do you have happy?

going from work to edinburgh castle could be more fun than you think. check out my route.

(cheng du china tales) (appx week 4)

hey all….

i apologize in advance for the lack of creativity and potentially boring material contained within this….for those of you newly added to this mass email i advise you ask for the first few i sent out, they were a tad more exciting. nonetheless….

i attended my first chinese wedding today. it was a spectacle. they don’t do the whole religion thing here, so the ceremony is more like an excessive banquet. however, younger (perhaps they’d think of themselves as ‘hipper’) couples are using these services that create an sense of organized cheese fest for you to base your banquet around. this couple went with the ‘marry with a good mood’ service. marrygoodmood.com? they basically provide fireworks, bubble machines, red carpet, music (three songs on repeat at an unbelievably loud volume), and an mc who is the most ridiculous chump alive. he’s a mixture of game show host, hype man, douche bag, and vegas performer who has nothing worthwhile to actually perform. it was hilarious. after the intro’s (kinda sounded like a basketball stadium announcer introducing the starting five), he did a countdown and something along the line of europe’s the final countdown blasted as stage level fireworks shot up (kinda thought i was at a styx cover band show). then the bubble machine was turned on and they sliced some cake, poured champagne down the pyramid of glasses, exchanged rings that were brought to the stage by little girls with angel wings. then them and their friends and parents all got a chance to take the mic and either sing a song or tell a story. finally they let us all eat and drink. the food was delicious. i was a bit bummed that they didn’t have beer, though. only red wine (not something you wanna tangle with in china, it looks like murky pond water with red dye) or bijiu, their national liquor of choice. it’s a white lightning firewater that tastes like rubbing alcohol. so i totally dug it. everyone gets a shrunken wine glass full and then proceeds to go around the table picking people they want to drink with them. as the foreigner, i was always chosen. you can either ask them to take a small sip with you or finish the glass. either way, someone fills up your glass right after you set it down. it’s impossible to say no. you have to literally wrestle the bottle away from whoever’s pouring or run away. i didn’t encounter this problem. i just let em pour away. watching all the chinese men turn bright red and scatter and/or wrestle and spill bottles of this shit was a riot.

the other night i got to go out to a neighboring city. it takes about at least an hour or so to get out of chengdu…it’s a huge city. the downtown area is about forty minutes from me and looks like any major metropolis…all huge bright lights, skyscrapers, and people walking around with prada bags on their way out of starbucks. i live out in the sticks. it’s much much more suited to me. dirt and grime and simple living. anyway, i went out to my host father’s cousin’s wife’s parents house. because of the whole one child rule they call anyone remotely related to them brother or sister. so we went to his brother’s house. we had a great dinner. once the women and children retired to the television me, my host father, his brother, and the brother’s father-in-law sat around the table drinking firewater and beer. about forty minutes into the toast-drink-toast-drink-smoke-toast-drink pattern both my host father and his brother literally passed out face down on the table. that left me and a man who looked to be carrying his 84 pounds of self into his 114th year of life on this planet. this man was amazing. he would stand and salute something and then swallow an entire glass of beer. then he’d point to me. but he’d fill my glass a bit more than his was. it was the magical game of anything you can do i can do better. what a blast. we got totally shit housed. i was the first american he’d met. the first american he’d drank with (and i represented well, guys…he was amazed). and the first american he had in his home. it was an honor. he loved it. i taught him how to thumb wrestle. we played a few chinese drinking games. i taught him asshole. he taught me a game i can’t quite remember. all in all….great times.

tomorrow i start work. it’s basically my time to be creative and inventive and experimental. if there’s a time to fail it’s now. i get watched and then given feedback on my successes and failures. should be fun. i do have to team up this week. unfortunately, i’m paired with this entirely self-righteous girl who totally believes she’s about ten-times more of a valuable life form than me. she has this annoying habit of pointing out the obvious and then ‘teaching’ me. like when she told me that a bottle (labled vinegar in fucking english) was actually vinegar and that some people like to pour it in a small bowl and dip their food in it. wow. she’s full of many other gems of wisdom. thankfully, it’s only five days. then i’m on my own.

i’ve been getting used to riding chinese buses. quite an adventure. anybody know how many people fit on a chinese bus? always ten more….there’s always room for ten more. they cram people into these things with absolute abandon. it’s crazy.

the weather is still hot and humid. supposedly this is the cool part of summer. during august it gets well over a hundred all day and night.

i’ve totally mastered the squat pot. i can flat footed squat like a champion. all those korean kids in high school would be proud.

first fairly large scare. i was walking through a taoist temple. taking photos, enjoying the mellow, etc. i took one step forward on a sidewalk i’d been following for the past hour or so and stepped on the front half of a manhole cover that was not quite snug. the front half flew up and smacked my genitalia with an unforgiving metal thump at which point my leg had nothing solid to stand upon (the manhole cover was now perpendicular to the hole) and i fell into the hole into what i can only assume was sewage. super swell. many a chinese folk gathered to help? rescue? come to my aide? fuck no! they all took photos of me. it was a hellish ride. my leg will smell of sewage for weeks.

i wish i had more things to share. is there anything anyone wants to know? i can never think of all the things i’d assume someone would find interesting once i’m sitting down at the computer.

as far as things i’d like to know. anything going on in the states/world. i don’t get any news. nothing. sometimes i can get on espn.com to follow the sporting world, other than that i’m s.o.l.

the biggest thing i’m getting adjusted to is chinese-english (chinglish?). they have the most indirect way of communicating. if they want you to do something it’s “perhaps you it would be more convenient for you to….” or “maybe it would be very much fun for you to…..” and they never want to tell you no, so anything they wanna shut down will get the response, “i will communicate with you later about that.” or “perhaps i will let you know at a later time.” are you drunk is “do you have happy?”

but when it comes to going to events or doing something, they call/ask at the very last moment and refuse to take no for an answer. i’ll get home with a shit ton of homework and my family will show up in my room all dolled up and say “we will go to the banquet now.” or i’ll get a call and the school officials will say “we will have a meeting for you in five minutes.” i live fuckin ten minutes away from campus. it’s crazy. nothing is planned. and if it is, it gets changed and moved and altered each minute. if you say you can’t make it they respond with “perhaps it would be more convenient if we will pick you up.” which means some dude is sitting outside of your house with a car waiting for you.

there’s a ton of this indirect communication. even non-verbal. i accepted a gift from a women at a banquet. some junk, essentially. i didn’t want to be rude and refuse. i took it and promptly lost it somewhere later. i get a call a few days later asking me when i will begin to tutor her son in english. !? i said i’m too busy and my work prohibits it. she got totally pissed, repeating over and over, “you took my gift!” live and learn….

speaking of last minute. i just got back from that wedding and just now my host brother informed me, “we will leave now for the birthday party.” interesting. don’t know who’s birthday it is, but i’m gonna be there. i’ll try and do something worth writing about…

more soon….

Watch what happens when you try to open a cascasing css style sheet on windows with IE

We get this wonderful one-liner. Windows shits all over the file and creates a one line “suck my cock” of code for us to enjoy. Moving from an OS X box and working with firefox TO using internet explorer on windows makes us pity the sorry suckers who call themselves developers on this setup.

(tales from a friend in Cheng Du China) - (appx Week 2)

hey hey folks…..

so, i’ve earned myself a few days off. i’m the first of the china 13’s (each year a new batch of trainees is sent….i’m apart of the lucky thirteenth) to be quarantined. who didn’t see that one coming? i would’ve bet some major cash money on it. i have contracted some unknown mutant skin disease that has reduced my face to something akin to the swamp thing. it oozes contagious alien sperm. the doctor (after doing some intense investigations with elongated toothpicks and suction cups) suggested that i “am a dirty one.” don’t know exactly what she meant…..but i couldn’t really argue with that.

so. i have far too many hours to spend sitting around my host families house. my brother is at school from 7:30 in the am to 5:30 in the pm and my folks don’t speak a lick of english. this makes things quite difficult. to make matters worse my computer decided today that the driver for my cdrom has been corrupted. therefore, i can’t even watch a movie. which blows super big donkey balls cause i just bought (get this shit): the departed, last king of scotland, little miss sunshine, pan’s labrynth, transformers, die hard four, and the first five seasons of 24 last night. i spent 22 kuai. that works out to something like two dollars and eighty cents. fuck me silly.

t-shirts i have seen this week:

1. i dream of me vision of mermaids
2. plain black t with silver sequence cursive saying: “ethnic”
3. confidence confidence (picture of missy elliot(?) below) on the back confidence 81
4. the world is best
5. fuck? yeah! i am black window
6. confidence overflowing in me always

if only these folks would just sell me the shirts off their back. it’s a drag going through shirt after shirt in all these stores thinking, “what the fuck? all these make perfect sense!”

language is still killin me. its the tones. you can say any word in the english language with any sort of intonation and people will get it. they might not pick up on the fact that you’re mocking them, but they can grasp the basic meaning of your vocabulary. i swear. each word has five different tones that alter the meaning. and most words within the same tone have five or six different meanings depending on the context. one word twenty or so different meanings. i haven’t even started looking at the hanzi (characters). i’m doing better than most of the kids at my training site, but there is a huge gap between now and maintaining a conversation about the most mundane shit.

i love taking a walk around the small city area next to chengdu university around six in the morning. the only folks out are the old men. i gotta get hip to their styles. they cruise the streets in tattered stretched out wife beaters tucked into linen shorts that are belted about five inches above their belly’s and hang down about half thigh. they rock plain black bruce lee slippers and the chinese version of a bermuda hat. they got the pipe or ciagarette hangin out the side of their mouth (about two inch of ash hanging solid) and walk with both hands behind their back, forever ready to be cuffed by the fuzz. it’s too sweet. they sit around playing all sorts of games i have yet to name, yet alone play.

as far as mail….i can’t really receive anything other than letters until i move into my flat. i still don’t know where that will be, although the percentages say somewhere in the gansu region in or around lanzhou. two years ago lanzhou was the world’s most polluted city. i think they’ve been dethrowned by mexico city. however, three of the top five are in western china. gotta keep it real. holdin it down. good thing i’ve got these cigarettes to filter all the dirty air. nonetheless, i will be in chengdu for the next seven or eight weeks. i think i find out my site sometime around the beginning of august.

i have mastered the squat pot. it’s really quite comfortable. and good for the body, i hear. however, the only major draw back is the leisurely reading while pooping. not possible. i need to have hands free to grab anything available whenever i lose my balance, which happens more often than not.

the food is amazing. totally delicious. filling, but not that food coma kind of full. oily and greasy. slides right out the other end. my favorite so far is the hot pot. these places are everywhere. each table has a big hole in the middle with a gas burner under it. a big vat of oil is placed in that and heated up super hot. it’s got tons and tons of red peppers and spices in it. then you just order dish after dish of whatever type of vegetable or meat you want. they bring it out raw and you throw it in the hot pot. give it a minute or two. sip beers. smoke. do what you will. then grab whatever you can from the boiling vat of stomach rot and toss it down the hatch. proceed to sweat profusely and lose all sensation of taste. it’s is so hot. spicy and temperature. the whole restaurant (despite having no walls, sometimes no roof) is a sauna. every chinese male has his shirt rolled up to his titties (the chinese male tube top is a big big hit) or just completely off. you grub hard. sweat harder. and drink faster. you only need a few large beers in this situation to get your buzz on. it’s fantastical.

someone was asking about the water. it’s readily available in bottles everywhere for fifty cents. the chinese don’t really believe in cold beverages, though. something about ancient chinese wisdom says cold things bring you colds (like illnesses). it’s hard to find. except beer. you can request cold beer and usually they will have it. not really cold. but better than warm. sometimes it costs a bit more for really cold stuff. like ten cents. water has to be boiled at home before consumed. although, my host family has a bit of dough. they get their sanitized watered delievered.

being a celebrity is pretty sweet so far. i imagine it will get frustrating and annoying pretty quick. but for the time being i relish in it. everywhere i go people stare, stop, and/or follow. if i’m in the grocery store they follow and look at what i look at. if i pick something up to investigate, once i put it back they will pick it up and investigate. walking down the street everyone i pass whips out a cell phone and takes a picture or, even more obssessively odd, takes a video of me walking down the road. most adventurous ones will stop me and pose for photos…typically the head tilt with peace sign. i usually go for the run dmc full self hug. sometimes the vanilla ice hand v. occassionally the dual hand LA. i try to thug it up as much as possible. they don’t just stare, though. they really investigate and talk and gossip and remember. the doorman over at the grocery store (yeah…doorman….gotta love the prc, they create jobs for everyone) speaks a bit of english. he had my host mother as a teacher a few years back when he was in middle school. i had never spoken to him before. however, he knew who i was living with and every detail about the program i was participating in. not that odd. one person who knew my host family could have told him all that. however, he also knew that i bought an ‘expensive pen’ (about 35 cents) from a shop across town. i went shopping by myself. he knew every shop i had been into all over town. where i bought things and where i didn’t. what type of cigarette brands i have tried thus far. tons of shit. these people talk. nothing is secret in regards to the big nosed white devil.

chengdu is notorious for their tiled sidewalks. but they are so slop hazardly put together. they constantly pop up. come undone. form a rolling wave. long story short - the sidewalks are a funhouse. the best/worst is after a rain. you’ll be walking along and one out of every ten walkers will find the ‘magic tile’ – the one that is a mini teeter totter. you step on it and -whoosh! - a jet stream of acid rain, piss, and liquified shit shoots up your leg. i’ve hit a few of em. it’s super fun. you’re leg smells like shit for days. i keep hoping i’ll find one that will give me a mushroom or extra life or something. not so much.

well. enough of this. i have some facial ointment to apply. think i’ll stare at the wall for a bit. perhaps do some crosswords. get back to anna karenina (not that bad thus far). maybe even take a walk and spread the sickness.

Hey what’s up dude?

Woot bro.

Dude I really like your shoes. they are the sex.

Aww. Thanks bro. They are rad. Rock. woot.

You wanna go to the show dude?

Ya , Ya, let’s go. I gotta tease my hair real quick and take some shots for my LJ.

Ok. well hurry up. Cuz I’m gonna break . . . bust some heads if you don’t hurry.

Ok. well come inside. and we’ll we’ll watch some TV.

Hey dude. I talked to the singer from XskullgobletX on aim last night and he said that death before dying on a twisted river that’s bleeding is playing tonight.

Dude that’s awesome.

Ya dude. And autumn falls of a godless winter death that is burning with a hornless unicorn is playing. I can’t wait. They really bring the mosh.

Ya dude. They… I I want to dance it up so bad to them. And there is this girl there I want to kiss and she wears way cool clothes and she is rad.

Ninja’s are cool. They are really cool.

Ya dude. They are the rock.

Ok. well. alright. You wanna finish your hair and we can go do your livejournal entry.

I’m I’m done. But I use the timer on the , on the pictures.

On the? ...... Ok dude. Well go take your LJ pictures and I’m gonna listen to the new from seasons when dying days burn in the slumber of watered down okra shell burn leaf.

Hey dude. Come on. Dude. This is rock.

I’m coming. I’m coming. Woot.

Oh dude. I heart your car. It rocks. I heart it a a lot.

Not as much as the new all american door knobs CD.

Oh snap. THat does rock. I heart that too.

Ya it rocks.

Hey dude. I talked to BradXdeath today.

From Charlotte?

No. He’s actually …

From winston?

No he’s from charlotte.

Oh. Ok.

Ya. well he rocks.

He was saying that scotXkillyou got these caffeinated drinks…

I I thought they were uh, they were uh, straight edge?

No. They listen to xxkillyouxx x x x on …

Oh. Ok. Ok. that’s rad. totally.

ya.

ha. that’s that’s hot. i listen to rap every now and then.

Are you serious?

Ya. Ya.

Well. Rap is cool cuz you should listen to a lot of different kinds of music.

(some sort of arnold schwarzeneggar grumble occurs here) (one of the many cuts in this film where these guys just couldn’t hang )

Oh dude. I have the new evening dawn dashers when a river runs through it. Do you want to listen to it? It’s totally rad.

Oh. dude I really want to listen to the egad star if you don’t mind.

Dude are you serious. They suck and that crew up there doesn’t like them.

Whadda you mean? You mean the DHT

No I think its the RUH.

Oh you might be talking about the MTA

Uh no i think its the WRZ

Oh oh ok ok.. They rock. I mean. that’s cool.

Ya I listen to rap sometimes.

Ya its good to listen to more than just one type of music.

Ya. that rocks

Oh dude that one song that’s by that uh, that, really pretty, that pretty band.

Ya, uh…. the rock?

Ya, they rock.

Ya ya. What’s that part?

Duhn duhn duhn we we grrrrr. yarrrr. chyun chyun chyun bleiajskljfileajflaskdfj.

See this performed to perfection here