The Mercurial Cleaning Lady

The good thing about living with Yuan Yuan is if I ask her to put something somewhere, I don't need to worry about forgetting where I told her to put it; I can always find it later on the floor. Having first struggled against but then embraced this reality, I amuse myself with variations on the subject, at her expense if I can manage it:

"Can you put this in the trash can? Sorry, I mean next to the trash can."
"Where do you want this on the floor?"
"Take your shoes off when you walk around on our dinner table!"
"Oh my God! Is that a piece of empty floor I see peeking out? Quick! Cover it with this used tissue!"
"Where's my cellphone? I can't find it on the floor and I know I told you to put it on my desk."
"In case you're wondering later what your bra smells like, it's my left foot."

And then this morning I woke up without the feeling of dread someone with a healthy instinct of self-preservation would have produced as surely as a teenager produces erections. My instinct of self-preservation had taken private lessons with Bob Dole without me knowing and continued to sleep, limp and carefree, as I somnombulated through the waking hours. And then I tried to find the half empty bag of milk I put on the table yesterday to make some coffee and to my astonishment it wasn't on the floor. And neither was anything else. Yuan Yuan had cleaned the room without so much as asking me more than 600 times whether I'd like to help her. All I ask is a little consistency...

Going to Thailand to die

Mark gets out of bed, he trips over a strategically places shoe, he skids on a strategically placed bra, he spills into a split across two piles of strategically placed socks, he does an elbow freeze on a strategically placed thermos bottle, a head spin on a strategically placed kettle, a windmill around a strategically placed Macbook Pro and lands gracefully on a strategically placed chair. Crisis averted. Introducing the master of strategy...Yuan Yuan! And that is how you learn to be grateful for surviving each and every day, even if it's not always in one piece.


We're planning a 7-10 day trip to Thailand for mid-November, and since my parents aren't invited, I've started doing some research on where to go once we get to one of Thailand's airports (I've just learned that there is more than one and that Thailand and Bangkok are two slightly different things). Mostly "research" consists of looking at pretty pictures made in Photoshop of Koh This Beach and Phi That Resort (Koh = Phi = Photoshop in Thai), and saying "now if I only had a printer, I could print this picture out and just find it when I get there." But since I don't have a printer, I end up also researching How in addition to Where.

Some of the "directions" are completely useless. But some I can tell at first glance are going to be invaluable. Here's a diamond in the rough:

"[Going to Railay and Tonsai] From Ao Nang this is a very simple process. You talk to a boatman, identified by their numbered and coloured shirts..."

A most promising beginning that doesn't let you down:

"... who will tell you to buy a ticket from one of two booths on Ao Nang beach at 80B per person. When there are 8 people wishing to go you will be escorted to a longtail boat and captained around the dramatic limestone karst headland. You will arrive 15 minutes later, at Railay or Tonsai. If you are lucky, at high tide the boat arrives right on the beach, but if the tide is out then you will have to wade to the beach from 50 metres out. You will get at least your feet and calves, and possibly your bottom, wet."

Once you get past the style, you can see it for the information-rich nugget this is. Here's what I learned:

1. I'm going to have to review grade-school math and/or take an accountant with me.
2. I'm never getting to Ao Nang in a million years.
3. If I'm lucky and I do get to Ao Nang, my bottom will be wet when the tide brings my decomposing corpse to shore a few days and 15 minutes later.

Can't wait!

Beard optimization

I was trying to give Yuan Yuan's face carpet burn with my (2nd day) 5 o'clock shadow today but she just giggled like the Pillsbury doughboy. I told her how when I was little my dad used to hug me and rub his neatly trimmed beard on my face and how it would always take me days to regrow my face afterwards and how I dreamed about having a coarse bristly beard like that when I got older so I could ambush strangers in the street and rub their faces raw with my thorny beard but how so far I hadn't gotten very far with this dream at all and how she'd probably have better luck rubbing her barely hairful Asian legs on people's faces. Then I realized that the tiny grain of truth in my story was nearly invisible behind the cotton candy sphere of imagination that I was weaving around it. Then I started trying really hard to believe in the imagined version, so that next time I could remember it as "the real story." I can't believe we use people's testimony as evidence. You might as well ask a complete stranger to imagine what might have happened.

"Do you solemnly swear to imagine the whole truth and nothing but the truth?"
"Absolutely not."
"Damn. Anyway, be advised that anything you imagine can and will be used against the defendant."


Yuan Yuan is the queen of disproportionate responses:

(walking outside)
YY suddenly jumps and shrieks like a squirrel being stretched in the 5th dimension. I frantically whip around and check her fingernails for any needles that may have worked their way under them by accident.
Me: what wrong??
YY: I just remembered! WE'RE OUT OF PICKLES!


Me: that word I taught you earlier, it was wrong. It means bian lun, not zheng lun.
YY: k, write down bian for me.
Me: how bout I write the first stroke (of the character) and you write the rest. (the first stroke is a dot)
YY: ok, but if you put the dot in the wrong place, I'll kill you.
Me: how can the first stroke be in the wrong place?
YY: shake on it?


YY: my mom is coming to Beijing to work.
Me: hmm?
YY: we have to break up. Or one of us has to die.


And the most ridiculous to date...
Me: f u!
YY: f u!
Me: (cries)

(don't forget to adjust for my creative memory)

Today is at least every day

I'm once again stuck looking for something entertaining and not too trashy to read. I probably have twenty different lists lying around in far corners of my computer and the Internet, but if I get all into the list-hunt, by the time I find one I'll forget why I was looking for it in the first place. It's almost a Catch-22.

I've noticed that when I meet some new Chinese person, there's an adjustment period where they have some trouble believing that humor can come out of a foreigner, and in their native language. I went to the dentist today and judging by the delays from quip to laugh, I might have been talking to Alpha Centauri. On Skype. Shudder.

Dentist: so feels ok? Are there any other problems?
Me: the door to my bedroom is really creaky. Also I think I'm addicted to the sound, I can sit there and open and close it for hours. I think my neighbor is starting to get pissed off. That's it I guess.
Dentist: ...(emits a nervous and somewhat robotic giggle and changes the subject)...so make sure not to eat really hard things. And if it continues to be uncomfortable, we'll have to put a crown on it. Do you understand what I'm saying?
Me: no problem, as long as I can still eat tofu. ("Eat tofu" = sexually harass people, in Chinese).
Dentist: ...ha...ha? Haha!

Ridiculous phrase of the day: "at least..."

You wouldn't think to think it ridiculous, mostly cause you hardly ever think to rethink the phrases you use on a daily basis. But Yuan Yuan was telling me some story about the neighbors today, and how they broke up but that they were together for at least a year, and I eventually had to explain that I wasn't crying about the onions, but about how ridiculous "at least a year" sounded. At least a year. At least a year. At least a year. Sounding ridiculous yet? How about now, when you think about the fact that the probabilty of it being exactly a year is for all intents and purposes (another phrase I nominate for extermination) zero. It's misleading! Every time I hear that phrase now, I get this incredible thirst to hear that it's exactly equal to that lower bound. But then I despair; it's much like hoping today's September 25th every day.

Expiration

I just realized I forgot to blog yesterday, for the hundredth and nth time in a row. On the one hand, that's a sweet 100 day No Blogging Trial in the bank, a story I can't wait to tell to my grandchildren (who will visit me from a parallel universe. The current plan is to not have any children, planned or unplanned). "One time I held it in for 100 days...100 DAYS! And you, your bladder exploded after a mere 10 hours!" On the other hand, a hundred opportunities for cheerful self-appreciation have been lost irrevocably. Every cloud has a cloud.

I got some dirt-cheap peanut butter today. I checked just in case and it wasn't dirt, though Mario would say it's as crunchy as dirt is. Apparently, Chinese people, with their uncanny intuition for bargaining and their boundless talent for ripping you off, don't know that peanut butter is like a visa: when it expires, you just slap a new label on it and it's good for another six months. And as this peanut butter probably came from overseas, it was probably made in the 1950s anyway and only made it here when they ran out of trees to make labels.

Anyway, it was delicious and I didn't vomit up much blood at all afterwards. I used the rest of the jar to rub on the sores that sprouted all over my body. Talk about multipurpose. And all for 3RMB a jar! 300RMB well spent.

I'm kind of a fanatic missionary when it comes to certain literature, movies and music. I've channeled so much various psychology into convincing people to read The Three Musketeers that it kind of amazes me when I see other books on shelves of bookstores. Maybe it's all the reverse psychology I've put into the task that's been canceling it out. Damn it! Now I understand why I haven't convinced a single person yet. I've failed miserably with my sister, my mom absolutely refused to read it again after the 63 time we read it aloud together and if my girlfriend were on a diet of books, she'd be long past rotting corpse. You'd need carbon dating to identify her period.

Currently she's nibbling at Twenty Years Past, but there's only a ten year warranty on the Kindle so she was doomed from the start. Thinking the fault may lie with the Chinese translation, I decided to take a peek. Happily and sadly, the fault lies completely with the reader; the translation is engaging, humorous and not disappointing at all.

Donuthead

I wish you could transform tasks of equal difficulty amongst themselves, kind of like reduction of NP-complete problems. Like if you could practice guitar for a week but channel the progress to running. Or run but have the energy go towards improving your musical ear. Or do pushups and have that do your programming project for you. Scientists, you know what to do.

On an unrelated note, I now think of myself in a completely new way, all thanks to Yuan Yuan. She was talking about some cookies we bought earlier and I couldn't remember for the life of me what they were. When it turned out they were these little donuts, first I spanked Yuan Yuan for calling them cookies and then I explained the vast difference between the two.

"Donuts are roughly circular things with a hole in the middle," I said with infinite patience.
"Like your head?"
"No, silly, the holes in my head don't go all the way through."

At which point Yuan Yuan returned the spanking favor, threw in a bonus head/table slam and explained that my ear holes were exactly that - the hole in the donut of my head. It suddenly made perfect sense, not to mention giving a whole new meaning to "you are what you eat."

Happy New Year!

It's Chinese New Year today, the jury not yet out on whether the petition to rename it "Everything Gets Blown Up Or Set On Fire Day" has passed. This is supposed to be the most family-oriented holiday in Chinese culture, as in if you're not with your family, there's a strict quota of tears you have to shed in front of a licensed tear counting official. My tear ducts are a bit out of practice since it's been over a year and a half now that I left the few people that know those precious weak points in my ego and can therefore step on them at will. Yuan Yuan's younger sister's got us both covered though.

This is probably the biggest culture shock I've experienced in a few months. A few hours ago Yuan Yuan mentioned offhand that her sister is probably drowning in a puddle of tears. I asked why (being a good boyfriend means you're required to ask a certain amount of questions) and the answer was something straight out of a dystopian novel. Yuan Yuan has four sisters so you might have to draw a diagram, but this is the basic idea:

Yuan Yuan's two older sisters are married so her youngest sister is not allowed in their houses on New Year's. Since she's back home in the village and has no way of making it to Beijing, and since Yuan Yuan's parents are currently also here in Beijing, it means she's all alone in the house. With no heating. And no internet connection. That's right, NO INTERNET CONNECTION.

Scratch what I said earlier, I think my tear ducts just breezed past that coefficient of static tear duct friction and surface tension and whatever else physicists have discovered to keep burly hairy (at least three chest hairs since I last counted) manly men from letting the tear out of its socket. Good thing I'm an excellent touch typist because I can't see a word on the screen anymore.