Carried Away

I've discovered a nasty side-effect of checking my mail obsessively: it's now nearly impossible for me to go to any other website online. Whenever I click in the URL textfield, my fingers immediately start typing "gmail.com" or "mail.google.com" while my brain hurriedly severs the thread connecting my consciousness to the originally intended URL. I am in dire need of changing my brain's cache and garbage disposal settings. I wonder if porn addicts have this problem. Maybe eventually they have trouble peeing when they go to the bathroom...because of other inclinations. (Certain valves in the male reproductive system prevent simultaneity or even close temporal proximity of certain actions. Michelle, if you're reading this, unread it and reread it in a few years).

The day before yesterday, I was swapping jokes with one of my students. He didn't seem to find any of the jokes I told him funny, Russian ones or American ones. I think my score for making him laugh was like 2/10. I almost resorted to tickling. I also told him the two Chinese jokes that I know, or rather the first two words of each, which was enough to get him giggling. He said he liked them but that he'd heard them before. Unfortunately they're PG-84 so you'll have to find them elsewhere. I'll give you a hint: one's about a naked man, a girl and a bear in a forest, the other about a gender-imbalanced shipwreck on a deserted island.

Anyway, after my colossal failure, the kid told me a few Chinese jokes he found funny. I didn't really get most of them, but here's one I kinda liked:

There's a horrible car accident in some village. 10 government officials were in one of the cars so reporters flock to the scene. When the first reporter arrives in town, she sees a row of 11 graves and a farmhand patting down the earth on the last one.
"Are these the people that died in the accident?" the reporter asks.
"Yep, 10 government officials and one local."
"All 10 died!?"
"Well...some of them were screaming that they weren't dead when I was burying them, but you know those corrupt government officials, they lie about everything."

Sadism is kind of a trend in Chinese jokes now that I think about it...

I learned a bunch of knots today and then destroyed a rice cooker without the aid of any of them. First the knots:

The Double Fisherman's Bend:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

No fish are required to do this one. It's also pretty easy, like most things once you know how to do them (the lotus position being a notable counterexample). The two ingredient knots are Double Overhand Stopper knots, so I killed two fish with two ropes. Birds are scarce what with all the pollution.

The Turk's Head:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

This one's a decorative knot, basically just a braid that wraps around in a circle. It looks cooler if you keep adding layers. Fortunately I'm using shoelaces, whose length is more finite that most things', otherwise I'd probably be sitting in the middle of a giant one of these right now, braiding furiously like a lonely grandma.

After a short foray into decorative knots, I got distracted by shibari, the Japanese art of rope bondage. Needless to say my neighbor's Internet connection slowed to a crawl as creepy Japanese men tiled my screen and masterfully bound half the women in Japan. In need of lighter fare, I turned to The Knotty Boys, who make tying your loved ones up as PG-13 as something like that can get. That is they make jokes while they tie girls up, to distract you from what's probably coming after they roll the credits. From them, I learned the Sailor's Knot, otherwise known as the Anchor Bend, which is otherwise known as the Carrick Bend (if confused, use the transitive property):


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

This simple knot is quite sexy even without a context. It's also apparently quite "reliable," as animatedknots.com claims. I'm not sure what we're relying on it to do other than not get untied, but with the shortage of reliability in this world, I'll take what I can get. In other words, everything in my room is now knotted to something else with this knot.

I think I might have picked up one or seven more on the way, but I've forgotten their names and there's a distinct lack of knot recognition software on the latest version of the Internet. Talk about an unexplored niche for bored computer science nerds.

So about the rice cooker. In case you're interested in breaking yours, here's the procedure:

1. Find a recipe for rice cooker banana bread.
2. Make the banana bread dough.
3. Pour the dough into the rice cooker pot.
4. Turn on the rice cooker.
5. When the button refuses to stay down, on account of rice cookers being smarter than their operators, tape it down with duct tape.
6. When smoke starts pouring out of the top, make sure you're on an errand somewhere. Don't worry, the rice cooker will turn off when it breaks.
7. Congratulations! Now get out that warranty, receipt, and go get yourself a replacement.

Yuan Yuan's English of the day (completely unrelated to what you're thinking):

"You want to be punishment?"

Tying People Up

I was browsing pictures of knots this morning, trying to find a tasty candidate for day 6, and ended up learning 3 different knots upon seeing their pictures and descriptions. Now I kind of understand what shopaholics feel when they browse the Macy's catalog.

First, we have the eighth wonder of the world: the Fieggen Shoelace Knot. It reminds me of the Strassen algorithm that involves only 7 multiplications instead of 8 when multiplying matrices, as both save work in procedures that already seem to be stretching the limits of simplicity and efficiency. The task that the Fieggen Shoelace Knot completes in a record low number of steps is tying bunny ears on your shoelaces.


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

The surprises don't end here. When I showed the knot to Yuan Yuan and asked if she usually did the bunny ears or the loop-the-loop, she said she did neither. She then showed me her way, which was some kind of twisted hybrid with a splash of blasphemy. The first step was the same as in the granny knot, but then she tied two successive slip knots instead of the double slip knot that is the bunny ears. The result looks like the bunny ears but has an extra level of depth. It's a bit bizarre, kind of like if one were to successfully eat using one chopstick at a time. Fearing for her life in case she were ever caught committing such atrocities in the US, I taught her Fieggen's chef d'oeuvre.

The second knot was the Alpine Butterfly:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

It looks much better with the round rope they use than with the shoelaces I've been using, but even my sloppy version it elicited awe from the audience...

Mark: check this knot out, doesn't it look awesome? (holds out halfway decent attempt at the knot, eyes moistened with vulnerability and the need to be appreciated.)
Yuan Yuan (casually): not really.
Mark: aha! I knew you'd be impressed!

Actually, Yuan Yuan is pretty easily amused and/or impressed, which basically means this knot is garbage. Or maybe she's just feeling insecure about her stacked slip knot's status of coolarity.

The third was the Constrictor Knot:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

This might be my favorite so far, from an aesthetic standpoint. It looks nice and it's delightfully constricting, which my finger would attest to if it knew sign language.

I'm already beginning to see a bright future ahead of me. Soon I'll be able to tie people up, tie them to poles, beds, cars, other people, hang them from places with flair and laugh snootily at people on the street when their groceries come flying out past granny's stacked half-hitches. Man...in 30 days I'm going to get the shit kicked out of me.

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.

30 Day Supertrial

This morning I revisited my good friend Steve Pavlina who, though he's never met me, is a frequent participant in my life. At his hands I've tried many things I wouldn't have had the idea or motivation to try on my own. There have been many interesting experiments over the years: polyphasic sleep (the Uberman schedule), lucid dreaming, Site-Build-It!, blogging, staying unemployed, and probably a few others, but my favorite weapon of the arsenal of life-changers he's handed out has always been the 30 day trial. If you want the full treatment, read it on his website, but the basic idea is that changing any non-trivial aspect of your life is freaking hard. A 30 day trial lets you try out a new thing without committing to it as a lifelong change. It's a magical operator on life changes:

Hard Life Change X 30 day trial = Doable Experiment

Example: quitting smoking is hard. Quitting smoking for 30 days is doable. Eating healthy is hard. Eating healthy for 30 days is doable. Not going to the bathroom is hard. Not going to the bathroom...well, it almost always works.

Since I first happened on Steve's blog, I've done many 30 day trials. I've given up sugar, meditated daily, drank water, gone vegan, worked out, studied Chinese, blogged, and wrote jokes. I've even participated in a family 30 day trial, where we refused to get annoyed at each other for 30 days.

Then I took a break from Steve Pavlina for a while. His articles, although wonderful to a degree, make me feel wimpy. Plus, the last time I visited his blog he was blogging about being married and polyamorous (a friend of a friend of "promiscuous"), which seemed like a slight departure from his usual inspirational fare.

Anyway, I checked his blog this morning and discovered he'd posted another entry regarding 30 day trials. This time he wasn't addressing the average Joe, but the supermen among us, the above average Marks for instance. The upgraded 30 day trial was not particularly creatively but quite accurately called "30 day supertrial." Basically, you do several 30 day trials at once.

So here we go, the daily must-do's for the next 30 days:

1. do 200 pushups
2. study French for an hour
3. draw for 20 minutes (my patience for drawing is paper thin)
4. learn how to tie a new knot a day. This one's courtesy of Lucy, who apparently has people running up to her daily asking her to tie non-slipping knots on their poles...but not in the dirty way, whatever that would be.
5. write a blog entry (100 word minimum)

Doesn't sound too bad when you look at it in crisp Times New Roman font. I wouldn't even call it a supertrial, maybe a 30 day trial with extra cheese, but watch this:

1. Do 200 pushups EVERY SINGLE DAY
2. Study French for an hour EVERY SINGLE DAY
3. Draw for 20 minutes (my patience for drawing is paper thin) EVERY SINGLE DAY
4. Learn how to tie a new knot a day...EVERY SINGLE DAY. This one's courtesy of Lucy, who apparently has people running up to her every day asking her to tie non-slipping knots on their poles...but not in the dirty way, whatever that would be.
5. Write a blog entry (100 word minimum) EVERY SINGLE DAY

Capitalizing the first letter of the first word in each task description makes it so much more potent, eh? Oh and I suppose the EVERY SINGLE DAY adds that last grain of rice to the straw stack on the camel's back.