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.

Who wears the glasses in this relationship?

Today, after a shower, I went back to the room to put on my pants, a little ritual I have. Yuan Yuan, who can't just sit around when I'm naked, jumped up from wherever she was on the planet at that time and did a little dance around me, or rather between me and the pants. Being a man, and therefore stronger and faster and smarter, I managed to get to my pants and begin putting them on before she could figure out right from left, which she has a history of mistaking for each other (as well as for up and down, depending on the pitch and roll of the bed-shaped centrifuge we keep next to the bedside drawer and call a "bed"), at which time she seized my left--a.k.a. her right--leg and danced with me around the room while I tried in vain to put my right leg and then whichever leg turned out to be the other leg into the pants, which was even harder than usual.

Of course when I finally succeeded, Yuan Yuan was sprawled on the floor (did I mention I was stronger?), screaming "give me back my glasses! They're in your pants!" (Did I mention I was smarter?), after which I felt something in my pants above me knee, and it was glasses (Thank goodness. I'm proud to say I haven't crapped my pants in years. That means at least 2).

Sadly, the comedy ended there and the soap opera began. I refused to take my pants off to get her glasses ("Whose fault is it my leg is wearing your glasses!") and Yuan Yuan refused to reach her hand in from the bottom and fish them out ("Take off your pants like a real man!"). The night ended in the worst possible way - everyone apologizing, including Mario, for not taking off his pants to check for spare pairs of glasses. 

Speaking of wonderful people acting stubborn and prideful, a former student once told me that if someone spits in your face, you shouldn't give them the satisfaction of seeing you wiping off their spittle. You should just pretend like they're not important enough for you to even acknowledge that they spit in your face.

 I wonder how many loogies his face is wearing right now.

Dream joke

Last night in a dream, Freya sent me a joke by email. It went something like this:

A guy has a parrot, an exceedingly rude, obnoxious, foul-mouthed parrot, probably confiscated by PETA from the last peg-leg pirate. The parrot is completely insufferable, the worst thing being that it won't shut up for a second, it spews a steady stream of obscenities like the proverbial faucet. The guy tries everything to make it behave: begging, pleading, threats, spanking, ignoring, fingers in the ears + "La la la, I'm not listening!", hiring a parrot whisperer, he even does a 30-day trial of not cursing himself, to set a good example. Nothing works.

Finally, out of options, short of ripping the parrot's face off, he takes the parrot by the scroat and throws it in the freezer. The stream of verbal abuse is muffled and then a minute later unexpectedly dies out completely. The guy is curious, and a bit worried, so he opens the freezer door. The parrot comes out and apologizes eloquently and profusely, promises it'll never take that tone of voice again and will be the most well-behaved pirate parrot the world has ever seen. The guy is completely mystified. As he picks his jaw up from the floor, then the parrot says, "Just one question. What did the chicken do!?"

And that is the first joke I've ever been told in a dream. Thanks Freya!

I dream of Dima

I read my dream diary today. I wrote in it on and off for around 6 months, mostly off judging by the amount of dreams recorded, and it is a pile of diamonds in the rough, though quite soft to sleep on. It reads like a collection of sci-fi microstories. Some of the stuff doesn't ring any bells, some sounds awesome and vague memories bubble to the surface, some was written with the wrong side of the pen and requires a seeing paw dog to read, and the rest are written in Dima's* handwriting and will probably never be deciphered. Still, you've got to keep those scientists busy or they get restless, and if there's anything I've learned from sci-fi movies, it's that scientists with free time inevitably end up responsible for a nuclear/chemical/fashion apocalypse.

Favorite quote out of the successfully (and possibly correctly) unscrambled notes:

"Took time slices of two apples to make sure one was traveling."

If only I'd taken a time slice of that dream and stuck it between the pages of the dream diary.

*One of my early childhood traumas. Grandma Mila was teaching me math. I had the makings of a great mathematician, evident in the fact that I wrote all over the page in anywhere but between the lines and all in some futuristic alphabet. Grandma Mila patiently tried to show me the light:

"You write like Dima and Dima writes like an idiot!"

Since then, as much as we love Dima, we can't help but abuse him verbally at each and every opportunity:

"That's not how you cut watermelon! You're holding the knife like Dima!"
"How'd you like my poem?" "You sure Dima didn't write it?"
"Look, everyone's a Dima when they first start, but don't worry, you'll get better."

He'll understand, once it goes viral and he gets his cut of the profits.