Suddenly I have to be at the airport in two hours and I have nothing to say to the mailing list. My six weeks back in the US have been quite a lot of fun, except for two minor events which disproportionately affect you, my readers. More on that later.
My first week back in Seattle was bliss. The "hit yourself on the head with a hammer" theory, in which it feels so good when you stop, was precisely correct. The only problem was the ratio - five and a half months of mild deprivation in China produced only one week of bliss in Seattle. So scratch that as a long-term path to Nirvana. (No pun intended.)
And it was hard to tell if the bliss was negative, from not being in China or, as I tend to suspect, positive, from being home. Certainly a tremendous weight came off as I entered Hong Kong; despite astonishing change, the sense of ... poverty? oppression? remains quite palpable in China, to an extent that I didn't realize until I left.
En route to Seattle, I spent five wonderful days in Hong Kong, staying with Des's family and friends. The weather was wholly cooperative, and despite being only a few hundred miles from Guilin it was substantially warmer, and sunny every day, though still quite hazy. We went to an abandoned fishermens' island one day, taking the sole morning ferry out and, eight hours later, the sole evening ferry back.
New Years' Eve I spent watching TV with the cousins, and headed to bed shortly after midnight (after calling Steve to wish him happy birthday from 16 hours in the future). The next day I found out there had been an ill-attended candlelight vigil for Democracy in China, which I wish I had known about beforehand.
Seattle was fine, rainy as it always is in January. I went to Los Angeles for a long weekend. Most of my friends seem to have left LA, and my passion for the Dodgers has cooled, so for me, Los Angeles is now solely about grandmothers and ex-girlfriends. Oma and I went to the Getty museum, and Grandma Ilonka cooked veal meatballs, for which I broke my vegetarianism.
On a rainy Sunday, Ann picked me up on the way to an audition in Hollywood. Afterwards, she asked, "What do you want to do today?"
"Let's do something really, totally Hollywood."
"Joel. I just took you to an audition at a theater on Fairfax. That's as Hollywood as it gets."
So we snacked at a famous deli and then saw a Buster Keaton film at the Silent Movie theater.
There are probably other things to report, but I can't remember because I lost my Palm Pilot. More specifically, I left it and my wallet on the roof of a car here in Anchorage after a fun afternoon sledding. We retraced our path and eventually found the wallet, but not the Palm Pilot. My last backup is in China, so I lost a month of notes and whatnot. This is problem number one affecting you poor readers.
Problem number two is that aufrecht.org suffered a possible security breach. I took the machine offline and started to rebuild it from scratch, and got basic services back up. And the data is all fine. But to get the interactive web site up, I would have to install Oracle. Installing Oracle, you must understand, takes a week just for the purifying rituals. Since I had only three days left in Seattle, I simply slapped up a temporary page. So, back-issues of this mailing list may not be available until I come back in July and have time to sort it all out.
Anyway. I have to go pack a small amount of clothes and a very large amount of books and gifts. I'm off to Hong Kong tonight, and after a night or two there back to Guilin, and so I bid farewell to America and would you people please try a bit harder to preserve the remaining fragments of the Bill of Rights while I'm gone?
Joel