I got so far behind converting my notes to coherent writing that I'm resorting to a mass dump. Here are a big fraction of my notes, unsorted and in only vague chronological order:

(new pictures uploaded to http://aufrecht.org, though I won't update the web version of this journal for some weeks, probably.)

Early November

Apparently the teacher network is now more closely connected to the student network. This works to the detriment of the teacher network - i.e., my internet connection just got much worse.

Some of the middle school students are offering up much better acting in the dialogs, to the point that now I get upset that the material isn't getting a proper dramatic treatment. Most of the students still come up, face the blackboard, and read in a monotone, but some of them do innovate, read dialogs without books, make up their own stuff, and add and subtract characters. I've tried to shake up the non-innovators by, for example, sending up kids with parts that aren't in the original dialog, but that doesn't work as they just sort of mill about at the front and don't even try to say anything.

It's been raining most of the last week. The first night, after a day of drizzle, we got a thundering downpour shortly after sunset which lasted about an hour. Around the same time, for a day or two, the pipes upstairs groaned frequently and loudly. The morning after the downpour, the tap water hissed as it came out of the tap and was cloudy white. The correlation or causation relationships between these three facts is left as an exercise for the intrepid.

Update: after a day, the water is back to normal.

I bought a book at the Nico Nico Do Xinhua today. I expect it will take me quite some time to read it. It's called, Māo He Lǎoshǔ; Cat and Mouse. It begins, Dōng tiān kuái dào le, which, with the aid of a dictionary, I have tentatively interpreted as "Winter was coming." Next, māo kàn jiàn lǎo shǔ zhèng máng zhe zhǔn bèu shú wù jiù shuō - "The cat sees that the mouse has only just begun to ready food, and at once says," - and that's as far as I've translated. I've peeked at the picture on the next page and there's a wheelbarrow, so I'm pretty excited to finish this page tonight in case the wheelbarrow is foreshadowed.

Ok, I couldn't stand the suspense.

The cat says, "If we join together as friends, we can finish in one day." The mouse looks at the cat and says with sincerity, we should start at once.

The network connection for the entire campus was down for a day or so. Actually, since the first time, this has now become fairly regular, so I won't bother to mention it anymore. If the journal date is November or later, you can assume that the network sucks.

Kung Fu concerns the groin; either the groin is being protected, or the groin is being attacked. Tai Chi, however, is all about lowering one's qi into one's dantian. Dantian, literally "red field," is the "power station," the region below and behind the stomach, above the hips, and apparently the natural resting place for one's qi. Many Tai Chi steps raise one's qi, presumably but not explicitly from the dantian. Other steps, the most dramatic stomps and strikes, work in concert with the lowering of one's qi into one's dantian.

Like most Americans, I was taken aback by the practice of making the entire bathroom a shower stall. But I soon came to accept it, and the advantage of the ease of cleaning the bathroom floor. With the turn of the weather, however, the niggling design flaw that I knew existed but couldn't identify has become glaringly obvious: you have to walk over a wet floor to get to the toilet. When it's hot, the floor dries quickly and this isn't a big deal. When it's cold and you close the window in the bathroom, the floor never dries. So the choice is between a wet floor or a cold bathroom. (This is in addition to the other key bathroom choice - a well-draining floor or a clogged drain which blocks both the water going down and the sewer vapors coming up.)

In class this week I tackled "How to Write Poetry." I certainly wasn't any Robin Williams, and in retrospect it was probably another too-hard class. I'm always surprised, in both the college classes and the middle school, by what students do and don't know. I feel like everything I teach is either too easy or too hard, never just right.

I found The Art of Computer Programming in the library. I checked out volume I and read it for a while. One of the librarians there seems to loathe me, why I don't know as I have more respect for the books, even their limited collection, then he seems to show; in any event, he always glares at me. So I figured that with Art of Computer Programming I wouldn't be in for a while. But I couldn't really get into the book. I got to the first set of exercises - and really, the book isn't so much about the text as it is about the gargantuan spaces in one's own mind (or in the alternate universe of abstract knowledge) that one can explore when guided by the problems - I got to the first set of exercises, and really couldn't interest myself. More proof that I was never meant to be a computer scientist or programmer.

This morning we had the first new class of Tai Chi, just me and Julie and Li Xu. We did the first five steps of Chen style New Frame. I don't remember much. And the master commented that I seem a lot less fresh in these morning classes then I do in the afternoon classes.

On the other hand, chatting after class (with Li Xu interpreting), he suggested that we didn't remember the 24-step Simplified Yang Style from the first set of lessons, at which point I put down my sweater and water bottle and ran through them. One stall, a few style points wrong (most of which came in symmetrical steps, and which I self-diagnosed and fixed on the oppositely chiral pass), and afterwards he pointed out a wrong arm position, a missed wrist rotation, and a missed half-step. Overall, he was "very happy" and wants to use me to show other people, and Li Xu wants me to be on the video that some "people from Beijing" are making tomorrow to promote foreign studentism in China.

Now I'm waiting for Seattle election results to come in.

There are fewer fonts on display here. Not surprising, when creating a new font mean whipping up thousands of characters. At first I thought there were only two or three, but now I can differentiate a few more. There's an attenuated brush font (the internet cafe uses it), a cheerful, fat font with big rounded edges, simple computer fonts, plain fonts, historical fonts that look like scratches in rocks, and assorted official-looking fonts. The very attractive classical font that I saw a lot in Hong Kong is pretty rare.

One student is in the hospital with dysentery. She ate at one or more of the little stalls and restaurants outside campus.

I sat in on a painting class from He Fung. We made watercolor pandas. Mine sucked.

I gave another afternoon lecture, this one on "Ethics for Computer Professionals". It went not as well. I had excellent attendence (over 60, probably) thanks to better poster coverage, but I had no questions and only a few people listening to content. Most people were there to work on English. Which is fine, but I wish I could engage them on the content, as well. Zhang Ming said that the topic was boring because they already get this sort of thing a lot. If so, it's very clearly in-one-ear. I blew the case studies - I just sorta skimmed through them. I should have made them more relevant, and paused in the lecture to have people role-play in their seats or something.

Anyway. No idea what to do next week. I may do a grab-bag of short current-tech-news blurbs.

There's a sort of myth that products made by hand are necessarily of better craftsmanship. Manufactured goods have become some prevelent and cheap in the West that there's no reason to hand-make goods unless they will be of higher than normal quality. That condition isn't true here. Shoddiness is pervasive. And even the most expensive furniture I can find is unfinished on all downward-facing surfaces. "But nobody will see it." You can feel it every time you pick it up, sit in it funny, move it, or happen to catch some clothes on a rough bit while squirming.

For more information on the cable cut that messed up Internet connectivity in September, by the way, here's a news article http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2095715,00.html. And here's a wonderful Neal Stephenson article from Wired in 1997, very long, which happens to mention, in the future tense, the very cables that got sliced. ) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

More network complaining. I'm still trying to figure out which, if any, of my network trouble is deliberate. Connectivity got substantially worse a month ago, to the point where I have trouble doing anything besides http. I later found out that this coincided with the campus reconfiguring so that the student net and the faculty net can talk directly without going through the router. That's right, 'the router.' And 'the government' is going to send 'a switch' to improve the network. This is a campus of 14,000, and maybe one student in 10 or 50 has a computer; I'm sure there are at least a thousand computers on campus. And we're going to get 'a switch.'

Here's a bit of data from my outgoing mail:

Average delivery attempts per completed message: 6.75547 Average message qtime (s): 29867.9

Total delivery attempts: 3408 success: 560 failure: 0 deferral: 2848

Each piece of mail I send takes over six tries and an average of 8 hours to get to the outside world.

18 Nov 2001

I've grown vaguely, uncommitedly fond of the EMP. (The EMP in Seattle, Experience Music Project, is a $150M Paul Allen building, designed by Frank Gehry, which looks somewhat like a smashed guitar, and houses a sort of rock music museum.) Not the inside, of course, which is expensive, gaudy crap, but the outside, which is expensive, gaudy crap of which I've grown vaguely, uncommitedly fond.

I got a CD today because of the great cover; it turns out to be Japanese, not chinese, and the first song was great but now it's boring rock. sigh.

For the Leonid meteor shower, a number of Chinese students joined us Americans on the roof of the American students' apartment building. The Chinese dorms are locked at 11 pm, so they had to spend the night. The girls had dragged their mattresses up from the first floor (it's a six-story building) and we set up at midnight. Right away a meteor brighter than an airplane steaked across the sky, spanning almost the entire horizon and leaving a trail for several seconds. Most of the students missed it, and nothing happened for another hour. They did, however, all hear the meteor, as all of the student dormitories screeched like girls. Then the weather played a cruel prank on us.

The glorious, cloudless weather which we had enjoyed for a week leading up to the shower came back the very next morning, and lasted for another week. Only the hour of the meteor shower featured clouds. In the event, all but a few stars were hidden from 1 am on. As a result, we could only see the brightest meteors. Julie counted over a hundred , and I'm happy to borrow her count. Most of the meteors were punctuated by roars from the direction of the dorms, and by Harry. Harry, one of the Chinese students, was compelled by forces beyond his control to emit a bansheel-like scream every time he saw a meteor. Although I ridiculed him the most, everyone on the roof was ready to throw him over before the night was over. By 2:30, cold and tired and having class at 8:20, I packed up and went to bed, leaving behind only a few empty threats for Harry.

Mr Jian the Dictator (our nickname; he's the dean of the English department and clearly misses the good old days of Maoism) called to remind me that I agreed to record some dialogs in the English lab.

"And you will bring an American girl."

"Uhn, I'll try."

The rules for queueing in China are simple. If there is air between you and the person in front of you, you aren't in line. That's basically it.

We finally found what that horrible stench across the street from our favorite restaurant is. First we thought it was an open sewer, and then we narrowed it down to a specific dinner stall, and finally we learned the surprising truth about what they cook. It's not meat. It's "stinky tofu." Really. It smells unbelievably foul, but is alleged to taste good. I couldn't get close enough to try without losing my stomach contents.

Art came down with pneumonia. First it was a bad cough, and now he's in the hospital. Penicillin on an IV drip. The hospital is on campus, and it's not very busy, so it isn't quite the horror show that one might expect. But I wouldn't want to be stuck there. Today Art said that a bit of blood backed up into his IV tube, so the nurse emptied it out. Onto the floor.

But after the first day he was definitely much better, and now that he's been there over a week he's pretty much back to his old self. Most of the time when I go to visit, he's surrounded by a horde of college girls. And the illness, or the drugs, or the isolation, has noticably upped his flirtation level.

The new cafeteria opened, in a refurbished building between the old cafeteria (cavernous and dingy) and the old new cafeteria (loud and crowded). It's fairly nice, though little of the food seems palatable. I got a perfectly good spaghetti dish, though, albeit with especially spicy, unusual red sauce. The french fries here are excellent and the ketchup is never rancid.

In the second edition of Dave Eggers' book ("A Heartbreaking Work of Staggaring Genius"), in a footnote to a footnote of the preface, he angrily insists that his book is not ironic. Irony, he says, is when words are used to convey a meaning that is the opposite of the literal meaning of the words. He then lists several examples, based on a bus hitting a dog, of events that are not ironic. They are instead, funny, sad, unfortunate, or coincidental. Or something like that. I would be quite beholden to anyone who could send to me the exact text of the footnote.

Let me once again take up the drumbeat of expensive excursion clothing. I did laundry Wednesday, and despite running the A/C in dehumidifier mode, by Friday morning my cotton clothes were still damp, but my REI synthetic socks, shirts, and underwear were quite dry. When you are preparing to go to another country, run, don't walk, to REI and buy the most expensive clothing you can find. Only the finest materials, natural and synthetic, with the best craftsmanship - South American or Scottish wool outside, silk underwear inside, and pure Coolmax in between. Pay as much money as possible, for you will not regret it. Pay over the sticker price if possible. Tip the cashier, and if the cashier won't take the money, insist on rounding up to the nearest ten or hundred dollars. The more you pay now, the more comfortable you'll be in the jungle.

If you look closely at the nameplates on motorcycles, you will realize that instead of HONDA and YAMAHA, they actually say HONOA and YAMDHA. Also, the sticker on local apples says, "Geuine Washington." I asked a student if anybody thinks the apples come from Washington, and he laughed. I guess it's not hard to tell the difference between Y0.30 apples and the real deal, shrink-wrapped at Y4.5 per at Nico Nico Do.

People don't clean things in China. Social mores seemingly dictate that only little old ladies can clean anything.

Paul Theroux says in "Riding the Iron Rooster" that the Chinese are obsessed with digging. I was getting worried about all of the blanket statements I make about "China is this" and "the Chinese do this", but I've taken heart that his book, which is considered excellent travel literature, frequently uses exactly the same sort of language for its pronouncements. So I can confirm that, fifteen years later, the Chinese are still obsessed with digging.

Possibly as a result of geographic variation, digging in Southern China mostly happens in a zone from ground level to four feet down. If we generalize to East Asia, and if the variation in maximum and minimum depth is constant, and if we begin with Viet Cong tunnels hundreds of miles to the south of Guilin, and we project northwards, we find that the Great Wall over a thousand miles to the north fits the projection quite well, being simply inverted digging, starting at fifteen feet above the ground and descending to ground level.

I think that digging, and its cousin, mixing cement, have become imprinted in the collective genetic memory of China. People seem to be able to mix concrete from cement, sand, water, and aggregate using nothing more than a shovel and instinct. In the last month several new tunnels have come into being, most notably up the side of the Jinji road, the front road for the University. A five-foot deep, two-foot wide trench protects all of the shops on the north side of the street from potential customers. The shops have retaliated by spanning the gap with bundled bamboo drawbridges nestled between the piles of excavated dirt.

On the bright side, the perpetual disaster at the bottom of Jinji road, a combination of a permanent minature lake in the middle of the road, giant trenches that move , piles of construction material, and . Today I noticed an electric cable that describes a few broad loops, perhaps ten feet in diameter, with the bottom of each arc nicely diving into and then emerging from the asphalt much like a dolphin arrested in mid-leap and turned into an electrical cable, but with asphalt instead of ocean (or river, if it was a fresh-water dolphin. Are there any fresh-water dolphins? I can't check, because my Internet connection is down.)

email from a student:

i have handed in my rewriteing homework to you this morning.But,i found that my grand is still "o".Why?

(sorry, honey, I don't grade homework instantenously)

Working list of things to do in the first 24 hours back (no particular order):

1) drink hot chocolate prepared by a red-headed lesbian barrista at Vivace

2) Buffy and Piecora's pizza marathon

3) go to a supermarket

4) Thai food with M'lin at that place on Bainbridge (see if the exorcism worked)

5) play aerobie

6) kung fu class

7) see a movie in a theater.

8) go to Fremont and have an cheese enchilada mole, followed by hot chocolate and a chocolate-dipped chocolate chip cookie (and go to the dessert place to get something for later)

9) dinner at La Puerta

10) Red Robin, same meal as before (cheese sticks, milk-shake with oreos, and whatever burger that was that you all ordered for me)

11) make numerous sodomy, necrophilia, narco-hippie, and cannibalism jokes, preferably in combination.

13 ) Borrow Raja's digital camera and take pictures of my stuff in storage the rice aisle at PCC twin geeks, the building my former workplaces (both Partes offices, all three eSociety offices, the Darth Vader building, the Westside office) the train tracks by my old apartment in Bellevue

It's cold.

Tuesday was a disaster. I had a few college kids, and it was about 45 degrees and raining, so I decided to try moving the desks so that we could sit in a big circle. Bad, bad idea. Based on recent reading, my theory is this: if you screw up the first few weeks (like, for example, you are probably going to do if you have no training, don't like children, are coerced into teaching, are teaching 7th graders, don't speak the language, and have minimal support and no curriculum or guidelines), you can never, ever do anything fancy again. Just stick with the minimal routine that keeps kids mostly behaving, mostly on task, and be happy if fifty percent show some minimal improvement. And if the kids who hate you occasionally act like they don't hate you.