged a day's time to bid my farewells and recorded a couple songs today: Genetics and Strings. Hopefully at least one of them will offend someone. If not, I'm going to have to start looking for more radical viewpoints to write from. Like a vegan's or crack addict's...or a vegan crack addict's.

I also wrote another song today, about dieting. It's in first person from the point of view of a girl whose boyfriend is forcing her to lose weight by giving up sweets. With my affection for sugar, I have to classify that in the horror genre, PG-13 at the least.

The Trilene Knot...


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

...is the knot of the day. After this one there are only two left to learn before this trial is over. Medieval people had it right: there should be a healthy variety of torture devices at one's disposal. I'm psyched for my future suffering already, just let this one be over.

Revenge a la Confucius

My student got me on the topic of revenge today. It seems to be a popular one with Chinese people. My friend Pei in Shanghai was always an advocate and an active practicioner and I never succeeded in persuading her that revenge was silly. But it did get me noticing myself committing petty acts of revenge on a daily basis, which is wonderfully hypocritical.

We were talking about "an eye for an eye" and blind people and throwing loaves of bread at people, when my student summoned Confucius to his aid. He translated an efficient 8-character Chinese quote for me as follows: "let's say someone does something bad to you and you give them your smile. Then what will you give a person who does something good to you?" Seeing my bemused expression, he explained that the point was that you'd then have to give that good-doer something even better than a smile (though neither of us could think of any examples). With the giving season over, neither of us wanted to give a damn thing even hypothetically so we nearly agreed.

However, I still don't really understand the reasoning. It doesn't sound like normal logic, nor does it have the bitter taste of female logic (which isn't exclusively the domain of females so don't get your thong in a twist). But we breezed quickly past the (un)understanding part and into practice and it turned out my student is just biding his time until he's rich and powerful, at which point he'll dole out punishments to all those who've wronged him. I remained on my tippy-toes for the rest of the class as he'd previously demonstrated a samurai sword of his to me and I wasn't too keen on finding out how keen he was to test the keenness of the blade. Ah Commander Keen...if only my parents let me play it in peace, maybe I'd be dumber but with better teeth.

Arbor Knot:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

I feel like I'm cheating every time I learn a knot whose components are knots I already know. Somebody punish me please.

Sleepy

I've never been so low on sleep and simultaneously so high on chunky peanut butter. I can't wholeheartedly recommend the combination but licking the second off my fingers is currently the only thing keeping me from succumbing to the first.

Tomorrow is another work day, though only one class remains after the flurry of cancellations on account of proximity to New Year's and lack of dedication to paying me money.

Pushups were the biggest challenge today. I've switched to a cartooning book for drawing material so that's gotten slightly more tolerable, but it hasn't made pushups any easier, paradoxically. And gravity is severely limiting my speed in completing them.

I'm reading Le Petit Nicolas in French and it's pretty funny. I don't know if it's translated into English but I'd recommend it to people who like children's books like Pippi Longstocking or Karlson on the Roof.

The Nail / Spoon Knot


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

So called because you use a nail as a guide for the rope, or in my case a spoon.

Me: Let me tell you a joke
My newest and cutest student: Which one?

Happy New Year's

Oof, almost forgot to blog before sleeping, it's almost 5AM here. Just got back from SanLiTun, the small bar and club street behind SanLiTun Village near the SOHO. Like usual, the baijiu hit the spot, but lately I've got my tolerance pegged down so I get myself to that perfect high and then drink only very cautiously.

The girls today were very very picky. I'd come across groups of girls, clearly bored, but that would still refuse to dance when asked. Of course a few said yes but today was not a day for the Guiness Book. There was a nice moment though which I haven't experienced before. Ever. A girl came up to me, a blonde foreign girl, and explained to me profusely how beautiful she found me. I was drunk enough not to blush or even feel awkward but I definitely felt good. I think I might have even thanked her as I nodded my head in agreement. Although I'm beginning to wonder how loud it was in that bar and what she really said. She was probably talking about the weather and I was hearing what my super-ego (a giant ego, not to be confused with the superego) wanted to hear.

Wrote a little New Year's song today but it won't be airing for a few days probably. Maybe I'll release it as B-side to the Christmas song. True to my resolutions this song is reasonably happy.

The Uni Knot:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Blah.

Gene: cool, mom still loves u
Mark: haha, new 30 day trial?
Gene: u r a shaman!

Happy New Year's Eve's Eve

Don't tell her parents but I saw Yuan Yuan today. We synced up our trips to the local supermarket, though I gave her a head start of course.

New Year's Eve starts in about 15 minutes here. I guess it's resolutions time:

1. Eat less sweets. Yasha the dentist is going to retire early if I continue my current habits.
2. Practice singing more. I've only scared half the people in my building so far with rock screams in the elevator (an effective 0.5 second elevator pitch by the way), so it's time to initiate the rest. If that elevator doesn't reek of urine by next year then I'll have failed.
3. Be more tolerant. I think I'm becoming more and more cranky by the day, it's a little scary. I'd attribute it to Pissy Male Syndrome but it seems a little too chronic. If I live to be old, I'm going to be the crotch in crotchety...whatever that means.
4. Lucid dream more than this year. Shouldn't be too hard as I've had 0.0 lucid dreams in the last 364 days. Maybe I can make the job a little harder for myself tonight. Reality check!...damn, that would have been a nice New Year's present.
5. Learn to draw better. I've been avoiding improving this skill my whole life, not including the last 30 days, but the more it irritates me to practice it the more it seems like a worthwhile skill to have.
6. Get better at guitar accompaniment. I haven't actually practiced guitar in over a year. Time to learn a 2nd strumming pattern.
7. Learn my own songs.
8. Say yes more. I've been becoming more of a no person by the minute since 1986.
9. Write more happy songs. My lyrics are currently set to cynical by default.
10. Exercise more. Run in the spring. I'm going to wish I didn't write this. I wish I didn't write that. Oof, that was quick.
11. Read more books, watch less shows. It'd be nice if they had some books in English in Chinese libraries, currently I can only read on my computer.
12. Do a bit of programming. Here's to setting the bar high.
13. Run more experiments on people.
14. Run more experiments on myself.
15. Finish my novel.
16. Visit America. I hear it's pretty different from China.
17. Lie more. I've been pissing people off a bit too much with the truth.
18. Blog more. This way I don't have to do all the lying to people's faces. Lower that psychological barrier a bit.
...I'm sure more'll come up during the next few days.

Steve Pavlina would roll over in his grave if he could see my list...and if he were dead...or just doing a test trial burial. None of the resolutions are specific in terms of time or quantity or anything. But my balls just aren't big enough for a 365 day trial. I'll think of these as guidelines for choosing my 30-day trials during the year.

The Surgeon Knot/Join:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

The crazy thing is, being able to tie this knot is the only requirement for legally practicing surgery in 47 of the 48 states in the contiguous United States.

Uh Oh

Things are moving fast around here. Yuan Yuan's parents are no longer arriving sometime soon. They're arriving now. Tomorrow. Yuan Yuan has gone totally berserk, which is way more tiring to endure than push-ups. Hopefully this is just pre-game jitters and not an indication of what the next month'll be like. Otherwise I might have to kill both her and her family and I really don't want to get back into that stuff. I'm so glad I wasn't born into a traditional Chinese family. I'd be so happily married right now that I wouldn't even realize how unhappy I was. Hmm...something about the grammar in that last sentence feels fishy.

I've given up drawing stuff in my room and downloaded a book on cartooning. Did the first lesson today. So far my cartoons all turn out looking like deflated beach balls with limbs and organs sticking out of them. Hope there's a demand for that in the world.

The knot of the day...and they're getting scarce on animatedknots.com...is the Prusik Knot:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Easy, simple and trivial (to be read with a strong Russian accent).

The Parents Are Coming!

Looks like an involuntary 30 day trial is coming up on the radar. Yuan Yuan's mom and (Yuan Yuan's) stepdad have indicated that they might be up for a short one-month visit to Beijing.

So far Yuan Yuan's parents have been on a need-to-know basis regarding our relationship...or more like we-need-them-not-to-know. Yuan Yuan fessed up to having a foreign boyfriend a while ago, though only to her mom, and only to a certain degree. As far as her mom knows, we're not living together, not doing anything that involves taking off our goose-feather jackets, hockey masks and strait-pants, and still we're being disapproved of, though mostly passively. As a relationship without a "result" (marriage, settling down in China and full-body deforeignation surgery), it's a waste of time. So says the Chinese village.

Yuan Yuan's stepdad is completely ignorant (of the relationship...though I hear the word applies pretty well in general as well), and Yuan Yuan plans to keep it that way. This means that I'm going to have a lot of one-on-one time with myself next month. Not to worry, I have my 30 day trials to keep me company. Yuan Yuan's worried though, specifically that if her stepdad finds out, she'll be sent back to the village to spend the rest of her life with 56K internet and a severe lack of sexy foreigners. I might have to practice my acting. If I can just channel Bill Murray from What About Bob?, we'll be rid of all her relatives in no time.

Tomorrow, my old bandmate Mr. Fantastechnique Butneverlearnsasongallthewaythrough is coming over. Usually I ignore his messages, phone calls, emails and tear-stained handwritten letters because he always has something "fun" for me to do, but I couldn't resist replying the other day when he commented on one of my song videos I posted on TuDou. Now I'm paying the price.

The knot of the day is the Dropper Loop:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

It's pretty sexy. And easy. Kind of like some girls I've met here.

Heated Toilet Paper

Having studied quite a few languages, I figured it was time to learn to study them the right way. I researched a bit about effective methods and came across an interesting idea, that forgetting is an important part of the learning process, as relearning is a much more powerful process than learning for the first time. The guy who wrote the article was also studying French incidentally, and he recommended that you review your flashcards with an exponential backoff. So you learn some new words, then review two days later, again four days later, again eight days later, ____ sixteen ____ , etc. If you can fill in the blanks, you deserve to know this secret technique.

Since they turned the heat on a month or so ago, I've been spoiling myself silly: shivering only on account of nostalgia from rereading my old blog entries, doing pushups because of 30 day trial madness and not because I need blood in my fingers to blog, shaving and walking leisurely back to my room after taking a shower instead of taking a Chinese death taxi. The latest in this long line of comforts is heated toilet paper. We have these metal not-quite-radiators around the apartment--in the bedroom, in the kitchen and in the bathroom--that are never hot enough to burn you but are usually quite warm. Since the one in the bathroom is just opposite the toilet, I've taken to putting the toilet paper there when I evacuate the undigested sugar from my system, and then using it when it's nice and warm. Honestly, it's highly overrated; my butt is nowhere near sensitive enough to tell the difference. But just the idea of pampering myself makes me feel as jolly as a carton of eggnog.

Today's day 20. Having survived yesterday, I think I can handle pretty much anything. Overconfidence has inspired a wave of planning for the next 30 day supertrial. The candidates so far are: getting better at singing, finishing the novel, playing guitar more productively, being nice to Yuan Yuan, being mean to Yuan Yuan, and weaning myself off heated toilet paper.

It'll also be a chance to test if some new habits were formed. It's never happened in the past but I'm unfailingly optimistic. Pushups will probably go out the window. Drawing might stick around, it's a nice challenge. Knots are definitely out. Blogging will probably stay; I need my 15 minutes of narcissism a day. And I'm enjoying studying French so I'm pretty sure that'll keep happening. All points to my days getting busier and busier but one of my students has been teaching me Time Management so I'll be ready when it comes, unless the Time Management arsenal has the Uberman schedule as a prerequisite.

The knot of the day is the Monkey Braid / Chain Sinnet:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

This is a good one for storing rope, to keep it from getting tangled. And it's way easier than any pie. I'd like to meet the guy who started the whole "easy as pie" thing and let him have a go with my rice-cooker.

Drunk

It's hard to fucus when you're drunk but I'm the most dedicated 30-day-trialer in the world. And today was a pretty good challenge. Let's see. I had class far away at 11, so I had to leave the house at ten. Before that, I managed 120 pushups and 20 minutes of drawing. During the trip to my student's house, I studied French with my helpful Frenchpod-filled Zune. I did that throughout the day during my many travels from class to class, and even comng back from the final drunkfest at 7:20 in the morning, though I can't say I absorbed too much. In any case, I definitely got in over an hour of studying.

The knot...unfortunately I don't know the name, but it is quite similar to the Icicle Knot in terms of purpose, though it's simpler to explain. Lucy taught it to me while I was drunk in the KTV, between push-up sets (which were really frustrating because it's really hard to count to ten more than once when you're drunk), and I repeated it twice to make sure I remembered it. It basically consists of winding the rope around the pole, making sure to go over the rope as you wind, and tying two overhandish knots after that. No picture courtesy of lucyknots.com but I'll try to figure out what the knot's technical name is one of these days.

Blah blah blah, I'm really tired and it's almost 8 in the morning and I have to go to class in about 4 hours so sayonara.

Fasting

Today was a day of low motivation. I've been torturing Yuan Yuan for the last two months by forcing her to exercise a bit every day, specifically do five sets of sit-ups. She gets one day a month off, plus one sick day for when her period hits. I noticed over a year ago that she doesn't exercise at all and I kept trying to make her start an exercise routine. I also wanted her to lose some weight, which is why she's currently on the Steve Ward diet where she's to lose 10 pounds in 2 months, a reasonable pace I think. Alas, positive reinforcement suffered a major defeat in the war against laziness and gluttony. So two months ago I came up with a particularly sadistic more-evil-than-usual motivation plan.

According to this plan, she has to do five sets of sit-ups every day. If some day she doesn't do sit-ups, I fast the entire next day. It sounds a little perverted and risky but it's been working so far. Then about a week ago, she didn't exercise one day and I was all set to not eat and make her feel guilty when she recalled she had one day off every month. I was pretty happy she remembered because the thought of fasting is the hungriest thought in the universe.

Then two days ago she got her period and had pretty intense cramps so sit-ups took another break. And then yesterday she skipped again, but this time out of pure laziness and sleepiness. So today I've had nothing but water, and occasionally boiled water, which is like a placebo for real water--no matter how much you drink, you never have to go to the bathroom, provided you know it's a placebo. Yuan Yuan's been feeling pretty guilty all day and has been periodically begging me to eat something. At one point she spent twenty minutes with her ear glued to my stomach, listening to the frustrated growls of an organ used to getting candy every five minutes. I don't know if the two things are connected, but after that she professed a desire to go jumprope and shattered the current jumproping record in our house. The new record stands at 650. Finally she couldn't stand my hungry company anymore and went back to the hostel early.

It's tempting to say "that'll teach her!" but I think I'll save my energy for the pushups.

The knot of the day is The Perfection Loop:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

If you want a little loop on the end of your rope that's in line with the rest of it, this is what you need. If you don't need one of those, you might need a life.

Mnemonics

I had a dream today about a girl with an interesting superpower: she could make the people around her invisible at will. I wonder whether that or becoming invisible yourself is more financially exploitable.

The knot of the day is the Bowline on a Bight, which creates a double loop in the middle of a rope (that last part might be plagiarism but there are only so many ways to convey that meaning):


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

A.k.a. boring as a...what's a bight?

I did a lot of French flashcards today. As my brain gets more and more saturated, I need to rely more on mnemonics. Here's a random sampler. Some are based on the pronunciation, some on the spelling, some on images that point in the direction of the French word. Basic knowledge of French pronunciation and a very loose definition of "makes sense" may be assets.

(Some accents may be missing or wrong)

My earl gray too! Noooo! (malgré tout - despite everything)
"Say 'Tundra!' or you can't get up!" (s'étendre - sprawl out, lie down)
Chevy rides over someone's ankle, crushing it (la cheville - ankle)
Checkmate (l'échec - failure)
Hate test in hate class. They time you to see how fast you can hate someone so you have to hurry. (hâter - hurry)
Oh, Sara A! + something rated R (serrer - to squeeze, tighten)
Baloo (poilu - hairy)
You're in the middle of two hungry tigers and you're the meal, "meal you" (milieu - middle)
"this I want (but can't have)" (decevant - disappointing)
Mom, I brought back Rapper Tay, he's going to live with us from now on (rapporter - bring back)
Ack! Someone hang that roach right away! (accrocher - to hang)
This (insert four letter word that sounds like the French word after the é) is too narrow, eh? (étroite - narrow)
A ring on a finger is like a bag over your head (la bague - ring)
A giant flea is biting pieces of flesh off a dog. Dog gets up and says: "Will you stop that? That is SO irritating." (affligeante - annoying, irritating)
"Sorry, you have to have a menage a trois before you can have your breakfast." (le menage - household chores)
Uncle Jesus wants YOU to be a nun (l'annonce - advertisement)
"I believe this part of an ear belongs to you?" (appartenir - to belong)
Hotel sign: sorry, we have mice (un souris - mouse)
Say Kuwait three times fast while you shake your booty (secouer - shake)
Gryaznaya luzha with fishes (louche - fishy, shady)
"Holy crap you have a thick epee!" (epais - thick)

Two more songs uploaded today on YouTube and TuDou ("Money" and "Go Away").

Dumpling Solstice

Today is the Winter Solstice, and also the 30-day supertrial's halfway checkpoint. If I fail now, I can start...hmm...nevermind...Mario and Luigi's lives were so much easier.

In China, you have to eat dumplings on the day of the Winter Solstice, otherwise Chairman Santa will come and rip your dumplings off on Chinese New Year's. So we all went out today to eat 饺子. Since Yuan Yuan organized the whole thing, we ate some kind of perverted version with fake bananas and fake peaches (canned in fake cans) for filling instead of the usual fake meat. They were edible but hardly worth blogging about, unless one has a daily word quota.

During dinner, Yuan Yuan had a practical English exam. The American girl she invited was bursting at the seams with dirty jokes and sexual innuendo, some of which even my college-conditioned ears had a hard time digesting. I don't want to repeat any of them so I'll leave it up to your imagination. I will give you a hint though--two of the following five ingredients were found in one of her stories: a guitar, a prosthetic leg, someone's grandfather, a plunger, a car tire. Anyway, I was pretty happy when Yuan Yuan failed to understand anything that wasn't explicitly labeled; her four-year-old brain isn't ready for that kind of stuff yet.

I learned the Buntline Hitch today. It's about as exciting as that last sentence:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Don't pull it too hard, it's kind of hard to untie. Especially if you pulled it tight after doing 200 pushups a day for 15 days. That's 3000 pushups by the way. Even Bruce Lee couldn't do that many in 15 minutes!

Two more songs posted on YouTube and TuDou.

Routine

Today was a bit challenging. I had class from eleven in the morning to eight thirty, including commute. I managed to get one pushup set in before leaving in the morning, but at the cost of breakfast. Not that I normally eat breakfast, but if I did...hypothetical props to me.

When I got back from my last class, I went to the hostel to get my keys from the Key Master, one of Yuan Yuan's more formidable English names. Roxie is her receptionist name, and Big Bear is her name in bed. Not that I think about it, I could be calling her Ursa Major, with fewer repercussions and 差不多的 humor content.

Little did I know that I was walking right into an ambush. The Key Master was only willing to part with the keys if I could fight my way through all the obstacles, namely the five pages of English she wrote that I needed to translate into English. Regular translators have it easy, translating from one language to another with their fake poetic licenses. Us sleeping dictionaries are the real victims of linguistics. I did pushups between the pages to vent any violent urges.

Pushups are almost done now. French: 20 minutes to go. I've noticed that I can often go through a hundred or so flashcards, not know half of them the first time and know 90% by the second run-through, which is very confidence-inspiring. I'm not sure what it is that gives me the edge, my indomitable luck or the six years of French I took. I doubt it's those memory-enhancing drugs I'm taking. Either way, I'm dreading the moment of brain saturation.

Anyway, all that's really left on the menu is drawing, which I've sort of resigned myself to. It doesn't even seem to take forever anymore; it's definitely got nothing on my high-school French class which was in some kind of gravity well where time was on a permanent lunch break.

Knot of the day, sheet bend:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

The last few knots all kind of look alike. Tomorrow I'm going to try something cooler looking.

The Consequences of Knowing English

I feel like I haven't done anything productive in days, the 30 day trial aside. Yuan Yuan has her English tour guide test coming up, English being the key word, and so my days are full of palaces and halls and walls, all dressed in creative spelling in grammar. She'll read a few pages in her book and try to boil it down to a few paragraphs. Then I read those paragraphs, unscramble the grammar, which is encrypted with something that would make SHA-1 blush, and scrap all the words I think she doesn't know, replacing them with the words "has," "with," or simply deleting them. Thus something like "the hall features the unparalleled Wall Of Communist Righteousness, which consists of several frames in which Chairman Mao disembowels the Great Dragon with his purple scepter," becomes "the hall has the Wall of Communist Righteousness which has some photos of Chairman Mao killing a dragon." Then Yuan Yuan files away the finished version to its rightful spot on the floor and proceeds to put the next item on her tour guide menu through a similar process. Nothing is ever reread, which baffles me slightly as it doesn't follow any test-taking strategy I've encountered in the Gamma Quadrant.

In any case, I spend my day between studying French--which I'm doing a few hours per day the last few days--and translating materials from Yuan Yuan's dialect of English to my own. It's a rough life. No one ever tells you when you're single: "dude, forget it, that girl's going to make you learn all about Beijing's tourist spots." But no worries, the test is just 10 days away.

Today's knot, the square knot:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Just one step different from the granny knot, the one most people use to tie their shoelaces. Although I guess some people use the square knot without realizing it.

Yuan Yuan's English pronunciation of the day:
frodo (feudal) society

Okay, time to go draw...

They should have progress bars available as titles

Still on track as of yesterday. The real test will be Saturday and Sunday when I have class most of the day and am forced to do pushups at my student's houses to avoid killing myself in the evening. It's hard to fit pushup sets into my schedule as my mom has inculcated all these health-nut rules into my head: don't exercise for an hour after you eat, don't watch TV while you sleep, pull down your pants before you sit down on the toilet, etc. And I'm not so sure what constitutes a meal. Does a bag full of candy count? Or is that not digested, just sweated out...that must how the Blue Man Group preps for their shows.

I have noticed a few benefits already of this new lifestyle. I can wear far less clothes in the room because the pushups keep me warm for long after each set. If I space them out just right, I can probably heat the room more effectively than the fake Chinese heater with its fake heat.

Yesterday's knot, the bowline:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Not too difficult for magic hands.

Today's, the slip knot:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Even easier than yesterday's. But I browsed pictures of the more advanced knots and I'm feeling in equal parts confident and screwed. Does beginner's luck restart for each new knot?

French is going smoothly. It's also producing lots of feelings I haven't had in a while. During today's hour, I looked over about a million vocabulary words and realized that I know none of them, which made me feel very Bill-and-Ted-esque. Then I felt excited, as in: "I'm going to know all these words...some day!" Then I felt motivated to study. Then I felt nerdy for feeling motivated to study. Then I felt excited about feeling nerdy as there's very little opportunity to be nerdy in China; people here prefer eating, and when they're not doing that--drinking. Then I felt nostalgic for MIT, where nerdism is both church and state. Then I felt guilty for living in the past. Then I ate some candy and felt the mini-heartattacks coursing through my teeth. Then I had to go to class.

Oh yea, drawing. Went OK yesterday, time passed a bit faster than the day before, but the results are still very disappointing. It's hard for me to draw what I see instead of what I know. I see a bowl, I know it's made of circles and I have to struggle to draw the squished ellipses instead. Hmm, maybe I should just draw all round objects from head on. "Excuse me sir, can you sit with the top of your head facing me?"

Superyesterday

1 superday down, 29 to go. Yesterday I had to hustle a bit since I only committed to the supertrial in the late afternoon and still had 160 pushups to go at 10:30PM. But it all happened, even the drawing, which was as torturous as I'd expected. It was truly a moment of wisdom when I chose 20 minutes over half an hour. I might still be in a coma if I'd chosen the second.

Yesterday's knot was the figure 8:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

It's pretty easy to do, unless you're attempting to replicate it from a set of written directions and a single poorly cropped picture, which half the how-to's on the internet seem to think is enough. The people who wrote them must know how to tie their own shoelaces or something. Luckily for those of us whose mommies still fly in red-eye to tie ours in the morning, I found animatedknots.com which shows pictures for all the steps.

The French studying went pretty smoothly. Months ago I downloaded every pirated book on French grammar and vocabulary on this side of the galaxy and yesterday I blazed at 5mph through one of them. The memorization part of my brain is having trouble getting off the couch after its nearly year long respite, but that's what 30 day trials are for, getting your potatoes off the couch and onto the treadmill.

Which leaves...the blog. No big problems there, except that getting on Blogger is a nightmare with the Great Firewall of China. My browser needs some bandaids and a shower.

Yuan Yuan learns English, phrase(s) of the day:
"Oh no! We almost finished that toothbrush." Translation: we're almost out of toothbrushes.

Yuan Yuan's creative spelling of the day:
"Dystrus." If you can guess what the intended word is, you deserve the Nobel Luck Prize.

Answer: "dynasty." When Yuan Yuan defied the odds and pronounced it exactly right, I was more proud of her than shocked at her epic violation of the rules of spelling.