在上班的路上

我今天要回去南汇。 过了一个星期我没有去，没事情在那边干，还是不想买那些鸡，就没去。其实我不是很喜欢工厂的气氛。英特尔公司待了那么旧， 那边一直有那种压迫的感觉， 可能就因为是那么偏僻的地方，再加上那里环境就像沙漠一样荒凉的， 除了辛辛苦苦工作的工人有很多很高致傲傲但很烦人的德国，新加坡，和马来西亚的管理者。那边可能就不太适合我。 anyway 今天起来要过去南汇那里，但是因为上面提到的一些原因，不想过去太早，所以我八点半出发想走到徐家汇的美罗城锻炼身体，有一个星期我都没有去，身体有点不舒服，昨天开始恢复正常，今天几乎都没什么问题，恢复本来的样子。快要出发看了一眼镜子，觉得满帅， 放了ipod开始听hotchip， 出门就有那种秋高气爽的感觉。 其实我觉得大家平常有点杞人忧天的感觉，天天都被一些小小的事情压得很紧， 只有到我们听其自然才会感觉到一些平静。 反正今天没什么外来的压力，也没多想什么事情，但是，对，要去缴电话和电费， 我每个月都一样，受到账单以后就直接放在我包里，过一个月再也不想，后来就麻烦 （看上面写的听其自然的结果）这次不会，我到了c-store他们不收， 他妈的没用的。。。后来走到一家好德便利店曾经有交过费就知道他们收， 里面服务员就是一个很难看的女士，其实好德这家点招人是有两个条件，第一个是要女人，第二个是要最难看的女人，大概45-55岁，而且这些不是什么美人迟暮， 名副其实的丑八怪， 你不信自己去看。 这次不是例外， 我想，我这次这样，持续听我的音乐，反正没必要沟通，后来失败了，他们那个收银机坏了，不知道欠多少钱， 完了， 没办法拔了耳机咆哮了一个“多少钱“， 交钱以后开心了就准备走，不行要等那个发票，不知道为什么每次交费非拿单子不可，我不耐心的等她盖章，拿了以后就扔在外面的垃圾桶，侧那被那个女的看见了，她看了我看得很严， 好像她心理再说， 你快回去垃圾桶拿回来你的单子， 要不我有你好看！天啊，有那么严重吗？拿回来干嘛？放在我的records吗？我没回去拿就走了， 她不会记得我，反正我们老外都长得差不多。 走了一会往前面看穿了短裙子的女士，办公室的样子，但是说实话，不太适合办公室，比较适合给那种变态的日本人看，也适合我，看了就开始流口水，后来往上看了脸， “eeeewwww"了一声， 真是东施效颦， 摇了头想把里面的图像忘掉， 就故意开始想，要赚钱，要赚很多钱，我怎么去发财， 后来开始想我要走慢一点，开始流汗就不行， 我看对面有个女人穿了工作靴子， 很短的短裤和一个漫长的外套，我下巴不由得往下降， 脑子开始深思怎么去认识，后来没机会，我被红绿灯阻碍了，往对面看， 她无动于衷，连看都没看，我想，可能是故意的，可能在和我调情，我再看了她已经走了，哦，我叹息了就继续走。 我开始在想怎么发财，再想股票，不知道股票市场现在怎么样会不会跌， 看了前面有个男士穿了西装，深灰色鞋子是土黄色，不知道为什么觉得他的样子满苦， 后来接近点他西装上面根下面是不同的布料，大概不是纯棉的， 但是还行，满适合， 后来看他带了眼睛，绿松石色， 哇靠， 苦，真苦，到前面能看到脸一看就想gay. 我平常看得很准，没人比我强我觉得，人妖也看得很准， 长的多美也没关系，我会知道， 真是专家， 菲律宾泰国待一点时间你就变成专家， emm, 反正再看了一眼就觉得可能是香港人，有时候香港人我猜得不对，不知道为什么，可能他们也不知道。 后来决定不去健身， 坐了公交车上班去。 已经九点，车上都没有人，我想，那天天上班那么晚多好，都不用紧在车上嗅他人的难闻的气味 （在中国这个是一个满严重的问题）后来下一战两个女士在我前面出现，一个穿了全身的运动服，天鹅绒做的，黑色的，两边都有粉红色的条纹， 领子也是粉红色。 旁边的女的 （连个大约50岁）把胳膊方在第一个女人胸前，放碍她交钱的尝试， 两个都用上海话争论, 一笑就能看见黄色有很大的缺口的牙齿，不知道为什么我就蛮喜欢她们两个。不会像做朋友，但是从旁边看满好玩。 天啊写了半天就写了这么一点点， 用一个小时的时间形容过去的一个小时不太合算是不是，太累了下次回来改正。

要开始努力 88 贱贱

life in nanhui

im back out in nanhui for the day. peach season is over (see earlier post on peaches for some uncut peach action) so nanhui has lost any claim to any kind of...well, any kind of anything positive mostly. ive reached a bit of a stalling point in my work out here so i went out side and decided to walk around to see if there was any thing good to eat. i was actually here yesterday so i remembered that there was nothing good in either of the stores down the road but i decided to look anyway to see if anything besides vacuum sealed chicken feet or instant noodles had miraculously appeared on their dusty shelves. as i was walking closer i noticed across the street some sort of a thing that looked a bit like a military truck from the war in 49, with all its inner parts exposed and two little front wheels. i said inside my head "what the fuck is that?", a big bus honked at me to get out of the road and then a kid riding by on the back of his fathers bike stared at me like i was an alien with a purple cock hanging out of my pants. i decided not to look in either of the stores. i guess i realized i wouldnt go in at all at the beginning but just wanted to get some air. then i remembered seeing some sort of fruit stand as i was driving out, just a bit down the road, near where the peach incident had occured a few weeks back, so i walked over there. then another one of those fucking weird truck things drove by, going like four miles an hour and coughing up gabs of ice cap melting world imperiling black smoke. i thought to myself, what the fuck, another one of them. then i kept walking and saw the fruit stand up there with three guys standing around talking about how they were going to rip me off so fucking bad it wasnt even funny. bastards, i thought. there were some orange and black shapes in front of the fruit stand that i could not quite make out. getting closer i realized they were chickens. their feathers were getting ruffled from the wind the cars on the road made as they rushed by. i could not tell if the chickens had an opinion about the cars. the chickens were (they are still there i think) tied to a string by their skinny little chicken legs and the string was tied between two rocks. i looked up from the chickens and noticed that the fruit was melons, which i dont have experience buying so would get totally fucked by these conniving bastards i was sure of it. plus i didnt think it would be convenient to eat melons while pretending to do work on a computer in front of the boss. then, then! another one of those fucking trucks drove by！ the third fucking one! i thought, what is this, some fucking weird slow moving lawn mower truck convention? then i said, ill take five chickens. i had never said anything like this before and i wanted to see what the experience was like. it was nothing special. then their was some movement and a guy sitting on a bike got down and the other one said that i wanted five chickens and then he said my chinese was good. i asked him how much for a chicken. he said "12 kaui ($1.50)" i thought it would be more expensive. i counted the chickens, there were six orange and two black. eight chickens. i could have the whole batch of them for $12, but i didnt quite trust those black ones, so that would be six good healthy orange chickens for $9. then i could probably buy one of those truck like things for another $20 or so, then i could drive those chickens back into the city on my chinese truck like thing and string them up on the side of another road some where. i wasnt sure where to go from there but had the vague thought that profits were certainly to be made. i decided against the idea. i said maybe next time to my would be business partners and headed back both fruit and chickenless.

it seems that the great march of entrepreneurship, that intense business climate sweeping china has taken flight and, along with great amounts of smog and particulates, gotten lodged somewhere deep inside my being. stay tuned next time for the making of a chinese chicken magnate.

two short trips to the terraces

they began building the terraces while i was still in elementary school across the street. i remember my father was somewhat upset that they were covering up the vacant lot he would bring me through, pointing out lizards and wildflowers and beetles. around middle school i think i became aware that it was a place for old people, or anyhow i had connected in my head old people with the terraces, old people and money somehow, this much picked up from listening to my parents conversations around the dinner table. while away at school i began hearing talk of bringing my grandparents to live at the terraces, and finally last year i stepped inside one of the duplexes there, me and my mother walking through as the workmen pounded away, approvingly looking at the new fixtures, sliding open and closing the closet doors. more then a year has gone by this time as i pull up to the curb with my sister and pablo. from outside i can see their old furniture has been moved inside, strangely out of place from its old home in Morristown New Jersey. as we come in my grandmother waddles over and gives us kisses and smiles and yells out "chet" "chet!", a name that will forever be etched into my brain alongside images of world war II warships and silent films and Buicks and tennis. Chet comes out on his walker, smiling, his eyes are a bit cloudy and his back is bent at a sharp angle so that i have to bend down to hug him. there was a long period in my life when every time i met him we would get back to back so my grandmother could see how we measured up. and though she at one point forgot and would say that we were even or even that i had passed him by, i never did reach his height until his back began to bend, pulled toward the earth. there is a certain light that old people seem to like to live with, or that somehow surrounds them, the blinds partially drawn, a dusty dusky light that somehow signifies the twilight years of their life. my grandmother rushes around and continually asks the same questions, my grandfather irritated sits down and i sit next to him as my sister and Pablo leave for the drugstore. it passes my mind that leaving for the drugstore is a nice family scene that i have not experienced much of lately.

i stand for a while, tired of sitting from the flight and all the travel, and look down at my grandfather below me. as a kid i remember him mostly for his height and his booming voice, and the way he would yell at the staff when he wasn't satisfied with the service. three years back, on his quick decent to this present stage, there was a period i was home and he had just completed a surgery that had left him mostly invalid for a short recovery period. as i was home it fell upon me to help him out when he needed it, help him get into the shower, make sure he didn't fall, and get him glasses of water when he called out for them. i remember seeing him naked for the first time, hunched over, his skin loose and papery on his body, his great head seeming somehow too large for his now crumpled body. the sex about him had fell into disrepair from lack of use, his penis shriveled in old age, his ass no longer an ass, just the end of his back and the beginning of his legs. i couldnt help but think about it, my whole existence at the time so concerned with sex, it seemed so foreign to me that he had totally moved on from it. i could think only of being a small child, of the age when most likely he would have taken care of me when my parents were away, washed me and seen me there smiling up at him or screaming my head off.

my grandmother kept pestering me so finally i sat next to him, the strange geriatric light falling over the two of us. we sat there and talked about my job and about investments and their real estate projects and later he talked about all the soda pop he was drinking lately, how he had never drank it before but suddenly in his dying days he had been consuming mass quantities of coca cola and sprite. he went in to lie down and rest and i went outside to look over an investment packet he gave me, skimming over it wondering what different numbers really meant and thinking how i could bring the packet down later in the week and read it with him.

the next day i came down again and the two of them were still in bed at a eleven in the morning, having gone back to bed after breakfast. though it was morning the light was still the same inside, somehow transformed and soft. i went in and sat next to my grandfather for a while as he lay there and we talked about the dinner we had been to the night before. later i pushed him out to the flower garden down the street a way and walked slowly through the flowers as he read off the names of the different roses. my father had taken him a few days before and actually made him smell the roses, but i couldn't tell if he was too interested any more and wondered if he was bored. my grandmother finally came out and i thought how young and spry she seemed now, next to him. walking back we passed their neighbor in his garage next to his cadilac and my grandmother went to talk to him and i wondered if my grandfather ever got jealous any more and i could picture him thinking, that bastard and his cadilac, i had a cadilac too you know, and then he looked up as we were walking down his path and waved to the man from his wheelchair but the two of them standing there did not notice, so i pulled him up close to the door and he put the brake on and i opened the screen and put the lock on the screen, holding the door open before wheeling him slowly in, navigating the small bumps and doorstop.

trip to suzhou

driving up to suzhou after the meeting with paul and ben driving, we stopped at a coffee shop to talk with a women about her laowai husband and his drinking problem. she kept going on and on about his drinking and i just kept thinking man lets get the hell out of here when the dude wants help we can help him. pulling into ben's complex the guard gave us a big salute and ben stopped the car and gave him a salute back. we pulled in front of his house (an actual house in china!)and later stood inside and everything white and spacious and i felt like i had left china and was back in the US somewhere.

the next morning i woke early and ran outside of the complex. i was waiting for the guards to give me a salute but i think they could sense i was just a guest and just stood there looking at the big foreigner running by. outside the complex opens up onto a big street, beside the road workers sat on the curb in groups of four or five, others rode by on bikes loaded with burlap bags. i ran down the road and then onto a construction road and down to jin ji lake (golden chicken lake) and along the lake for a while. along the lake was a green field and a line of workers squatting, pulling grass or weeds or something,maybe twenty or thirty workers, some of them raised their heads to watch as i passed. further down was a little shack, an older man and a child squatted there washing out a bowl, the old man raised his head and waved to me and i waved back thinking about their life and my life.

returning to the complex kids were gathering at the entrance to be picked up by school buses, their moms accompanying them. a lot of them were foreigners, white and taiwanese and korean, i felt strangely like i was back at home, in some gated community in California. later that morning me and paul and ben walked outside behind their place and down to the lake, we stood looking out over the lake and ben told us how much money was put into the suzhou industrial park and how when he moved in their were trucks pulling out of the huge fake lake we were looking out over and how the group of mansions across the lake had been empty for two years because of a scandal involving the public finding out about the mansions being given to party members.

mr wang rode up on his bike and ben called him wang trump and laughed and told us how mr wang owned eleven of the houses in the complex and went around fixing them up and rode his bike always and didnt ride in cabs because he was scared of them. wang trump was from taiwan and i helped them translate and the four of us went over to his other place down the road and the whole thing was filled with huge oak or some weird trees and in one of the trees was a nub and wang trump looked at that and asked what it looked like and ben said it looked like a ji ba and wang trump didnt understand so he said it some more and finally he got that he was trying to say cock and they stood around and laughed and then we looked at the rest of the house and went upstairs out onto his cigar smoking deck and he told us the water was pumped directly from the lake and how he had drilled a pump to the middle of the lake and got his water free of charge! and later talked about how buying a jet is not really expensive its only the charges for keeping it in good shape and storage that are expensive. he gave some number for the jet and i tried to convert it to dollars and its always easy to miss or ad a zero with these things but the number seemed pretty damn big regardless. we left and ben told us how they had moved to suzhou from guangzhou because of attempted kidnappings of his son and how they had a bodyguard that followed his son around everywhere and the kid would be out riding his bike and playing with the other kids and the bodyguard would be there in the background somewhere.

later we drove out to ben's factory and i saw the place for the first time and everything looked nice but was damn quite, no orders and no production and people sort of lounging around looking busy and later ben called a meeting and talked about duck calls and blew his duck call and his assistant ducky came running in that was his sign that he needed her help. ben is from nashville and sold paper before and found a cheep machine to make a special kind of paper and so decided to take the thing apart and ship it to china and so there he was in suzhou talking about duck calls and how when you see the ducks up high you have to do a high call called a highball, and he gave us the demonstration, and how usually a couple will come down a bit lower, circling, and then you had to do a female cuckle, the sound the female duck makes when it is happy, and you do that cuckle for a while and the ducks circle up there, and you cuckle some more and they get lower and then you aim and fire and he did the blah sound of the gun, but that at jin ji lake you cant do that but you can practice to keep in good shape, and he sat there with his duck calls around his neck and asked if anyone wanted to give it a try.

ben left early that day to work out another loan from the bank to see if they could stay afloat and me and paul left with the other workers in the company bus and were dropped off on another part of the lake where we would meet for dinner. they were testing out this water and light show equipment and huge jets of water were shooting up into the sky accompanied by weird techno music and then later some Beethoven, the water was interesting but the music was far too loud and we walked away and down the path up against the lake and later stopped and watched some kids rollerblading before walking back. we returned and heard they had gotten the loan so ben was happy and we had a nice meal and ben's daughter came and got hyper drinking diet coke and started doing movie quotes and giving her dad high fives and laughing and asking her parents please please please to let her say one swear word.

the next day i went around the office interviewing people to get a good idea of the company and the situation and ben walked around outside nervous as his employees explained why they had no regular orders and later in the car ben wanted to make sure i wasn’t going to go back to the board and try and get him fired or anything and i told him of course not we just wanted to help out.

i got a cab to the train station on friday and had to wait an hour or so before the train and sat around and people from everywhere with big plastic sacks were there and waiting and i passed groups of people dirty from their journey and a strong smell would waft up from them. i found a place to sit and had a small snack and sat their and read and a man came over and stood right above me and looked down at the book and i said "what are you doing, you cant read it, its english" and he said he just wanted to see what i was reading and then asked where i was from and where i was going and how much my salary was per month and if i was married. i talked to him for a while and then he walked off and i walked off to find my train and stand in lines and got on the train and then got kicked out of my seat and sat on the steps for the rest of the journey. the experience was a lot different from what i had just been trough, driving around with ben and staying at his nice home on the lake, the people around me mostly poor and traveling with all they owned. the train station in shanghai is in the north and also in a pretty poor area, and i kept thinking of all the growth and success rising up and around these people, all the success stories and factories and businesses making millions of dollars and ben's business struggling to stay afloat and these people dirty and tired and struggling to make it from one meal to the next. i walked from the train station to the subway in the rain, tired from the travel. on the subway families huddled around their big sacks and slept and i leaned against the subway doors and closed my slept as well.

some good music videos

chad vangaalen

wolf parade

cover of an iron and wine cover of a flaiming lips song

some thoughts on addiction and alcoholism

my friend derek (not real name--friend from last post)drank on thursday night. only a couple beers so far, who knows maybe he will come back in and not go on a rampage. so far of my good friends that i got sober with or was in the program with maybe half or more have gone out drinking, though not all of them are screwed up big time. kevin (names are all fakes, anonymity is the foundation of all our traditions....and all that jazz) is drinking and most likely screwed up big time. derek, if he keeps drinking, will definitely be screwed up big time. calie is ok drinking i think, and same with fred (who was fifteen when he stopped, parents caught him smoking too much pot or something like that). pete is not going to meetings any more and is pretty screwed up drinking or not. this kid dale i sponsored back in colorado is still sober, beating all expectations, seems to be doing well last i heard from him. bart is drinking, most likely heavily, though i havent spoken to him for quite a while.

i think early in sobriety i sort of thought that once people get to about a year they tend to stick around. i think the reason i thought this is because you see a whole bunch of people come and stay for just a few meetings or a couple weeks or whatever and then never come back. im realizing now that people dont stay all that much after a year is up either, or after two, or three, or five, or ten. obviously them going out drinking is not like their life is ending (depending on level of problem of course) but still it is definitely a major setback and can in some ways be related to falling back into some disease like cancer or something, that will eventually either kill you or you you get better again (getting better the second or third or fourth times has lessons that the first time did not).

addiction is an interesting thing. thinking about alcoholism as a disease throws another wrench in there. addiction, thinking about it psychologically, (this is my basic understanding at least, from reading and different stuff--not aa) is basically an unhealthy response to anxiety. like, something happens in the outside world, giving you fear or anxiety, and instead of feeling that anxiety and sitting in it and figuring out what needs to be done to get out of it, we move to food or booze or drugs or sex or whatever and let our brains lock on that as an escape route to the anxiety, like the flight or fight reflex gone insane. obviously the anxiety causing problem does not go away, it is just avoided temporarily with the bender or pig out or whatever. the solution is to figure out how to get to that level of maturity where we sit in that anxiety for a while and think about the best way to act and then act with courage and get over it, acting with courage enough gives you the confidence so that the next time the thing comes up you dont have the anxiety.

so, this part i dont have worked out yet. i still gorge out on a lot of things and act like an addict sometimes when i am feeling sick or insecure or whatever. but i am getting better (slowly). so, provided i keep progressing, which i am pretty confident about, in a two steps forward one step back kind of way, then i will at some point be at a point where i dont really react impulsively like an addict. but, does that mean i could drink again? (this is not something that i would consider doing in a real sense, being as scared as i am of alcohol). this of course depends on your idea about alcoholism. if you take AAs view, which supposedly has been verified by scientific studies of alcoholics metabolism, alcoholics do not break down alcohol fully, and the part that isnt broken down causes a reaction that "craves" more alcohol. now, is it just a coincidence that people that are alcoholics are also addicts in a very general sense, often giving up alcohol for first drugs, then giving up drugs and alcohol and chain smoking and drinking coffee like mad, etc? obviously the alcoholic, because of the chemical reaction or "alcoholism" may have learned to deal with anxiety in this manner while drinking, and after quitting drinking continued to act out in an addictive manner. or, perhaps, some of these "alcoholics" are really just addicts, acting out alcoholically because they dont know how to deal with anxiety (perhaps even eventually turning themselves into "alcoholics" in the physiological sense, by drinking so much- though im not sure this is even possible, though people often talk as if it is).

i havent really been thinking about this all that much (though reading this it may seem as if i have). though at the time of derek going out drinking it shook me up some, and it has been sort of concerning that nearly all of my friends from aa have gone out drinking, still this weekend i mostly just layed around with debby and went to eat and got massages and went out to clubs with debby and erik and had a great time. i think i may go to taiwan in three weeks. we have a national holiday for a week then, and debby can get me the ticket from hk or macao to taiwan if i can manage to get there. she will be there until then with work. at this point it is still unclear what she will tell her former colonel, big shot and KMT big wig dad when i am there.

peaches and victims and tips for stalkers

i worked out in nanhui yesterday at a factory that we are working with. nanhui is way the f out in pu-jersey and is basically back ass water no where land where factory workers make about 100 bucks a month (this is a good salary, these people are written about in the wall street journal as showing the absolute supreme benefits of sweatshops in china and sticking a finger to those fucking ignorant college cunts protesting about sweatshops -- still though it can be a bit concerning reading the salary figures in a factory you are working with) . nanhui is famous or supposedly famous for peaches. i learned about it from this new tai chi american guy that has moved to shanghai and lives out in nan hui teaching english at some sweetshop that has set up a school (bastards). actually i heard him mention it i think four times, each time he introduces himself and says where he is from he mentions the peaches, in chinese, which no chinese people can understand, so i help them translate (fucked up unintelligible chinese to somewhat more intelligible chinese) . it is odd that he mentions it every time. he is an odd guy, and also one of my favorite new guys, when he talks i cant help but get a big smile on my face thinking of all these chinese factory workers speaking like some hippy that took one too many hits of acid on slow motion.

i left the factory early and walked out on the street to wait for a cab. out on the main strip there are a big row of stands with umbrellas blocking the sun/rain, elements and what i assumed were different fruits and vegetables, etc. instead i found that it was about ten to fifteen stands of different kinds of the famous nan-hui peaches. im a bit hesitant to deal with peach dealers from some past bad experiences, but i decided a peach would be nice while waiting for a cab on a beautiful day in the end of summer. i asked them if the peaches were ripe and accused them of being 1. not ripe and 2. a rip off and generally gave the people a watchful eye while the whole transaction went down. finally the deal was done (1 peach for 5 kuai (about 75 cents) fucking bastards). i asked if they had some water i could wash the peach off in. there was a bucket of dirty water the guy pointed to and i said , whats that, are you breeding mosquitoes there? and then he brought me to another bucket of semi dirty water and i bent down and cupped water in my hands and rubbed it on the peach and it dripped onto the cement. i ate the peach, it was delicious in some parts and not quite ripe in others. it was pink and orange and yellow all swirled around. i ate the peach and waited for a cab and the cab didnt come and i asked the peach selling bastards if there were any cabs in this place and looked at them like it was their fault no cabs had come. i finished the peach and thought about kicking the pit over off the highway but instead just threw the thing non-chalantly off the highway and wondered if i would get in trouble for it and thought of a peach tree growing up down there where i had thrown the pit but figured the ground is probably too polluted and screwed up from the near by factories to support peach life. they were cutting up a peach and eating it and i asked for a bite to try it out and the women said i only bought one peach! why should they be nice and give me some of that one and i said maybe i would buy a peach every day from you bastards if you were nice and didnt rip me off and sell not quite ripe or even just ripe in some places so when the sucker comes and feels the peach and pushes it in for softness its soft in only one spot those fuckers. anyhow finally he gave me a slice and i ate it and didnt eat the dirty skin because i figured there were probably lots of chemicals on there and shit or maybe they even washed the thing in that dirty ass water. i threw the rest over off the road and it got lost in the weeds down there and ants and other bugs had an amazing sugary sweet peach feast.

my buddy was having a hard time so i went to hang out with him. he went on and on about the world being hard on him and things being fucked up as a result of things and other people happening to him. normally i wouldnt stand around for this kind of victim hood crap but he is a good friend so i took it and tried unsuccessfully to put in a few words of sanity from time to time. it went on for hours and my head started hurting so i said i couldnt take it any more. to all you victims out there, here is some advice: dont talk about it to people that you want to like you or think highly of you. if you think that your life sucks and is a pile of shit because of other people or things, then go tell it to your shrink, not to me. first of all, it is bullshit, and second of all, i dont want to hear it. actually, let me widen the net to catch any or all negative bullshit that is going to come out of any ones mouth. i dont want to hear it. sure, we have to look at problems to fix them, and thats fine and great and lets take a long hard look at them, but, lets have maybe a defined "looking at problems" period, where we will rescind all superior voice tones, and we can sit down and take as unattached as possible a look at things that are going on and figure out our part in them and what we can do about them. no victim bullshit and no negatively influenced bullshit i know whats best and other people wont listen to me why why why did those bastards steal the election and now look at the state of this sorry sorry country.

On a happy note, I think I have a new stalker. This Danish Dutch (she will probably find this at some point and have a major flip out session like the last psycho stalker chick) girl followed me on the bus the other day. Then she sneakily started talking to me and got my phone number. As my eyes are screwed up and I was taken somewhat off guard, I couldn’t get a really good look at her before giving away my number. so, I had to meet her once to get a better idea of what I was dealing with and thought worse comes to worse my friend erik is here and I can ditch the two of them to their fates (which is what happened). Then she called me three times after I left the two of them alone together, sent me three text messages the next day, and then called twice the day after that, including at eleven at night. Then, this is the kicker putting her into stalker status, she sent a text the next morning at seven: “I called last night, why didn’t you pick up?(!!!!!!) (emphasis mine). Here is a tip to any girl wanting to get in my pants: don’t call me! Ever!

(editors note: it occurs to me now that someone reading this not familiar with the author's complex psychology might misinterprit this last statement to mean that the author does not want to have telephone contact with stalkers. this was not the meaning, the meaning was the stalker will have a better chance of enticing the author by refraining from calling and playing a more hard to get approach, something that stalkers are obviously not very good at)

stanley said something about the temperature being twenty degrees tomorrow. fall is a good time in shanghai, but it is short.

winter is a good time to avoid loneliness.